Some updates

It’s been while, again, since I’ve blogged. And I’m sort of concerned about how to fix that. Do I commit to a post a day? There’s a bit of pop pyschology floating around that you should never tell your goals to anyone. Doing so only gives you a dopamine dose of self-satisfaction that actually reduces your likelihood of completing the project. Why go for delayed gratification at all if you can get your hit of happy by telling all your friends what you plan to do.

There are, nevertheless, some pieces of news that I feel like are worth sharing:

• A ton more code on my github since the start of summer. This is partly due to my working on dumb little side-projects during the vacation, but also to an increase in my feeling of wanting to share the work that I have been doing on the side for the last year or so. Little ideas here and there. Also, code that doesn’t quite deserve its own repo ends up in my gists.
• I’m now a Digital Centers Intern at the Science and Engineering Library at Columbia. As part of my project, I will be studying music listening habits in the library space, and (the really cool part) developing a visualization of this data for the Oculus Rift DK2. I’m looking at this project as an excellent opportunity to learn some different programming languages, and to build up Python chops. It’s easy and straightforward to get a sketch going in Processing.org, but the move will eventually be towards Unity…
• I’ve started attending the excellent (DH) hackerspace Studio@Butler and meeting other students who are interested in the application of technology in the humanities.
• I decided to create a proper academic homepage on the columbia.edu domain at www.columbia.edu/~epb2125.
• Finally, I maintain a (for now) private “microlog” on Tumblr, which, using Tumblr’s email-to-post feature, I keep updated with things that I’m working on, as they pop into my head, as a sort of personal lab notebook which helps me jog my memory as I review the week’s work.

And that’s not everything. Stay tuned.