Well, the weekend has come and gone, and along with it my friends and apparently my health. |Whippy| and Jen stayed over for 3 nights and 1 night respectively, and the nights only |Whippy| was here I accidentally fell asleep in the living room with the window open. I haven't really been sick in years, so I guess it was payback time. Blech. At least the symptoms haven't been too bad so far.
Hmm, oddly enough when my mom visited a few months ago she bought me some NyQuil, Robitussin, and Tylenol (all my cold meds had expired in 1997-2000, mostly remnants of free cold packs from college). She must have known something I didn't. Heehee.
The last two days I've actually been dealing with silly admin work, pay for hire stuff. FreeBSD is kind of wacky (the last BSD OS I used/managed was BSD/OS 2.1 (aka BSDI) -- a very different system), but I may actually like it more than Linux. *shrug* Not that I care enough to play around with it for a while at least.
In other news, the email update mechanism is now fully in-place and has been verified to work seamlessly. Of course, Jet then turned around and pointed out the date wasn't dynamically updated on the page. Gah, typical user ;).
Next up (after the 30 second date tweak) is standardizing to an XML format, then hooking in a real DB backend (instead of the persistent DB hack I put in first). Both of these should be straightforward -- doing the groundwork (e.g. installing MySQL, etc) will actually end up being the bulk of time/tedium I suspect. No huge rush here though.
Had lunch with (my old advisor/research boss) Davis today. As always, he was excited to show me what he's been working on lately. The past few years it has become increasingly focused on high level stuff. His research is already probably on the fringe (bucking traditional models/approaches, which does not please many in the field), but this is really out there. Basically, he's generalizing complex, dynamic systems and showing that our very (traditional) notions of viewing these systems has been very narrow. We've focused on parts of the bigger picture (in terms of planning, simulation, and control) that are really secondary, making huge volumes of literature and research in these areas, but haven't even formulated other aspects of systems let alone developed or mastered our understanding of them. In effect, he's trying to spawn a whole new field -- or at least make people prove that they're right to keep the collective horse blinders on. Despite the fact that he really has a hard time with politics -- and thus his research program suffers from inconsistent, sporadic funding -- sometime I really have to admire the man. It takes heart to take your peers to task when you think you've all been doing things wrong (and continue to plan to do so), support your ideas in an intelligent, rational manner, and finally to not stand down when all you're met with is belligerence, hostility, neglect -- and no real arguments. It's the fight for truth.
Posted by mlee at March 5, 2003 4:33 PM