TITLE: A Lot To Learn This Semester
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: January 21, 2011 10:38 AM
DESC: 
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BODY:
It's been a good start to semester, though too busy
to write much.

My
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2011-01.html#e2011-01-13T15_42_00.htm">
   Intelligent Systems</A>
course shows promise, with four teams of students
taking on some interesting projects: recognizing
faces, recognizing sign language, classifying
transactions in a big-data finance context, and a
traditional knowledge-based system to do planning.
I am supervising a heavier-than-usual set of six
individual research projects, including a grad
student
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2010-09.html#e2010-09-01T21_12_23.htm">
   working on progressive chess</A>
and undergrads working on projects such as a
Photoshop-to-HTML translator, an interpreter for a
<A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoiconicity">
   homoiconic</A>
OO language, and pure functional data structures.
This all means that I have a lot to learn this
semester!

I'm also still
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2010-12.html#e2010-12-22T14_27_42.htm">
   thinking about the future</A>,
as the dean's 3-year review of my work as department
head proceeds.  Yesterday I watched the video of
<A HREF="http://www.43folders.com/2011/01/17/permission-to-be-awesome">
   Steve Jobs's commencement address</A>
at Stanford.  This time around, his story about the
freeing power of death grabbed special attention.
Jobs gets up each day and asks himself, "If this is
your last day on Earth, will you be happy doing what
you are doing today?"  If the answer is "no" too many
days in a row, then he knows he needs to make a change.

That's a bracing form daily ritual.  When it comes to
this level of self-honesty, on most days I feel more
like
<A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Night">
   Howard W. Campbell, Jr.</A>
than Steve Jobs.  I think I also finally grok this
aphorism, a favorite saying of a friend: "Real men
don't accept tenure".  It can be an unhealthy form of
academic immortality.

The question I ask myself more often than not these
days is, "Are you programming?"  Let me substitute
"programming" for "writing" in a passage by Norman
Fischer quoted at
<A HREF="http://tewalkerjr.com/blog/?p=1821">
   What I've Learned So Far</A>:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
... programming is a sort of absolute bottom line.
"Are you programming?"  If the answer is yes, then
no matter what else is going on, your life -- and
all of life -- is basically OK.  You are who you
are supposed to be, and your existence makes sense.
If the answer is no, then you are not doing well,
your relationships and basic well-being are in
jeopardy, and the rest of the world is dark and
problematic.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

A day without writing code is like, you know, night.
(With apologies to
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2010-12.html#e2010-12-20T15_32_50.htm">
   Steve Martin</A>.)
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