My proposal was accepted at an IBM conference on best practices! I’m thrilled to have all these opportunities to share what I’m learning and to learn even more from other people. It’s a little mindboggling dealing with all of this as an early-career employee with less than half a year on the job, but I know from personal experience just how wonderful public speaking is when it comes to networking and connecting with people.
I’ll need to work extra hard to balance all these conferences with paying work, and to show the business value of all of that. It’s a bit of a challenge in the consulting world where we’re supposed to maximize our utilization, but maybe it will work out well.
To help keep track of all the conferences, articles, and other significant events on my horizon, I’ve added an upcoming events widget below the calendar on my blog. I used MagpieRSS and PHP to read the XML file from Google Calendar, and I did a little regular expression magic to get just the dates and locations. Maybe you’ll find it useful too!
Business responsibilities come first. If my clients aren’t happy, I may just have to pull out of some of the conferences. I think everything will work out, though, and the conferences will help me bring even more value to my client work!
My social calendar tends to stay relatively full. I have to
consciously schedule breaks into it because otherwise I just pack it
with stuff. Google Calendar’s monthly view is great for keeping things
sorta organized. I’m really, really tempted to write a social app that
makes it easier to manage these get-togethers – what Filipinos call
“gimmicks”.
Such an app would have a floating list of non-time-specific
activities, with people indicating interest or even availability.
People should be able to take events from that list and schedule it
onto a group calendar.
There should be *some* way I can easily manage having multiple
overlapping circles of friends. See, there’s a reason why I’d rather
blend groups!
And all of this, of course, should be available from a mobile
interface so that I can go from one event to another.
But that’s too much interface complexity, so it has to stay inside my
head. ARGH!
This year saw me in three countries: Japan, Philippines, and Canada.
On the surface level, I learned about a fair number of things: Jakarta
Struts, Ruby, engineering psychology and human performance…
Other things I learned:
My biggest challenge was adapting to graduate school. I found it
difficult to be motivated and confident. I had a really bad attack of
the impostor syndrome that made me almost quit my teaching
assistantship because I felt I was doing the students such a
disservice by teaching something I didn’t really know. The students
reassured me, my professor and the previous teaching assistant helped
me, and even the assistant department chair called me in and
half-scolded, half-encouraged me.
The engineering psychology and human performance class was
interesting, too. The lab reports really helped me review statistics,
and I enjoyed writing. If I could do one thing differently, I wish I
had kept my new-found study habits instead of getting frustrated in
lectures. I used to read ahead, but I found it difficult to pay
attention in class, so I ended up just reading afterwards. Maybe
graduate-oriented classes will be more engaging.
Searching for a good project was also very difficult. My research
supervisor and I went through so many ideas. Because I didn’t have a
clear research question in mind, I felt adrift and frustrated. I
wasn’t sure if graduate school was worth the opportunity cost. I’m
happy now, though. We’ve found something that not only fits in with
our short- and medium-term goals, but also helps me with my long-term
goals. I think social search provides interesting possibilities,
particularly if we can make it much easier to do, much more
mainstream. I’m curious about whether we can make it easy to filter by
multiple networks, too. I still feel a little guilty about not having
completed my reading paper, but I resolve to turn in an absolutely
wonderful one next term! =)
I think the secret to life is being fully in the present, wherever I
am. I’m looking forward to throwing myself into the metadata course
when I get back to Canada, and I’m setting aside time to read papers
while on vacation.
Listening to my family’s stories. Chasing horses and ice cream carts
while learning photography. Hanging out with my friends. Geek lurv.
(Hi Dominique! Hi Clair and JM! Hi Paolo and Kris! Hi Marcelle and
Gin! ;) ) Digital Pinay smackdown. Long phone calls and Skype
sessions. Cryptograms. Graduate House people and activities. New
friends and old friends. =)
On Technorati: reflections
Plans for 2004