Final dissertation copies have made it to Virginia

I've finally got my dissertation approved by the Dean's office, and 6 copies on expensive cotton paper are now sitting in the CS office at ODU. Even though it seems like everything is taken care of, I still won't relax until I have my diploma in one hand and a hard-bound book entitled Lazy Preservation in my other. At least we've got one very kind and helpful secretary working in the CS department... I can't imagine how I could have gotten this taken care of from Arkansas without Phyllis' help.

Note to self: Next time make sure your dissertation's cover sheet which requires all your committee member's signatures is 100% correct before your committee flies back to their home states. Argh....

Dancing faculty elves

It's not every day you see the CS faculty dressed in tights and doing synchronized dancing. Thank you, Lauren (one of our seniors), for the laugh!

(The guy on the right doesn't look very happy, but he's got some serious moves!)

Fav5

My pick of the week's top 5 items of interest:

1. A humorous take on What If Gmail Had Been Designed by Microsoft? (Thanks to Mike Baur for sendimg me that one.)
   


2. While we're on the subject, Gmail now supports IMAP. That means you can now use email clients like Outlook and Firefox to access your Gmail without popping the emails off of Google's servers. Had Google supported IMAP several months ago when the Harding faculty was forced to switch to Gmail, it would have made many lives much easier. I was abile to get it to work with my harding.edu email address following the instructions and using user@harding.edu for the username.
   


3. If you like Google, Java, and mobile devices, you may want to give Android a shot. Reto Meier has written a little how-to on developing a person-mapping application with Android. Non-developers may not be quite so fascinated with Android.
   


4. Playing catch-up: an interesting article pointing to 12 research projects aimed at reducing spam.
   
   
5. Congrats to the Dallas Cowboys on a best-ever record of 10-1 after defeating the Jets 34-3 on Thanksgiving. Next victim: the 10-1 Green Bay Packers. Also congrats to the Razorbacks on an amazing win in triple overtime over the #1 ranked LSU Tigers. The Cowboys really need to draft McFadden next year...
   

I'm thankful for dairy products

My parents drove up for Thanksgiving last night and brought along some photos from my childhood. For those of you that know me really well, you'll get a kick out of these...

Frank eating cheese and crackers.

Frank eating buttered corn on the cob.

Ethan is almost 8 months old

It's been a while since I posted a bunch of Ethan photos, and I know many people check my blog just for the pics. So here are some from the past couple of months.

Hello there!	With Ashley
With Kelly	Not my happiest face...
Playing with Stacy	Asleep on grandma
With Brett Wiley	Ride 'em cowboy!
Celebrating Dad's birthday	Little ducky tastes like chicken!

More bandwidth at Harding

Harding has finally increased its Internet bandwidth capacity, from 40 Mbps to 80 Mbps... there are going to be a lot of happy students returning from their Thanksgiving break.

In the past month, accessing the Web was really frustrating. I would get a failed HTTP connection about half of the time. I was told YouTube made up 40% of Harding's Internet traffic!


Here's a graph of Harding's projected Internet bandwidth requirements over the next few years, thanks to IS&T. Guess our little fix is temporary. By 2010, we're all going to have problems anyway.


Update on 11/29/07:

Although Harding doubled its bandwidth, I still have frequent problems downloading pages. According to one of my sources, our needs are still exceeding our new limit. I guess its time to start capping enrollment.

Live from Dallas

I'm in Dallas where my dad and I met up to see the Cowboys take on the Redskins. This is the first Cowboys game I've seen in person in a few years (the last one was the Broncos vs. Cowboys game on Thanksgiving Day), and it proved to be quite an exciting one. Romo threw 4 TD passes, all to TO. But Washington's Campbell was looking pretty good. Somehow the Dallas defense held on to the 5 point lead, and the Cowboys are going into the Thanksgiving holiday with a 9-1 record. Whoo-hoo!

Fav5

My pick of the week's top 5 items of interest:

1. Jury 101: If you're currently serving on a jury, don't blog about it.


2. Finally, a monitor which doesn't use power when in standby mode. What's the big deal? The British Government estimates 8% percent of all domestic electricity is consumed by devices in standby.


3. Interesting new Wikipedia research at the University of Minnesota: Only one-tenth of 1% of Wikipedia editors account for nearly half the content. And the probability that a user would view an article in a damaged state is 0.37%.


4. Cats: This is just weird. Almost as weird as this.
   Eggs: This is absolutely amazing.


5. Congrats to the Harding Bisons who defeated Arkansas Tech 62-55 at Homecoming and set a new Harding record for points scored in a game.
   

3 days of Halo 3

This past weekend I felt horrible. It actually started Wed night and didn't let up until Sun night. Fortunately, I had just purchased Halo 3 with some birthday money, and since I couldn't do much of anything else, I spent a good part of 3 down days playing Halo online with XBox Live.

It was a lot of fun, but a huge time-killer. Now I understand why so many of my students don't seem to have enough time to complete their assignments... Halo is eating up an enormous amount of their free time. It would be eating up my time too, but I decided to unplug the XBox and leave it in my office... I simply lack self-control in this area.

Fav5

My pick of the week's top 5 items of interest:

1. Which Wikipedia articles are trustworthy? A new service called Veropia thinks they know. They are hoping to act as a warehouse for Wikipedia articles that are vetted by "experts."


2. Students at Saginaw Valley State University are building a video game in their spare time. Their role-playing game is a lot more involved than the board games we produce in our CS capstone class; they are enlisting help from 15-60 students and hoping to release their game in Nov 2008.


3. Does NBC's Pres Jeff Zucker really believe "Apple has destroyed the music business"? If anything, Apple should be heralded as the company that finally pulled the music industry out of the Dark Ages. Tone down the rhetoric, Zucker.


4. Google and an alliance of social network parters are releasing OpenSocial APIs, open services that allow social applications to be created on sites besides Facebook. Facebook has so far been excluded.


5. This is Harding's Homecoming weekend. Go Bisons!