Reasons why today rocked my socks off:

1) PEC compliments day. And finding out my roommate participated (Yay Kathy!) Nothing brightens my day like getting a compliment that says "Your smile brightens my day!" (Thanks to Jeff..)
2) Social Spaces group meetings. It was awesome, in general. I always enjoy the people in the group, and we got some positive feedback about our idea for our research, so that's exciting. Its really exciting to move away from past work and get some new ideas out there. This is SO cool. We also got some rather positive feedback that you can't tell we're undergrads from our paper, so that made my day.
3) Running in to/Stalking Casey through the union to stand around and talk and then see the BABY Parade! Seriously, there were about 20 babies in strollers being pushed around the quad and it was amazing.
4) Getting word that I will be flying out to Seattle for an interview sometime in the near future. Hooray!
5) A surprisingly mature correspondence
6) Getting to hang out with my favorite planning board and Nick Fabek tonight!

Huggies Hand Soap

Oh, my life is made by the fact that I have Huggies Hand Soap in my bathroom. I think I'll go wash my hands again. I'm also excited because we have some WONDERFUL fall and winter site facs for ASB. Which, by the way, if you are 21 and affiliated with UIUC and need something to do over fall or winter, we still need drivers. I'm really excited for training to start up.

Apparently, my haircut lends to me looking sort of like Susan Sarandon. And I've gotten a few emails from my father and a professor I used to work for about video tracking bedbugs. And my $8 dress is awesome. There are pictures out and about somewhere. The next two days are going to be crazy, in that I'm scheduled so I really don't have more than an hour to do some homework here and there.

Engineering is a crappy hobby. But lets face it, at this point in time, its not my major. I'm going home October 13th and I couldn't be more excited. I havent been home since May 26, and then I was in Lexington for an hour. I was at home maybe 2 weeks before that for a couple of days.

I'm sure I had cool links or pictures to post here. I miss taking artsy pictures. So here's my ASB essy and a random piece of construction equipment:

My hair is crazy, it fits me well.

I’ve been to Paris, France more times than I’ve been to Chicago. Studying abroad was probably the greatest experience of my life and there just aren’t words for the 6 months I spent abroad.

I’m a southerner, though I don’t admit it often. I went to public school in Kentucky, and instead of holding me back, it actually gave me opportunities. I miss Kentucky in the fall, and like honey on biscuits and sweet tea. I’d rather have a southern twang than a Wisconsin accent.

I used to have RAM as a keychain, probably the biggest sign that I am an engineer. Engineering classes are boring. To quote the Incredibles, I “geek out” about things. I often forget that assignments are temporary, as are grades. I should stress less and enjoy myself more. Not that a hedonistic life is my goal, but from time to time I need to relax a little bit and remember what is really important – people.

Getting to know new people is probably my favorite thing in the world. I like being surrounded by different kinds of people. I like finding out people are passionate about things. Passion drives the world. If someone is passionate about something, regardless of what it is, they could get me interested in it.

I love hugs.
I like making people smile.

Duchenne

Duchenne Smiles, from Wikipedia "Smile" Entry:
Researchers have identified a number of different types of smiles.

* The "Duchenne smile", after the researcher Guillaume Duchenne, is the most studied, and involves the movement of both the zygomaticus major muscle near the mouth and the orbicularis oculi muscle near the eyes. An example of the smile is shown in the girl's smile at the top of the page. It is believed that the Duchenne smile is only produced as an involuntary response to genuine emotion, and is therefore what one could call the "genuine" smile. Due to the involvement of the muscle near the eyes, it is sometime said that one can tell whether or not a smile is "real" by whether or not it "reaches the eyes".
* The "Pan American smile", on the other hand, is the voluntary smile involving only the zygomaticus major muscle to show politeness; for example, by a flight attendant on the former airline of the same name. Considered "insincere", this type of smile has also been called the "Professional Smile" by David Foster Wallace in his comedic short story A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again.

"I'm busy..." "I know, I've seen your resume"

Notes to myself, so far this semester, in my Psych notes:
-"Any Beekeepers here?"
-I want to be THE expert on something
-Look into Soc classes
-How do you build a blog that people actually read, comment, and contribute to?
-Write a cover letter for jobs as a "bio panel" for a book
-I need a palm pilot to have access to google calendar at all times

Notes to myself in my GE 424 Notes
- If you can't understand your students...
-Screw you, eigenvalues
- The university is trying to piss me off enough so that I become a proffessor
-12:52 T/Th Manic sets in
-I miss the quote book

Stream o' Consciousness

1) Its funny how some days that you expect to be terrible turn out not to be so terrible
2) I LOVE fall. And hoodies. And how much of a nerd I am.
3) Hoodies are an American concept
4) PEC rocks my life. It'd be cool to do a PEC inspired thing on the video walls at Siebel (but what would that be?). It's really amazing how much just asking "How are you" to a Cashier and Meijer changes how they approach the next people in line. Positive Event Chains are real, people.
5) I am absolutely incapable of getting any work done.
6) I need to take more pictures. I need more things to take pictures of (or more time to find the cool photo subjects, or time to stop and take the pictures, at least). I should find my SLR camera thats around here somewhere, I have a feeling there's about half a roll of film in it, which developing will be a huge surprise since I don't know the last time I used the camera.
7) I remember talking to a German girl about the work force, and how in the US you're just expected to be happy, or at least pleasant, most of the time. It makes working much more tolerable in general. Apparently a lot of other cultures really bring their emotions to work with them, which is an interesting concept, because its not something we realize we do (or don't do). Though it is pretty common to get a facade of "Everything is fine, just fine". I imagine everyone has had the conversation "Hey, how's it going?" "Fine, you?" And then you think to yourself everything is NOT fine I'm having a really shitty day, why did I just say that everything was fine? I usually correct myself on that, and get a bit of a laugh out of it... but then again, when I ask people how they're doing, I actually want to know, not just as a common courtesy or social expectation. It's unfortunate that if you ask someone "What's up" a head nod or "nm" is an acceptable answer, kind of taints it for those of us who actually want to know more detail. Hmmm.

Back to work...

Shit Pit

J’habite dans une putain bordel de merde. Vraiment. Et j’ai perdu l’abilité d’écrire en français. C’est difficile maintenant. Je pense que c’est que j’ai pas parlé en français depuis 18 mois, quoi.

Mmmm. It'd be nice if things would just slow down a bit. I have a feeling I won't even notice when I hear back from my interviews in the next two weeks, between site facilitator interviews and retreat and all of that stuff that is going to be insanely awesome but time consuming. Like writing a research paper to possibly get published... I'm still in disbelief about that.

Anyone have any cool ideas for content for a video wall that would interact with the people in the environment around the screen? We want it to be simple and quirky but sort of arty.

When the trees start changing colors, I will go crazy. I want to go home, and see the changing leaves on the hills, and drive the winding Tates Creek Road (possibly in my dad's new Civic?). Maybe going to Curtis Orchard, here, would help, maybe not. Apple donuts wouldn't hurt, that's for sure. But maybe homecoming weekend or the weekend after there will be an excursion to Kentucky, if anyone is interested in tagging along.

Je voudrais faire du escalade, chaque semaine, parce que quand je fais quelque chose active, je me sens meilleure. Grammaire, putain.

Hey companies - how bout you check out MY website and put in an application?

So. Expo is over. I have an interview tomorrow with Microsoft, and a bunch of online apps I still need to complete. Not to mention a bunch of online job postings I should monitor on a daily basis. It REALLY wouldn't be that hard to create a career fair system that would allow you to input keywords about your interests and have companies put in keywords about their job openings and then match people and companies. Heck, it wouldn't be too hard to modify Agge!os to do that.

And I think I'm going to pay $180 to get 4 books, skip a day of class, drive to Indianapolis, and hear a lecture from the "master" of data visualization. I think its a good life choice.

I feel old. And I don't much like it and I want it to stop. I could fill plenty of time without having to go to class at all. Staying an extra semester was absolutely the right decision. We'll see how busy I still am.

Everyone should apply for ASB! Fall/winter apps are due on the 22nd. www.illinoisasb.org

The tofu is calling my name

Facebook
A couple of interesting links: Day without Facebook
Facebook made Time!
Using the outcry for Aids research.

My thoughts on this whole facebook thing:
I'm going to lay low on facebook for a while. I'm going to try not to have actions show up in my mini feed, really.

The whole issue here is privacy. Facebook claims there is no information now that wasn't available before - ok, sure. But what is really going on is the information is a lot more digestable, and easily obtained. Sure, I put in my information voluntarily and don't really do anything that I'd care if other people knew about. Here's the difference: Before, if I wrote on someone's wall, you pretty much had to know that person as well, and be checking their profile, to see if I wrote something there. People aren't going to go through all of my friends to see what my most recent activity was, where I posted and whatnot. Now, they don't have to do that, that information is readily available to them. (I'm not sure, but your feed may only show you wall notes for people you know both the person writing and recieving the note).

Here's another scenario: One of your friends tags a picture of you making a fool of yourself the night before. Before, you'd get an email notice of it and only people checking your friend or your profile will have any idea that that picture even exists. Now, lets say that picture gets posted early in the morning, and you have class all day - with the NewsFeed, hundreds of people could be notified about the existence of that picture before you even know it has been placed on facebook. That brings up another issue - with photos, you should APPROVE tags, not be asked to remove them, for the same reason. Unless you actually talk to the person who put the photo up, you still can't say whether the photo goes up or not - but having your name tagged should be something you approve, not something you remove.

I think the big issue is that people might actually enjoy the feature - if they'd been GIVEN the option. As it is, I would probably turn both off - I really don't care to know the feed for all 300 of my friends; And I do actually KNOW all of those people and can generally tell you HOW I know them, without needing to note it on facebook. The idea is, the people I know and care about, I'm going to seek out their information, and as its currently set up I might not even get that information amongst all the clutter from the people who are on facebook all the time. If you could select WHICH of your friends you get feeds from, that might be a really interesting feature.

Someone mentioned that as its a free service, people shouldn't complain about it. I'd like to comment that the people running facebook are making a decent chunk of change off this free service, and by keeping it free they probably make more money. They wouldn't have the product they have today if people didn't have some input - and I'd say people can whine away in an attempt to get it changed, at least for a limited amount of time. If you really don't like it, quit whining and deactivate from facebook. I'm considering it, really, or at least removing most of my information. Its really amazing how few events I'd find out about if I didn't have facebook.

We talked about privacy in the social seminar group today, after reading a paper by Yvette Rogers on Ubiquitous Computing. The basic discussion revolved around designing for privacy - basically, if you don't consider privacy in some of the early stages of design, it tends to be less secure and more prone to errors if its added in as an afterthought. Designers should consider if they are going to record information or not, and what to do with that information if they do record it.

I had a second rant, on something non facebook related, but as of now I dont remember. I want to be an expert at something.

The Bride's Wearing Three Bras

This weekend just wasn't long enough, and that's all there is to it. But that's pretty much how it always is, isn't it? And its only 4.5 months. That's doable. The ceremony and the bride were gorgeous, and I ran a lot of errands, but I was happy to do it - just not a high percentage of quality time. Maybe that made goodbye easier. Who knows.

Ok, so things are starting to get busy, workwise. But no complaining here, because no one wants to read that.

Apparently, my dad knew a couple of the people on the flight that crashed in Lexington. For the record, the Bluegrass airport is about 5 minutes away from my house in Lexington. I personally didn't know anyone, but as my dad pointed out... there is about one degree of separation from someone on that crash and every person in Lexington. Lexington isn't really a hub for anywhere - people were either on their trip home or were just starting the first leg of their trip. I still managed to cry my eyes out over it. I felt people might be curious about this, so I'd go ahead and comment, but thoughts and prayers to the families and friends dealing with this now.