Shad

Fun movie. Enjoying it. I suggest everyone see it if you haven’t.

Anyone seen the second one? Any good?

Also, saw Meet the Fockers this afternoon. Pretty good, though not as good as the first.

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I was holding off posting till I’d told the family, but now I can break the news here officially.

In mid-January, I’m moving to Oslo, Norway for 6-9 months.

Exciting, eh? I can’t go into a lot of details just yet, but I’ll be sure to post all the details on January 17 (so don’t forget to check back then). What I can tell you is that I’m very excited. I’ve often thought that it would be fun to live abroad for a while. Never imagined that a deal this good would come along. It’s really just enough time. Not so long that I have to sell the house and say good-bye to everyone I know, yet long enough to feel as if I’ve really experienced what it’s like to live in a foreign country.

A couple of years back, I traveled around the world with a close friend for five months. The experience truly changed my entire life perspective. I lost 50lbs along the way and found myself on the other side. Ever since, I’ve had a serious itch to get back out there and see what else there is to see. I enjoy the states (as messed up as I truly believe they are at the moment) and I love living in Austin, but I also love the thought of the unknown. I also relish the thought of really understanding new people and places.

Additionally, it’s a great step in my career. Oddly, I’ve never really thought of what I’m doing as a “career” until very recently. I’ve often said that this is just what I’m doing until I figure out what it is that I want to do. Well, what I’ve found is that it’s possible to take what I’m doing now and slowly turn it into what I want to do. It’s been a slow process, but I finally feel that I’m making progress.

Anyway… looks like life is about to get really interesting again and I’m really looking forward to sharing it with all of you.

One of my areas of interest is The Semantic Web. I’d like to take just a moment to describe what it is and why it’s important. The link above is a really great introduction to the Semantic Web and I would suggest anyone that’s interested in the evolution of human thought and knowledge take a good read.

The basic idea is as follows. The current World Wide Web is built for humans to understand. Computers are simply playing the role of formatters. They pull data off of a server and follow embedded instructions to format the data for humans to read. While this capability is incredibly powerful at providing connections and information to people, it is not take full advantage of the power of computing hardware.

The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web. The basic idea is that additional data can be encoded into directly into a web page which is understandable by computers. This data is expressed in extremely simple terms (called tuples). Tuples very closely mimic natural language. Typically, they describe information in a simple subject, verb, object sort of structure.

For example:

Shad (subject) lives in (verb) Texas (object).

And while this may seem rather simplistic, it’s actually quite powerful (these are the basic building blocks of human language). Having many of these short simple sentences captured in a format that computers can easily parse allows for deductions to be made from the data.

So, how does this affect you? How does this help? What does this mean?

Well, not much… yet. But, being able to capture knowledge in a format that computers can parse means that, over time, we’ll be able to make more effective use of the collected knowledge of mankind. To be more clear, we’re creating the capability to parse all of our collective combined knowledge. In the short term, this simply means that computers will be able to help us to make decisions more quickly and effectively (as more data will be immediately available to each of us).

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After a long week without it, the iMac is back in operation. I never thought I would miss a computer, but I did :)

It’s nice when the secretary of defense clearly outlines exactly what he’s going to do in response to soldiers complaining about the lack of sufficient armor in Iraq.

“I don’t know what the facts are but somebody’s certainly going to sit down with him and find out what he knows that they may not know, and make sure he knows what they know that he may not know, and that’s a good thing. I think it’s a very constructive exchange,” Rumsfeld said of the questioner.

The man’s a poet isn’t he?

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No comment.

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When you have a nice date with someone and she says she’ll call “early next week” but never does. It’s been two weeks now. Ouch. Seriously. Ouch.

Maybe her phone is broken… and her e-mail is… um… broken… as well.

Maybe her grandmother “took ill” so she had to go see her… in Bulgaria.

Maybe she joined a cult. She’s probably purchasing white sneakers, kool-aid, and arsenic right now.

Or maybe she was hit in the head with… um… a… ah… hard thing… that subsequently… ummm…. left her unable to recall people whose names begin with “s”. Surely she’ll notice when she sees that movie on TNT with Sinbad in it… you know the one… the one where he goes back to college to play one more year of football with that guy from Quantum Leap… but I digress… she’ll see the movie and suddenly, without any real rhyme or reason, memories will come flooding back of that night drinking beer at Don’s Depot… sitting on the back porch and listening to the rain… hanging out with that guy… what was his name… hmmmmmm.

And there’s nothing I can do to help her.

Surely she wouldn’t just blow me off, right?

Right?