Glacial Erratics

I Better Put Something Here

October 16, 2003

It's clear that, at least in my small segment of the world--that is, the one involving only me--continuous and conscientious blogging is an activity of the unemployed. The fifteen days necessary to clear the front page of this blog went by and I had no idea and nothing to say for it until I stumbled upon the nothingness found here and fell into guilt.    (O8)

Working backward, what have I been doing?    (O9)

I attended an all day meeting of IndianaUniversity developers to learn about the Open Knowledge Initiative and how it might fit into the IU technology environment. The most exciting moment of that was at the end when a manager type I shall refrain from naming came to visit me and my co-worker and thanked us for participating and said, "I know it can be intimidating for you guys with so many UIS people here."    (OA)

Perhaps he meant to be nice, but that was an assy thing to say. The implication, you see, is that people in his department are professionals and I'm not. This is an attitude that's been floating around for quite some time. Perhaps it's justified, but I can probably hit the latrine from further back, while explaining to him why decoupled services on top of well modeled data structures are the most flexible design over the long term.    (OB)

In any case, if we want OKI in our KB, we need to rewrite the KB. I wonder if Danny wants some contract work, so we can make the SemanticKb?    (OC)

Earlier, I visited with my parents in the lovely confines of Shakamak State Park. They've been going there, often with me, my siblings and another family, for nearly 30 years. There's not much to do there, some few short trails to walk around on, some lakes to look at. Our primary activity is drinking tea and having pleasant conversation.    (OD)

Meanwhile, my buddy Stan is caught in some kind of time loop and the erstwhile superheroes in this comic book universe (you know, the kind that can move through time and stuff) have been captured by the female archetype in this arc of the story. We've been doggedly deconstructing the text in search of a way out of this chapter.    (OE)

Prior to that I was climbing in the red and apparently having heady, somewhat angelic, experiences with a new drug found at the top of some of the climbs. It's brown and powdery, looks a bit like sand.    (OF)

http://www.burningchrome.com:8000/~cdent/mt/archives/images/red200310.jpeg some more pics    (OG)

(I'm broken when it comes to taking pictures of myself with my "you can see the picture when you take your own picture" camera. In this view I'm over compensating in response to comments from the lovely poupou, failing miserably, and I won't do that again. At least until the next time.)    (OH)

A different Danny had loaned us a huge pile of trad gear, so we availed ourselves of some easy trad climbs, having little to no experience at such things. We aren't dead, so it must have gone well. If you want to buy me a present, I'll have some of these, any size. Thanks very much.    (OI)

And now I must end this because I am late for work.    (OJ)

Comments

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On October 22, 2003 07:24 PM Danny said:

Typical. I've not been checking the blogosphere for the past couple of weeks - I needed to get a bit of coding/writing done to earn some money for the bills, and just get too distracted. So effectively I've be doing contract work...    (P4)

But - consider me available!!    (P5)

2/2
On October 22, 2003 09:59 PM Danny said:

Nosing around - there's a big headstart with SGML being used for KBML, that would probably flop fairly directly into X(HT)ML docs + RDF meta. Ad hoc (but still semweb-friendly) vocabs could probably taken directly from the KBML.    (P7)

Search engine - Lucene's there for plain text, though I'm certain there's low-hanging fruit around with leveraging regular search and the knowledge structure (this stuff is very much on my own to-do list).    (P8)

The OKI docs look reasonably straightforward, I wonder if anyone's mapped their stuff to RDF or DAML? Their interfaces are Java - hookable into Jena I wonder??    (P9)

Time for bed here. Things to sleep on: what on earth could trad climbing/gear be? What aren't trad climbs? (feet first?)    (PA)

Sending...