Friday Reports give a rundown of what I did over the week. It’s a window into the process here at WWC as well as a way for me to keep some records.

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This week I have focused most of my efforts on continuing preparations for work on a simple PHP MVC Framework to support the rewrite of Marionette, the college’s homegrown CMS. Last week, after writing some preliminary libraries for the framework, I had a realization about how little I really know about Object-Oriented Programming. I began a fevered gathering of information. Monday I received my copy of Martin Fowler’s classic Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, and I have burned through the first several chapters. After reading many articles, I have been struck by the enormity of the task ahead of me. I spoke about the problem with Sloan, a friend and C programmer for Mach5. He said something that struck me: writing this software will necessarily be an “iterative process” in which I learn by doing. This means inevitably making mistakes and having to redo work, but it is the only way I can see to achieve anything with my current knowledge level. Trying to cram a Computer Science degree into a few days of reading is simply not going to happen, so next week I start writing code again. My challenge will be to at least create a stable enough structure to support the process of revision that is sure to follow.

This week I learned that the Work Program has created a new Podcast Crew supervised by one of the Residence Directors. I’m waiting to see if the crew will produce content that is worth featuring prominently on the college website.

Thursday my wife and one-year-old son were in the office because there was a serious problem with the sewer at our house. Trying to get this resolved took up the better part of my morning.

I had the pleasure of talking with a reporter from University Business magazine on the subject of cybersquatters and higher education. We talked some about the Las Vegas-based nuisance Robert Wolfson who has committed service mark infringement on colleges and universities across the US, including Warren Wilson (see the entry on cybersquatting for more information).

This week we received the final comments about our new website design from marketing and branding consultants The Change. The comments were very supportive of our direction overall, and the paper is a strong third-party endorsement for the new look. Tweaks and revisions to the design continue.

This week’s Story Behind recycles some old material from last September. Next week will hopefully be some new stuff about Peru.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 3rd, 2007 at 12:04 am and is filed under Personal. It has been viewed 670 times. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

[…] The best way for me to innovate and enjoy what I do is to go native. Time to slip into the digital tribe and move among its peoples—virtual, 3D hands brushing in the darkness of social networked second lives, a million onymous youth dancing hyper-textualy into the night, the thrumming of drum and bass shared via mapped music genomes, and the twinkling glow of liquid-crystal-pixels offering up the entire geo-positioned world like an altar to a social, multi-cultural, semantic, hive-minded, Mercurial GOD.

http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/ - Blog of Danah Boyd. A PhD student studying privacy and the internet.
http://greenteaicecream.co.uk/ - “Social Value and the Social Web”
http://www.fastcompany.com/ - Interesting blog associated with Fast Company magazine.

I am taking a hiatus for the remainder of the summer to finish some hulking, be-fanged programming projects. Once those are complete, I am going to “take off the training wheels” on erelevant–redesign and revision it around a broader central theme. It will be less personal, less inflammatory and more topical and content-oriented. […]

When Time magazine named “You” as its person of the year in 2006, it was a ham-handed attempt to salute “user-generated content” as the driving force behind Web 2.0. Last year MySpace and YouTube commanded $580 million and $1.6 billion, respectively, because regular folks participate in the grand techno-democratic experiment, baring their souls to the […]