Miscellany

Teaching is continuing apace, so I thought I’d make some observations about how day to day life is going… I’m getting a lot less physical mail than usual – largely due to the lack of junk mail and advertisements. It’s really refreshing. Some days I don’t get mail at all. I would be entirely happy to see this continue. Procedures around grocery shopping continue to evolve – shifts in the open hours, limiting the number of people in the store at once, asking people not to use re-usable bags. It’s all fine and my local store’s website is doing a … Continue reading Observations on Day to Day Life

Wrapping these series of posts up about the past decade, I looked through my various calendars and journals and thought about the major events and accomplishments of the past ten years. Professionally, this decade will be hard to top. I received tenure and then was promoted to the rank of Professor. I ramped up my rate of publishing and received an NSF grant. I developed new courses in game design, eye tracking methods, gender and technology, and artificial intelligence. I supervised student research projects in nine different areas, including sentiment analysis, biometric identification, the accuracy of fitness tracking devices, and … Continue reading Personal Memories of the 2010s

I’m not a big traveler, but I’ve found some places I’ve enjoyed spending time this past decade, some closer to home than others. As far as exciting destinations go, I visited Hawaii for the first time this decade. This is the only place I’ve visited off the North American continent, and I expected it to be nice but not up to the raptures one hears about it. I’m now part of the rapture contingent. I spent a week and a half on Oahu, mostly on the north shore. I was shocked how easy it was to find secluded spots to … Continue reading Favorite Places of the 2010s

Things my RSS feed wants me to do this week: Stay productive after work on my side projects because if work and your homelife are all you’re doing, you’re a bum. Go to NYC for Manhattanhenge or make plans to go back for it in July. Buy Travel Blog the Board Game – even though from the description it is unclear where the “Blog” part of the game comes in. Consider if I am suprised that those over 55 pick more secure passwords than those under 25.

Things my RSS feed wants me to do this week: Buy a set of ninja throwing knives. Rate American English accents – helping researchers is good! You should do this too! Turn my sensitive documents into a fireplace log. Contribute to a project to produce a new letterpress-printed edition of Pride and Prejudice. Get excited about the start of commercial space transportation!

A couple of thoughts on motivation and procrastination for your Monday… Working hurts less that procrastinating, we fear the twinge of starting “Thanks to hyperbolic discounting (i.e., weighting values in inverse proportion to their temporal distance) the instant pain of disengaging from an Internet article and paying a prefrontal override cost, can outweigh the slightly more distant (minutes in the future, rather than seconds) pain of continuing to procrastinate, which is, once again, usually more painful than being in the middle of doing the work.” where’s my motivation from pictures for sad children

Words is an absolutely beautiful little play on language and meaning; it’s only three minutes so I highly recommend you check it out. Found at this list of the ten most wonderful internet films of 2010, all of which are worth a look, actually.

“When I talk to young designers, and I talk to people who want to be designers, I tell them, “Here is the truth: The truth is, you are never going to make your dream game, so get over it. Okay? You are going to work really, really hard, you are going to go to school, you are going to spend time learning, you are going to write papers, you are going to intern someplace where you work very hard, and when you finally get your first job, it’s going to be designing levels for Hello Kitty.” And what I look … Continue reading Start of the Semester Inspiration

It is nice when a little thing that has been done wrong for so long will start being done right. Case in point, I was actually mildly excited to read that after doing it wrong for years, Subway will start tessellating their cheese triangles worldwide starting July 1, which is silly because I maybe get a sub there once or twice a year max. But now I won’t have to live with the knowledge that every time I drive past a Subway there are people in there making subs with asymmetric cheese distribution.