Anything is Possible, it’s a matter of Probability.

It’s been a little over a year since this site has seen an update, and at least two years since I made any significant modifications to the overall site.

That’s all about to change, but first a few updates.

Since I last posted a few things have happened.

I went to a wonderful wedding in the French alps for my cousin Nicolas.

I attended WWDC 2009.

I graduated from the University of Tennessee.

I got a job working for the University of Tennessee Libraries.

I turned down a job in Washington, D.C.

I attended WWDC 2010.

All the while, I’ve been working on and building some pretty cool things.

Some other more personal changes happened too, but odds are if you’re reading this you either already know about those or you don’t need to know. Just as my life has undergone some pretty big changes and transitions, so will this site. While this design, layout and structure was all well and good for 2007 when it first went online in this form, a lot of things have changed including my needs and tastes. Probabilitytree.com and the various other personal domains that redirect to it will become more of a personal landing page for me and the things I do. I’ll still blog, but hopefully more frequently than I have with this WordPress blog. I haven’t completely decided if I’ll stick it out and try WordPress 3.0 on a more regular basis, switch over to Tumblr, or just cook up something in Django.

Realistically, I have a certain philosophy when it comes to personal projects. Be it my day-to-day computer, phone, or website, I don’t want to have to think about it too much. I want to be able to hop in, make a change, do some work, respond to something and move on. While I love coding in Django and as much as I feel I could do with my own site, I’d rather get something together that works, looks good, feels good and gets out of the way. I get paid to code during the day, and as much I love to code at night, there are other things I’d like to work on besides my own website.

Thanks for keeping up with me, even through the silence, still the best place to follow my regularly is on Twitter, but expect some more long form ranting in the near future.

We had another journalism event last week. It was put together by Dr. Jim Stovall and the Tennessee Journalist, with a helping hand from Scripps. The Beacon naturally neglected to mention the Tennessee Journalist bit, but oh well.

I liked the format of this one. Kept things pretty simple and put the focus on getting students face-to-face time with local media professionals. The feedback I got was that it was helpful to get the perspectives of practitioners in the field, and to get some advice on getting a job in this climate. My brother was in attendance and spoke to a number of very interesting students. There were a lot of other familiar faces including Bob Benz, Lauren Spuhler, Patrick Beeson, Jack Lail and Chad Parizman. I got to rotate around and chat with a few of them before they left, but most of them know me by now anyway. I’ve been doing this college thing for five years now and am almost done. My only gripe was that the whole event made me feel a little old. Most of the journalism students in the room were completely new to me, save for a few who have been working with TNJN this semester. I suppose my time has come, but I still never thought it would feel quite like this.

Long story short, I’m getting old, it’s time for me to graduate, these kids need to learn the ropes and become better programmers as well as journalists, and Knoxville is brimming with talent.

By the way, Patrick wrote up a great bit on his blog about his conversations with students, and I agree with him on every point, I’d recommend reading it, it’s quick and to the point. I even left a (hopefully) helpful comment.

This is entirely random. But the more I think about it, and evaluate my employment options come May, the more I get the feeling that I’m a Product Person.

First, a few counter-points.

I love/hate math. Really, I love logic, which is why I am repeatedly drawn back in computer science and engineering stuff in general. Nothing beats pouring through tech specs on a new device or technology. And I do love the thrill of squashing that bug and troubleshooting something into oblivion. But when it comes down to algorithm design or optimization, I start to glaze over and I get bored. It’s not that it’s hard, it’s that after a while, something so deeply mathematic starts to bore me and I look for something more broadly complex. Something larger.

I understand networking. Well. Not only that, but the history of the stuff is fascinating as well. But I can explain TCP/IP, and “how routing protocols help route routed protocols” (Cisco CCNA 3.0). Routers, switches, and big telco metal are tons of fun and do present the kind of troubleshooting and design challenges that I revel in on a technical level. Elegance in network design and the knowledge that our fiber link isn’t going to collapse upon itself like so many dying stars is tremendously rewarding. But here again, I eventually get bored. Things are always exciting yes, but they do start to fall into patterns for me, and things can become so process oriented and slow (for good reason) that creativity is often stifled and the new and dangerous don’t really have a chance to flourish.

Then, there’s Product and Design.

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Twitter is killing my ability to blog.

That is all.

I am presently sitting quite comfortably on a foldable chair at a table with my PowerBook, a textbook, a cell phone, and a bowl of freshly picked cherries at my aunt and uncle’s house in the country-side of France. We’re about a 25 minute drive from Paris in the village of Vernouillet. On Monday I will move into a dormitory at Cité Universitaire on the southern end of Paris.

How did I get here? By plane of course, from the Tri-Cities Regional Airport, to Cincinnati, to Charles-DeGaulle International Airport. Why? That’s a bit more complex, allow me to elucidate.

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So, Verge is finally over.

Well, technically, it ended on April 4th, but I’m just now getting around to spinning out my thoughts on what happened.

For those not in the know, Verge has been a series of convergent media conferences put on by the Tennessee Journalist. We cover issues in web journalism, web-based media, getting jobs in new media, new technologies, and anything else potentially related to journalism and the internet. We’re fully buzzword compliant. Stephen Townsend did a great write-up on the event here along with some great pictures taken by my friend and roommate, Brandon Ball.

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When I think about blogging, and all the tools we have to make the task simply easier or possible at all, I can’t help but think of a layer cake. I’m going to dive into a bit of an analogy ride here (I am a big fan of analogies) partly to help explain the concept of a blog to my peers and friends who keep asking me to try and explain it to them. If this is simple stuff for you, just move along, this will get interesting in a later post.

To define a “blog” in the terms of a dictionary, we would start with something like “a Web site on which an individual or group of users produces and ongoing narrative”. In other words, a site that is regularly updated, can also suffice. The use of the word has become so broad that it requires some hands-on use and some refinement.

On with the cake. [Read more →]

So, to make a long story very short, my host of 5+ years decided to make some pretty big changes to their service, pricing, and level of access. Business wise it’ll be good for them, they can attract tons of SOHO’s to their service with lots of push-button services and “security”. All at the touch of a button.Well, the touch of a button thing is really a dirty lie, but besides that, their five 9’s reliability had plummeted to maybe two 5’s. Time to move on.I did a quick survey and found Dreamhost to have the right price, a good promo, and all the right features for the purposes of this project.

Additionally, have the flexibility to spread my wings a bit is nice, more on that next week. Even though there have been some very public typographical errors on their part in recent history, that level of transparency that they so dutifully maintain is what just convinced me to join on in.So let’s pretend for now that this is a new age, and we can all kick back our chairs, sip on some ice tea, and dream of spring and WWDC.

Hooray!

So we’re off to another great year here at the University of Tennessee and I’m one more semester close to graduation. I’ve decided to go ahead and go for the minor in Information Sciences. If we had a major I would have switched to that long ago, but since that isn’t available this will have to do.

On that note, IS 102, the introduction to the IS minor is interesting. I won’t lie, it’s far too basic for me. We’re starting on what computers are and not going too terribly far from that. Computer Science 102 and 160 both taught me more than this class can, but the context is certainly different which makes it not a complete waste of time. In either case it’s unavoidable at this point in time since the professor responsible for the minor left but a few months ago. We’ll make this interesting however. As versed as I am in Django, I have not had a chance to fiddle with Drupal. So I’ll be taking some class related time in the coming weeks to develop some Drupalie stuff. Good times. [Read more →]

I figure every site/blog/journal needs an inaugural post. So here it is.

This is a second run at making use of this domain, oddly enough, the slightly misguided vision for the first attempt ended up being realized after all.

So to those who ever saw the old edition, I apologize for letting it linger for as long as it did. In the interim, this space was largely utilized as a test bed for some RapidWeaver magic (a fun app worth checking out).

So now, after some time, travel, and reading, I’ve settled on marginally maintaining a presence on the web beyond Facebook and my long abandoned LiveJournal.

What will be on here? Hopefully some insights into online journalism and technical issues related to that (for as long as that lasts), software design, web design, broadcasting, and whatever else strikes me and isn’t ridiculous.

Cheers.