Day 20: Video Star

So, I left my laptop in my office.  I was out of time and I didn't want to stop what it was doing. 

On Mondays, Wednesdays ans Fridays it's my job to pick Oliver up from daycare.  In the past it's been my responsibility every day of the week; this semester I have an evening class on Tuesday and Thursday or it'd be that way this semester as well.  I absolutely don't mind it, and I'm very used to this schedule; I love seeing his eyes when he knows it's time to go home, (even if the real reward is seeing mommy :-) ).  But, the daycare doesn't take kindly to parents who are tardy and charge a steep per-minute penalty after 5:30.  One of the things we most like about this daycare is that it is close to my work and our home, so I don't have to travel far.  Nevertheless, if I don't leave within a few minutes of 5 to start the trek up to my parked car in the lot overlooking campus ( often the closest I can find; a frustration for a different day's post) then I run the risk of not making it on time.

I'm never done so in a very real way it's good to have a hard deadline that means that I have to leave regardless of other considerations or I'd likely be compelled to sacrifice important time with the family for the sake of whatever thing I'd been hyper-focused on that day. 

Today's area of hyper-focus was the technical aspects of running my planned YouTube channel for all things computer science and computer and electronics development.  I can't have been said to even touch, much less own, anything that could be remotely called a camcorder since probably the mid 90s.  Like most people my age, my internal clock thinks of the 90s as being ten years ago, but the truth is that was TWENTY years ago.  Ten years is bad enough, but with twenty years of technological development between me and the state of the art in video capture and editing I am like a primordial monkey-man dancing around a giant obelisk whenever I try to use the Sony Handycam I have access to.

The basic user interface hasn't changed much: record, zoom in, zoom out, playback... check.  But what's so different in the design seems to be how the camera is designed to be your one-stop device for storage, display (even to the TV or other devices) AND editing on the device.  It's basically a powerful computer built for a small domain.  That's totally different from the late analog/early digital conversion days of the 90s.  The thing has 250GB of internal memory, more than many modern laptops, but it does need it given how much memory it eats up in storing high-quality video.

I want to do what I had thought would be a simple thing.  Move the videos whole-clothe from the camera to my computer.  For me, that's got to be step one in editing and delivering content.  It's not easy; not yet anyway.  In fairness, one major complicating factor is that I want to function in a Linux environment and the video manager software that Sony intended for people like me to use does not function outside Windows.  Still, you can see behind the scenes and mount the cameras internal hard drive in Linux.  What you see is cryptic to say the least.  The file structure is anything but user-friendly and once you do find the actual video files you can't watch them in the format they're saved in.  Applications exist to make handling their conversion relatively painless, but this is complicated by the fact that longer videos (of which I have taken several in the form of student presentations), are automatically chopped up every 2GB into separate files.  Though it isn't obvious at first, the conversion software has a problem with these arbitrary divisions.  One thing is clear, the average user was NEVER supposed to look under the hood and was meant to stick strictly to the provided software abstraction.  I live and teach software abstraction, but your lower level abstractions should at least make things usable (looking at you Sony).

The truth is, I STILL don't know if I've got a workable solution because the encoding process I finally worked out after hours of searching was still grinding after many minutes when 5 o'clock rolled around.

Long story short, rather than kill the surprisingly (to me) lengthy process in the middle, I walked out and left it running.  I left my laptop at work, and that left me with a  really weird feeling; I always have my laptop with me.  I decided to leave it because I new I'd have my Xoom android tablet at home, but that didn't keep me from leaving and reentering my office three times to assuage the uneasy feeling in my gut. 

I am using my tablet to compose this blog post right now.  I downloaded the Blogger android app (a thing I hadn't thought to look for before tonight) and I am so far pretty happy with it, but I still feel the touchscreen keyboard IS sowing me down.  I can't get used to editing on a tablet; code, blog post or otherwise.  Still, it's a workable solution and that's good to know for when I go on the road and I'd rather cart the tablet instead of the laptop.

Still, I find myself hoping that leaving the laptop at work is revealed tomorrow to have been worth it in that the conversion process was successful.  To say that working with a modern camcorder is more complicated than I thought it would be for me is an understatement.  I think I'm on a learning curve though, dragging myself out of the 90s, and I hope to be on the downward slop of that curve pretty soon.

Day 19: Contrition

Attack on Sunday.  When the Empire of Japan made an attack on the emphamis day of December 7, 1941, it was no accident that it was a Sunday.  The day of rest in our western culture is a known chink in our defensive armour. 

I mention this because it's perhaps no accident that this, the nineteenth day of my thirty day challenge, is the first day when I've been totally unprepared to make a meaningful blog entry.  I'm not really done resting, I suppose.

Oddly, there are many things I could talk about.  I could talk about the looming crisis of the student debt bubble and college funding in general.  I could recount what I've just read about the connection between Turing and the modern day search engine or about the pre-mature ending of von Neumann's life.

Or, I could talk about how beautiful my son is and how inexplicably lucky I am in many things.

But, I can't really formulate how to do that without boring myself; or worse yet, repeating myself.

So, instead of any of that, and as it is Sunday, I will instead make the following statement of contrition.

I am, from time to time:

1. irrationally impatient
2. mean and uncaring
3. crude and crass
4. temperamental and short-fused
5. condescending and unforgiving
6. short-sited
7. self-centered
8. brutish and in-artful
9. and worst of all, boring

For all these things and more I am sorry.  I regret not finding a way to change my many flaws up 'til now and I promise to re-double my efforts to find redress. 

Day 18: From the Mouths of Babes

Things my son has taught me about life:

This morning Oliver wanted to go outside.  Oliver loves going outside probably more than Elmo (and Oliver LOVES Elmo).  Oliver was not afraid to ask to go outside.

Lesson #1: If you have decided what's important to you, then ask for it.  (Often repeatedly.)

Of course, Oliver wasn't wearing any pants and was still in his pajama top.  What's more, daddy was still in his pajamas as well (hey, it was early on a Saturday, OK?). Nevertheless, when daddy tried to explain this to Oliver he was not deterred in any way.

Lesson #2: Don't sweat the small stuff.  Don't focus on the problems, focus on the goal.

Luckily, mommy had already selected some clothes for Oliver to wear today.  Daddy decided at that point to put on Oliver's clothes.  Secretly, daddy was hoping that Oliver would be pacified with putting on shirt and pants.  Then daddy was hoping Oliver would be pacified with putting on socks.  THEN daddy was hoping if he had Oliver find his own shoes then Oliver would forget about outside.  Instead, Oliver brought a total of three pairs of shoes to choose from.

Lesson #3: Don't allow yourself to be satisfied with partial completion or intermediate steps.

Lesson #4: Do what you can to convince the people who's help you need to accomplish your goal that you are serious about getting it done.    

At this point, Oliver was dressed, but daddy was not.  So, first daddy got up to take his medicine.  Then daddy had to use the bathroom.  Then daddy had to brush his teeth and hair.  Finally daddy put on his clothes socks and shoes.  The first thing Oliver said was, "outside".

Lesson  #5: Be patient when you have to be; never let your patience be perceived as apathy.

Finally, we went outside.  Oliver loves to go throw rocks and flowers into the creek that runs near our house.  Daddy was sure Oliver would make a beeline for the water and, in fact, Oliver mentioned the water many times and headed basically in that direction.  But, Oliver wasn't in any hurry.  Instead, Oliver stopped to pick every flower, play in the rocks and dirt, point out all the birds (Oliver takes great joy in the existence of birds), and generally examine the world we found in our path.

Lesson #6: Don't focus so much on your end goal that you miss the more important lessons along the way. 

We never did get to the creek today.

Lesson #7: When you get tired, come home and take a nap.

Day 17: One Year's Passing

It was one year ago today.  I came home after work, I sat down on the couch, and the news reports started coming in via the Internet.  First I saw a strange picture.  It was of an intersection on a road I had travelled thousands of times over the preceding decade.  When I saw it, I knew immediately that it was a picture of tornado damage.  When I saw it, I was first confused about what direction the picture was taken from, because the landmarks were all missing.  I had to look really close and blink many times to make things make sense.  My brain couldn't at first comprehend the destruction.

Even today, there are places where when I drive down familiar roads in Tuscaloosa the landmarks drop away, and a moment of panicked cognitive dissonance takes hold as I try to grasp how I've gone from perfectly familiar to perfectly barren and unfamiliar without knowing it. 

The state of Alabama is second only to the famed "tornado alley" in terms of the annual number of tornado events.  In Alabama, you don't really live in fear of such events, because you can't function if you do (much like earthquakes in California, I'd imagine).  Some of my earliest memories involve hunkering down with my family in the interior hallways of our house as storms likely to produce tornados pass overhead.  Every child in school is well-versed and drilled in what must be done should a tornado come during school hours. 

In fact, the only reason why their aren't shows on Discovery Channel about tornado hunters in Alabama is because it's usually extremely difficult to get good footage of said tornados.  They're often rain-wrapped, obscured by dense vegetation, and/or dipping in and out from behind the landscape.

(Incidentally, the inability to really visually "track" a tornado (like you can on the American plains) is what makes Alabama tornado's so much more deadly to chase.  Most professionals won't do it.)

Most tornado in Alabama ultimately don't do much damage because they either aren't very big, or aren't on the ground for very long,  or only strike extremely sparsely populated areas, or any combination of the three.  It's common for Alabamans to be blase and under-whelmed by tornado sightings. 

The April 27th tornado was different, in all the worst ways.

       



This tornado stayed on the ground for over 50 miles; leaving a visually traceable track of devastation across one of the densest population areas in the state.  It bisected the city of Tuscaloosa and then made a bee line for the suburbs of Birmingham where it exacted its toll destroying many more houses (including my cousin and her husband's) and killing more people along the way.  It's full documented path both on and off the ground can be seen here.

At it's widest point, in the center of one of the poorest areas in Tuscaloosa, its devastation was a mile wide.   

In the city of Tuscaloosa alone the damage was unimaginable.  The tornado blessedly skirted the campus of the University of Alabama, but still took the lives of 6 of her students and 3 other college students from the community colleges in town.  The total loss of life stands at 64, according to official reports, with over 1500 people being injured and thousands of homes destroyed or rendered unliveable, in the city of Tuscaloosa alone.

The bodies tossed on top of the town mall have been removed, many businesses are in the process of rebuilding, the dead are buried, but the scars remain.  

Here are some comparative photographs of before and after Tuscaloosa:  Satellite Images  

What else remains, however, is a renewal.  What the storm could not tear asunder was the spirit of the place, the heart of the community and its people; both in Tuscaloosa, and across the state as a whole.

The grand magnitude of the loss and suffering bears remembering today, and I'll be using today's anniversary to focus on the things that are important in life, and the blessings we have.

On a personal note, when I left Tuscaloosa five years ago, I was sick and tired of the place.  After living their most of the year for more than eight years I was more than done with it.  But when I saw it being ripped apart, when I saw it's people suffer, when I saw the familiar turned to rubble, I wept and I still weep thinking of it.  Sitting in Wise, Va, totally unable to help except for collecting supplies from our church to send to Alabama, I never felt less at home.  The tornado taught me one thing, Tuscaloosa will always be one of the places I call home; it'll always be dear to my heart.  I miss the Tuscaloosa I knew that is gone, in part, but I can't wait to know the Tuscaloosa that is rising anew.  Roll Tide!    

 

Day 16: The Kind That Helps People

The late great Randy Pausch in his "last lecture" famously recounted an incident with his mother where, after he received his doctorate, his mother proudly introduced him to a friend as "a doctor, but not the kind that helps people." 

I hate going to the kind of doctor that helps people.  I simply can't overstate that fact.  Now, as a disclaimer, I don't hate doctors (either the kind that help people or those that... don't., as a general rule).  Medical practitioners have an oft thankless job serving the public.  Often, if they do their job correctly, people might not even notice.  I can empathise.

I believe in modern medicine, I know that health care is a critical service, and I have good insurance and think everyone should have affordable access to health care.  So, that's how I feel in theory, anyway.

Let me give you some background.  I literally did not go to the doctor nor seek any medical care for the eight years that I was in college.  I survived yearly allergies, at least two cold seasons a year, and the worst that dorm and apartment living could throw at me.  It's not that I didn't get sick.  It's not that I couldn't have used medical care from time to time.  It's just that I would literally rather suffer through it; you know, what doesn't kill you... keeps you living, I guess. 

Last year I was feeling sick one week and it wasn't until my wife made me take my temperature and it was discovered to be around 104 degree temperature that I finally decided to go to the doctor.  Even still, I'd rather not have.

It's strange.  I count myself a rational person and I rationally know that my attitude toward going to the doctor is anything but.

As it happens, I had a 6-month check-up today, so I decided to try and analyse why I have such negative feelings about going to the doctor.  Here's some of what I found.

First, it's extremely inconvenient.  I'm a guy who gets irritated when I have to quit working on what I'm doing at any given minute long enough to walk down the hall to use the restroom.  Part of what it means to be a geek is that you naturally hyper-focus on things and the worst punishment is to interrupt them.  It's inconvenient to GO to somewhere else do do something you don't want to do anyway. 

Second,  it's not enough to force yourself to go a place you don't want to be, but when you get there you'll find a gaggle of other people.  Amongst these will be many people who also don't want to be there; each fighting the same nameless faceless bureaucracy.  Some will just be sullen, but some will be annoying.  Oh, it's the annoying people that really get to me.  It's a perfect storm to irritate anti-social me. 

Then paperwork.  THEN waiting.  Why the waiting?  Maybe there was once a time when the agreement surrounding a scheduled appointment worked both ways, but I've never seen those days.  It's irritating that appointment times seem to mean nothing, unless you are late, and the only reward for being on time is earning the right to wait  and wonder when you'll be able to actually leave the increasingly shrinking walls of the waiting room. 

Finally, a bubbly nurse calls your  name, and God bless her she's just trying to set the mood, and she's doing the best she can, but the happier she is the more it highlights how glum you're mood has become. 

In my case, the key question that is going to dictate how the rest of the appointment goes is going to be answered as the lovely nurse wraps my upper arm in the blood pressure cuff and begins applying pressure.  I try to intentionally calm myself; to keep the reading low, but I can't help ruminating on how unfair it is for the nurses and doctors to have a physical metric for how much I DO NOT want to be there, and how if I tried to devise an activity for raising my blood pressure I could not have done a better job than the situation I find myself in.

Then comes the exaination room.  This is my favorite part.  For the most part it's quiet, it's a respite from the hustle and bustle outside and in the waiting room.  But in the back of my mind, I'm waiting to hear the doctor through the door.  I'm waiting to hear the chart being pulled from the door, and I'm trying not to feel like a child waiting in the principal's office.  I can't help dreading hearing the negatives, feeling less than adequate, even worse, feeling all too much like a statistic; all too normal.  Feeling like I've failed in some way.  I can't help taking it personally. 

To my doctor's credit, he's a very affable person from the time he enters the room to the time he leaves.  He gives me information and doesn't dictate terms, but works with me to make informed decisions.  He never condescends.  That's why I choose to go back.

More paperwork, and one more bout with the bureaucracy.  

Then I leave.  Blessed release.  It's like going back out to a new-born world.  The reality check surrounding the notion, "at least I'm not at the doctor's office" is the only good thing about having to go in the first place. 

And now, I don't have to go back for four months.  I'll just try not to think about it until then. 

Day 15: The Part That's Aweful

Generally speaking, I love being a college professor.  It's the most rewarding job I've ever had.  I get freedom, I'm (relatively) well-paid, I can leverage against my own time and seek out my own understandings, and I get to work with a class of young people who are motivated to make the future a better place for themselves and for society in general.  I have seen success stories and I have seen the fires of ambition, knowledge, and understanding lit in the faces of many of my students.  It keeps me coming back for more, quite honestly.

But... but.  There are things to hate about being a college professor as well.  When I was first interviewed over the phone for this position my now boss, following a script we use for phone interviews, asked what I thought the worst part of the job was going to be.  I answered that probably grading was going to be the worst part of the job.  Oh naievite.  I still don't relish grading, but experience is ready to answer that question anew

First, I'm undervalued.  This is a thing I can handle.  I've had a baptist upbringing and it may just be that baptist guilt (often well-deserved, mind you) is second only to guilt of a catholic nature.  I can handle (mostly) being undervalued by society at large, and I get how that undervaluing of expertise is fomented in a society that prides itself as egalitarian to a fault (nevermind that that whole thing is a myth so that the scrupulous class can maintain it's power in the face of its own hypocrisy); I know that I may be blamed by politicians and mandated into ineffectiveness; and I know that as long as the academy is seen as a business then administrators will make decisions that don't make sense to me and that equally as long as the academy is supposed to be the driver of the economy (in lieu of a regulatory environment that actually supports innovation, rather than quashing it) I'll always fall short of societies expectations.

I can't impart knowledge, I'm not responsible for people's educations, I've never been able to MAKE anyone learn or do anything they didn't want to do.  I can't even make people respect the reason they came to college in the first place.  As long as I'm going to be solely responsible for ensuring these things I will be a failure.  Mind you, I don't think myself a failure, because I know the proper metrics to use for measuring success.

But it's that last part, not being able to make people respect why they came to college in the first place that is the most galling.

Cheaters.

I know several of my students are cheating in one of my classes.  (I'll be no more specific than that, mind you.)  These students started turning in good work, rather suddenly.  At first I thought, great job!  Maybe this is one of those instances I work and live for where I'm making a difference.  But, as the trend continued, I began to notice something troubling.  The answers weren't just right, they were pristine; they were shockingly like the answers given to the professor by the book's publisher.  I know this because I'm not an idiot.  I know this because I check my own answers against the book's resources and will even sometimes show the book's answer in class if I think they've done a particularly clear job (not always the case) of solving the problem.  But, what's hung my students is not just that, but that the book will sometimes give extra information; do extra work, not asked for in the question... just an added bonus.  These parts have been showing up in the student work as well, fully formed, verbatim. 

What a waste!  To be afforded such an opportunity and then to throw it back in the faces of people who work hard for your benefit?  To treat me like I'm an idiot?  To say it makes my blood boil is an understatement. 

And what's more, you're not only hurting yourself (a self-inflicted wound is bad enough) but your dragging down everyone around you who knows the importance of academic honor, who knows how fragile the degree your receiving is, who knows that the earner of the degree is just as responsible for its value as its bestower.  You're hurting everyone, least of all yourself, and your patting yourself on the back, laughing internally about how smart you are because you can go online and look at one of the literally hundreds of resources where lying cheater scumbags just like yourself can go to defile yourself and all of academia.  Aren't you smart; look how you've played the system.

The bitterest pill is this.  I'm meant to encourage my students to do the hard work its going to take, to exercise the discipline it requires to learn some of the hardest material on campus, and so I do that by offering a lot of homework, sacrificing of my time in answering questions and directing inquiry into that homework, and I make the homework worth a significant portion of the final grade.  But, the way to stop cheaters is to not do any of that and to make homework worth very little if anything.

So, congratulations, you've put me in a pickle.  I can either stop you cheating bottom feeders, parasites that you are, and adopt a sink or swim attitude that hurts my ability to encourage students to perform at their highest; or I can continue on, watching all our hard work be defiled and rendered meaningless by the actions of a few.

It's decisions like these that are the worst part of my job.   
 

Day 14: Blowing Up the Bridge Across the Digital Divide

According to a report published by the Pew Research Center's Pew Internet and American Life Project earlier this week (a report whose implications have been widely reported on)  fully 1 out of every 5 people that you saw in public today never uses the Internet.  (Find the full 41 page report here.)

What does that mean?  Well, it basically means that 1 in every 5 random people that you walked by today is either un-, under-, or simply misinformed.

It's hard for people like me (a person who is planning on no longer paying for an underutilised cable TV subscription) to think that a person's daily life wouldn't include the Internet or that it wouldn't be a major source for current information. 

Consider the following graphic: link.  Six, SIX companies control almost everything you can see on television (the graphic is a little outdated, GE has been replaced by Comcast recently).  If you think radio or the newspaper industry is any better, think again.  And if you think that the news you see is not a servant to the bottom line of the parent company then you obviously didn't see the network coverage concerning last years SOPA and PIPA debate (especially Comcast owned NBCs "coverage"  "critics say it will lead somehow to censorship." emphasis added). 

What's more, the report shows that the main reason people don't go on the Internet is far and away because they're "just not interested."  In short, they think the Internet has nothing for them.  At 31% that rationale is around three times as common as each of the next three stated reasons including; don't have a computer (12%), too expensive (10%), and too difficult (9%).  By in large people are CHOOSING not to use the most powerful source for information exchange ever devised by the hand of man.

The conscious decision to NOT use the Internet is wholly different from what a lot of people assume about why people aren't using the Internet, I think.   

When you look at the demographics you see what you would expect once you'd learned to expect it.   The old, the uneducated, and the poor don't use the Internet.  I first read about this problem, what's commonly called "the digital divide" several years ago when I read a government report which I had every intention of linking to, but, I've lost my printed copy in the folds of my office and I haven't been able to tread deeply enough into the millions of results from Google about the digital divide to locate it anywhere online.

Needless to say the concept of the "digital divide" is well-covered in the literature.  From a global viewpoint, statistics show that in many developing countries only 1 in 1000 people have access to the Internet where in developed countries the number is closer to 600 in 1000.

In this country, people who live in rural and poor areas don't generally have equal access to the Internet.

But what does access to the Internet matter?  A lot.  First, democracy.  The ability to compete in the political arena and have your views heard is increasingly tied to access to the Internet.  Second, commerce.  What you can buy and how easily you can get it is intrinsically linked to the ability to go online.  Also, consider the advantages the power to know things, instantly and for free, means. 

As a child of the 80s I'm old enough to remember when you couldn't know anything without asking someone who knew or pulling down the encyclopaedia.  Both of these are naturally limited resources.  I remember what it was like to be stuck with no money on the weekend if you didn't go to the bank before it closed on Friday.  I remember what it was like to have no way to even find out what consumer products were out there to fit your purposes, much less the ability to order them.  I don't want to go back to that.  Ever.

But, apparently, a lot of people in this country are choosing, CHOOSING to live in the 80's.  I think it's important for our country's future to understand why.