From February 2010 – February 2011, I traveled to 14 Countries and 6 Continents, plus resided in the USA. Does that qualify me for an award? Maybe I should check out the URDB for that: Most countries visited in a single year!
I’m doing some housecleaning on my lap-top, upgraded the OS to 10.6, got a bigger hard-drive (500GB) and boosted the memory (4GB). This means I can start collecting all the 16GB SD cards from my trips and create a fresh new iPhoto Library organization, coagulating everything together into one large masterpiece. I just wanted to use the word “coagulating”, did you catch that?
I found these icons already on one of my hard-drives so I’m ticking one for each country, like a virtual backpack with a patch for each. In no particular order:
So begins the pre-requisite disclaimer from a guilty writer, hanging their head low as they admit to their absence. It’s been a while. Needless to say, I’ve been busy. I have legitimate reasons for leaving this space blank for so long. One of which is that “Subject to Change” was such a great post to share, and a high note from which to depart.
Last fall I announced my departure from the work force. My voluntarily membership into the unemployed. It wasn’t that simple. From my point of view, I didn’t just leave. I asymptotically departed, giving 6 weeks notice, and then contracting for about two months on a part-time basis. I wanted to make sure the project I had tirelessly worked on for 8 months was in good hands with the software development team. It was. I received this message from my previous boss in July, almost 8 months after I left:
[Our clients] announced today that they consider [the project] to be stable and into maintenance.One year and four months in labor and now a really massive and awesome system has breached the birth canal.
You were more than instrumental and I am very proud, very grateful and very moved by your work and participation.
Now, if only I could get him to add that to my LinkedIn profile!
The real point of this post is to point you to the project that I carried on, and still must finish, while I was traveling this year. I set out to learn some new things this past year, one of which was video editing and film making. I first built a “video” subdomain here but then realized the project was bigger than that and deserved its own location. My First Retirement became a long running joke as I tried to explain to others what I was doing with 2010. Maybe it was a piece of sarcasm to deflect the real reasons (they may be clear here and here) I was defying societal norms and taking these risks. I have no difficulty going into the details but, as Seth Godin wrote yesterday,
“The answer is simple…is always more effective a response than, ‘well, it’s complicated.’”
So I retired this year because I wanted to and had the means to support myself through it. That’s the simple answer. Here were the opening credits for your enjoyment:
My reality now, one year and one month after departing my full time job is that I am working, and employable. My first retirement is officially over.
There are so many rewarding feelings I recorded during this entire journey, but one of the most rewarding feelings was to invalidate the fear I had that I would be unemployed looking for work for months after returning to the US.
One could extrapolate from many stories and chain of events that the pursuit-of-video played a role in the transition I underwent from retired to employed. Regardless, I have three men in my life that took a chance to hire me after so much time off. I hope they don’t regret it, and I hope they know how appreciative I am for the opportunities I have been afforded.
As some of you may know, (or not no since I haven’t posted here about this) I have recently completed a project with my friend Laura Lee Huttenbach, a friend of mine from University of Virginia. My role was to build her website, which I would like to share with you:
It’s been really fun to work on developing this website because it gave me the opportunity to flex the engineering and CS skills I have. You know the moments where you just want to build something and see it work? This fulfilled that urge! This project, I learned how to integrate WordPress into the actual website, using the same header and sidebar options; I obviously know how to install wordpress on my own site, but integrating the design was something new for me. I also installed PHPList and embedded the form into the website as well, all while working on my design aesthetic.
I saw this as a project with a lot of opportunity. Not just for developing my own skills, but also to test out online marketing, and social media’s ability to cull a few dollars from many to fund a worthwhile venture. When I received LL’s initial email asking for help, I immediately thought, “If President Obama can raise a $30mm surplus in campaign contributions because he made it so easy for people to donate, then Laura Lee and I can figure out a way to raise $5000 for her to write this book”.
Laura Lee’s goal is to record oral and cultural history in developing countries. Her first trip will be to a tea farm in Kenya, where she plans to record the life story of an 88-year-old man they call “The General”; she met him while traveling through Africa in 2006-07. He was a leader of the independent movement there and has an inspirational story to tell.
I thought you may enjoy learning about the project and checking out what I have been up to in my free time the past month or so. I definitely believe in what Laura Lee can do and obviously think this is a project worth doing since I volunteered my time to build her website. Please check out her website, share it with others and make a contribution to her cause (and make my work worth it!)
A couple months ago I started receiving Glamour magazine at work and had no idea why. Was this a cruel joke? I don’t really like getting these magazines because they have women I don’t look like, clothes I don’t want to buy and advice not worthy of my ears. In general, I think these magazines make women feel bad about themselves, and make women ascribe to certain values that are not important in our current times.
A good friend of mine, someone particularly special to me, Clare Ondrey, took the initiative to start a petition on the website ThePoint.com. Please join!
You can read more by following the links in this badge, or read about Clare and her initiative on Jezebel.
Its been a long time coming, and it is finally here. My former research adviser and always mentor Bob Glushko has finally taken on all of his research and created an end-to-end design course to be taught at the School of Information at UC-Berkeley.
As you can see, yours truly (along with Prof Glushko) is featured as the first reading. You can find “Bridging the Front Stage and Back Stage of Service Design” here.
I’m starting to see this argument (maybe its a stereotype) a lot: ”hate-based actions are considered to be only those about or against Islame” in the eyes of Muslims. If this is the opinion, then they can post hate-based material against anyone else except for themselves. So, that being said, this is what the author of CreepingSharia.com is pointing out in this post about MuslimChannels.tv.
MuslimChannels.tv is streaming Al Jazeera English, Huda TV (religious programs from Saudi Arabia), Press TV, Link TV, and Democracy Now!. In addition, they’ll have user-generated content from Islamic leaders and congregants. Looks like they’re focusing on mostly American muslims, and hoping to get content from scholars and imams as well. Interesting to note, the person interviewed from MC.tv is Stephanie Khan, a female. I just note this, not because I haven’t noticed strong Muslim Female presence (see Rima Barakat-Sinclair artilce), but because the Muslim world we know outside of the western world does not promote female authority, rather women are treated as second class citizens. I always wonder how Muslim women in the western world could denounce their host countries and promote the Muslim world when there are no lives for them there.
I decided to take my own look at MuslimChannels.tv to see what they have up there. This is pretty interesting, the first video I watch is “American Muslim Women” posted by MuslimBridges.org. It’s fascinating how they rationalize (almost persuasively) that dressing modestly saves them from the psychological disorders of women in the West suffer from (like eating disorders, self-consciousness, etc). I can relate to that…
From the blog titled “Israel and The Sin of Expulsion: The Implications and Consequences of Expulsion for the Jewish People”
The writer has a problem with Shalit’s pictures being posted on Facebook, Myspace and other social networking sites because of the perception that the grassroots movement is connected to what the Israeli government is doing to get Shalit back. The author questions the effort and urgency put forth to get this soldier and others back. And then wonders, if there was no urgency at first, why return such dangerous prisoners in exchange for what potentially may be body bags.
In all, this author’s refusal to post Gilad Shalit’s picture on Facebook as his own is a protest against his government.
This article is about the fact that Facebook will soon allow for people to search in Hebrew rather than transliterate a friend’s name into English. The article also lists basic statistics (which are always important):
Israel network doubled in membership to 152K between October and November.
Israeli users have not been able to create purely Hebrew-language profiles (musing: I wonder if this has prevented adoption amongst a certain class of citizens that do not speak any English)
Short and sweet, that’s how I like my tidbits of information : ) Reminds me of something I read in a paper yesterday about CMC and usenet groups
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