sacha chua :: social intranet consultant and geek

My mom's been asking me for winter clothing pictures for ages. =) Check out the pics at http://sacha.free.net.ph/notebook/wiki/2005.11.30.php . Here's a quick animation:

Ogres are like onions. They have layers.

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My research supervisor is tickled pink by the blog aggregator I put up the other day. He likes being able to see all of our personal life stories on one page. Who would've thought?

Alvin and I agreed that something like that would get far more and far fresher content than a new blog just for IML. We're learning our lesson from all of these little half-blogs scattered all over the place...

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What do I need to do in order to get a little microcommerce around here?

I have a very real problem: buying groceries in small quantities is tough. I want to be able to buy and sell extra groceries, but I want to limit transactions within the building. (I don't want to have to walk out!) Some things I'd be willing to buy and sell further off, I suppose, but I'd love to have classifieds just for Graduate House.

So I need classifieds that are easy to monitor. Special considerations for groceries would also be useful (example: expiration date, being able to easily track how many units are left). I want RSS feeds with fancy criteria. =) We can handle payment offline, so that isn't really a concern.

Hmmm. Sounds like a fun thing to build over Christmas. Plus points if it hooks into Mambo, I suppose.

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Wow. Knowing that my writing requirements are spread out over a number of days and that I'm making steady progress on the different things I need to write certainly takes a load off my mind. I feel that my reading paper is moving at a good pace, and I think that I've scheduled in enough time to do well. What works for me:

1. Read source material and write all my notes down in a notebook, together with page numbers and other reference information.
2. Think up an outline. Add the outline to my schedule.
3. Go through my notes and write more detail about each point, either going chronologically or skipping around to points that fit into my flow. This step might have been easier if I had written my notes on index cards instead of a ring-bound notebook, but oh well. Anyway, repeat until all of my notes have been included or dropped.
4. Edit.

Yes, yes, perfectly obvious to everyone. =)

I also bonked myself over the head for missing another obvious thing. For my reading paper, I should start by looking up all those classic papers on keywords for classification (there should be a few!). If I could find a paper or two that talked about user interface differences that make it easier to assign keywords, that would be great. The key thing that I need to explain in my paper is why the social aspect is so very interesting, and what that enables: browsing, searching, mapping... =) What's old is new again, after all. I think the Internet's radically transformed keywords, though, making the social dimension non-negligible...

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The final tango meeting for the term was a party! Free for members and CAD 3 for guests, it was a great deal. We taught a number of beginners how to dance the tango, and everyone had fun.

I had the privilege of having not one but _two_ dances with Señor Pedro. He showed me how to dance the close-embrace style. That was absolutely awesome. Of course, I'm nowhere near as good as his wife is at dancing tango, but he knew how to make sure I felt good throughout the dance. =)

I won a ticket to the tango dinner/dance on the 11th, too!

I'll post pictures tomorrow. Forgot to bring home the sync cable. =)

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