Miscellany

Detailed photo essay of making the table for the G7 summit – nice details about the challenges with the oak veneer and the design for hidden power and data ports that can be updated as technology evolves. I am unspeakably bad at Hued. I have bad intuition for how hue and saturation change a color, and for guessing what the hint text is referring to. Turning on fine-tune mode with the crosshairs in the lower left helps a bit. This got covered all over, but here’s Soundslice’s accounting of their decision to add a feature to their software because ChatGPT … Continue reading Miscellanea, July 2025

This video made me laugh enough I watched it twice, and then a bunch of others from the series, which were also good but not as funny as How to Fix Grocery Stores from Hank Green. This made the rounds thoroughly, but this is exactly how I consumed the weather forecast for years and I would absolutely install a widget that ran this on my phone. Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Aviation is a variation on the falsehood programmers believe about names. While the names piece is great, the aviation variation is interesting because, on its surface, air travel is an … Continue reading Miscellanea, June 2025

April got away from me with the end of the semester (earlier than usual with a new academic calendar for us), so early May has been spent catching up all over the place. Looming summer means more time to read. In preparation, I browsed the new-to-me Literary Hub on grading breaks. Ask a Ninja is back! Long read The Department of Everything: Dispatches from the telephone reference desk – excellent reflections on the importance of knowing how to find information and how to frame answerable questions. An even longer read on the hidden house in the IBM ascii character set … Continue reading Miscellanea, May 2025

Going up a couple of days late, here’s some things I came across in the past month…. A new favorite comic from SMBC There is a variety of content at the ELIZA Archaeology Project site including the complete code of the text generation system with a description of the MAD language it was written in, a blog on the software archaeology process of recovering it, and a running version you can try out. The Calm Tech Certification (IEEE Spectrum article, project site, book) is a really appealing idea, both for consumers and as a tool for encouraging developers to think … Continue reading Miscellanea, January 2025

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