I joined the Tuesday morning Bow Cycle Club ride - my first BCC ride of the 2024. I’m firmly at the back of the “C” group, but I made it, didn’t die, and will be joining more rides over the summer. This was a shorter ride, but with lots of climbing. Wow, is my cardio garbage. I can work on that.
⚙️ Work
- I took (most of) the week off. Except for coming in on Thursday for…
- co-facilitating part of the TI Programming Retreat
- and a couple of meetings.
- And the last coaching session - I’ve got some clear ideas on what I need to focus on now.
🔗 Links
Human-Computer Interaction
- The University of Maryland’s Human-Computer Interaction Lab just held their 41st annual symposium, including an impressive set of Lightning Talks from grad students. Many of the topics are of interest to edtech design. Overviews and abstracts for the talk are included in the program for the symposium. SoTL is nice and all, but HCI is where the fun is. (And they can overlap in pretty much a Venn circle.)
Internet software
- Hotline is still a thing! There is a new build of the client/server software for modern Macs! (via Dustin Mierau). Between this, the resurrection of Archie, and the continuation of Gopher, it’s an old-timey internet resurgence.
AI
I’m off this week, so didn’t spend much time tracking details of the AI announcements this week. Basically, Google decided search engines suck and it’s gone all-in on their AI-generated answers, suggesting that people make pizza with glue, eat at least one rock per day, fight snakes as part of their thesis defense, etc. I’m really hoping the old-timey internet resurgence keeps going, and we wind up with actual search engines again. Kagi’s close - I’m still paying for the pro/premium/whatever subscription - but it’s also deep into Google and Bing indices via their APIs. A separate, non-Evil, non-AI-garbage-generation bona fide search engine is needed.
🍿 Watching
- ★★★☆☆ Dark matter (AppleTV+) - total recall meets inception meets quantum leap. I’m 3 episodes in, but I think I’m about as burned out with “the metaverse” as I am with superheroes.
- ★★★★☆ The Fifth Element (1997). A story that Luc Besson started writing when he was 16, and it’s just so weird and quirky and different. Parts are definitely the fever-dreams of a 16-year-old, but it’s a fun movie.
- ★★★★★ Watchmen (2009). A different kind of fever-dream. I know it gets a lot of hate for “not being true to the graphic novel” etc, but I think it’s a solid adaptation and always wind up watching it every time it comes on.
📚 Reading
- ★★★★☆ Jean M. Auel’s Clan of the Cave Bear (1980). A well-researched exploration of what possible interactions may have taken place between Cro-magnon and Neanderthal humans during the Würm glaciation about 25,000 years ago. I’d seen the movie back in 1986, but had never read the book(s). Also, the first book is set in what is now Crimea. It maybe leans a little too hard on “racial memories” as being literally memories though. Between this, Quest for Fire (1981), and Iceman (1984), the early 80s had some good, science-backed explorations of anthropology. Now we have superheroes and metaverses and post-apocalypses.
- Started reading The Valley of Horses (book 2 of the series).
🧺 Other
- The footer that I’d added for ShareOpenly links seems to have been acting weird, with Hugo’s caching somehow getting the wrong URL and title for posts. I’ve removed that for now, until I figure out the caching thing.
- It looks like at least a couple people are still using TIDraw.net. Maybe a Russian using it for UX design? And a Chinese “guess the song” game? They’ll have to find another free whiteboard tool once the domain expires…
🗓️ Focus for next week
- 1:1 meetings
- planning the last LTAC meeting of the academic year
- LTDT programming planning and debrief from the TI programming retreat
- CT scan