FOB

We are holding a Linux Plumbers Conference [excuse the broken hyphenation] here in Portland a little less than a year from today. It should be a really nice event…

I've been dreading writing my essay for my scholarship application. I finally have it done, and I think it's a darned good essay…

Portland State has two ways of authenticating users of its 802.11 network. One is NoCat, about which the less said the better. The other is a somewhat idiosyncratic WPA setup. Jules Kongslie and I got a client working with it recently; here's how…

I don't know where the day went. I went to OSCON today to help out at the PSAS display, I was somewhat nervous since there was mostly a display of hardware of whose language I'm not fluent in. It was a good learning experience and I'm pretty sure I convinced several people to come to next week's Introductory PSAS meeting. I chatted with Ian a bit, I think it would nice at some point for me to learn about hardware. My extent of doing hardware was at the first little startup I worked for in Silicon Valley which went public a little over a year and a half ago and now supplies map info to mapquest. I learned how to solder and desolder from a colleague (even though I was doing software), and managed enough to fix my old beat up VCR (swapped the switches). I do like figuring out what part of devices don't work, taking them apart (carefully, theres always a trick), ordering replacement parts and successfully fixing them (been able to do that with a number of things, quite proud of myself actually that I can repair stuff on my own). Its quite cute too that my youngest daughter likes to do the same; she's quick to jump at fixing things when they break and seems to have a natural ability and desire to "figure it out".

Mike Vanier has a nice blog entry that for some reason got Reddit exposure today. It's entitled Why I Hate Programming Competitions. I coach the ACM International Collegiate Programming Competition (ICPC) pretty often, and my criticisms of it are pretty much in line with Vanier's…

Just got the official letter from the Portland State University President in the mail today. I've been granted official promotion to Associate Professor with indefinite tenure, effective AY2006–2007. Thanks again hugely to those who got me to this point; I feel like my efforts were the smallest part of this success.

I'm currently posting from a gosh-awful Best Western motel near the Milan-Malpensa airport. The long list of bad things about this place is too amazing to post. The good things? It has an Internet connection (although only pay wireless in the lobby), and it's close to the airport.

The weather was relatively lousy today, and I just now (2200 local) finished the grant writing I needed to do. At 0415 tomorrow morning I get the wakeup call to quickly pack and head for the airport.

It's time to come home.

I just had an absolutely amazing carpaccio and a fragrant local wine at a place on a little twisty micro-neighborhood street near my hotel. Then I went to the gelateria by the water, and sat eating my gelato and looking out over the awesome late-evening face of Lake Como.

It's almost enough to make me not cranky that the rest of my trip to Italy is going to be spent working on a giant grant proposal, due Monday while I'm flying back, that I had hoped would be mostly done before I left and finished by others.

Almost.

A quick word for those tracking my career progress . Just got my letter from the Portland State University Provost today recommending that I be promoted to Associate Professor with "indefinite tenure". The President still has to sign off, but this is essentially a formality.

Huge thanks to everyone who helped me get to this point. Now it's time to plan the party.

I am guessing that this how I start a personal blog. The purpose is advertise my progress (and often my lack of progress) towards a PhD in Computer Science. This might help some one in the future or dissuade some one from pursuing a PhD (which might actually be helpful!).