1455 words so far for the paper due on Thursday. I can do this!

Random Emacs symbol: message-citation-line-function – Variable: *Function called to insert the “Whomever writes:” line.

In the middle of explaining my thesis project to a usability expert at
IBM, I realized that I *have* actually managed to build something
interesting. As I explained the problem to him and showed how this
problem would be addressed using the existing tools, I realized that
there was a real problem and that my prototype might be a step in the
right direction. And my demo didn’t fall apart, either! Whew!

When you’re too close to something, you can find it difficult to
appreciate. I tend to err on the side of downplaying the coolness of
what I’m working on. I keep telling myself: It’s just a protottype. I
don’t have the data I need to make it truly useful. It’s nowhere near
as cool as the thing that I really wanted to build if I had the data.

Well, forget that! If I can show my prototype to someone and get them
excited about the idea of Web 2.0, if the way that I visualize things
will make someone campaign for adoption even in a small group…
that’ll so be worth it.

Wow. I have a project after all!

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Yay, got ethics approval for my usability study! Now I just have to
work on polishing up the prototype and making sure that it’s testable…

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I was stressing out about hooking up the back end of my metasearch
engine to the front end that I’d prototyped in Ruby on Rails. Progress
was much smoother than I’d expected! I’m happy about the work I did
today, and I’m looking forward to going to the Wikinomics event later.
=) Life is good.

And yeah, Facebook is
addictive… ;)

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To my surprise, there’s a copy of the Battle Royale novel. That wasn’t
there before. And it’s great reading foreign papers. From The
Guardian, I learn that the British are upset about friendly fire from
US soldiers (which naturally gets hushed up in US news). From Haaretz
Weekly, I learn that the tiny community of Samaritans (who can trace
some 126 generations of high priests) has relaxed prohibitions against
marrying outside the community and taken to importing brides from
Ukraine in order to address inbreeding (there you go, the up side of
mail order brides). The Wall Street Journal is, of course, the Wall
Street Journal.

Ah, to rediscover this the month before I leave… I’m sure the
Toronto Public Library will have something similar, even if I have to
make myself reading dates at the reference library branch. =)

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The Ruby on Rails web programming framework is just plain amazing. I
added maps to my search prototype. The code was really simple! I’m
almost a week and a half ahead of schedule on the interactive
prototype. I’ll focus on the backend for the rest of the week so that
I can run that performance study…

Very happy girl.

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Why on earth was I feeling frustrated with my thesis? One day on the
IBM intranet, and I’m full of energy and raring to go. I can’t wait to
prototype that search engine, and I can’t wait to see all these Web
2.0 concepts in action. I love being around such awesome people, and I
can’t wait to figure out how to make this my day job!

I have to move fast, because the swell is building and I want to
catch the wave…

Random Emacs symbol: eshell-last-async-proc – Variable: When this foreground process completes, resume command evaluation.