The Adventures of a Digital Sensei
I got the Obi Wan Kenobi lightsaber for Christmas to finish out my Ultimate FX saber collection. Hasbro makes a Darth Vader, Anakin Skywalker, Luke Skywalker, Darth Maul. Qui-Gon Jinn, and a Obi Wan version. The problem is that I think my wife has stolen one of my sabers. I think she took it and sold it on eBay. I had two Darth Vader lightsabers and she is trying to tell me I only had one. I am a grown ass man. I know what I spend my money on!
Ever since I was a little kid Christmas has been my favorite holiday by far. All of my family members have known this for years. I guess when all is said and done, I just love getting presents, and this Christmas I got some pretty cool stuff. The hat shown in the above picture is from the official Indiana Jones collector series. I also got the Obi Wan Kenobi lightsaber to finish out my Star Wars Ultimate FX saber collection. I already had the Darth Vader, Anakin Skywalker, Luke Skywalker, Darth Maul and Qui-Gon Jinn models but I was missing Obi Wan’s saber. The Obi Wan model finishes out my Ultimate FX saber collection for now. I am still hoping that they make a Mace Windu saber.
As for the rest of my presents, my Continue reading “I love Christmas!”
My wife is accustomed to celebrating the holiday on Christmas Eve as per some obscure Norwegian tradition. As a result, this has also become a family tradition for us over the past few years. Every Christmas Eve we head out to one of our favorite restaurants for dinner. We still celebrate on Christmas morning. We just try and make sure that she doesn’t miss being home too much.
Apple finally got around to offering pricing and purchasing options for the new MacPro on their web site. Unfortunately the listing is just before the Christmas holiday and a tiny bit too late for me to ask Santa, or my wife, to put one of them under the tree for me this year. This is probably a good thing since the fully maxed out version of the MacPro with a 12 core Intel Xeon E5 processor, 64 GB of ram, Dual AMD FirePro D700 GPUs, and a 1 TB internal flash base hard drive clocks in at Continue reading “I might need to hit lotto”
I went with my wife to the NY City Motorcycle show at the Jacob Javits Center yesterday to pick out a bike for her next Route 66 trip. She and a few of her girlfriends did the trip last year while she was on sabbatical. The girls chronicled their entire journey from NYC to Las Vegas on Route66Explororer.com. She had so much fun on the trip that she now wants me to join her next time, and for us to do the journey by motorcycle. She got the idea for the cross country bike trek after our joint Groupon motorcycle class a few months back.
She got so inspired by the class that she went ahead and got her motorcycle license without me. I was kinda pissed off that she went without me, but I couldn’t blame her too much since my schedule during this last year on the tenure track has been so crazy that I haven’t able to set aside the time to take the MSF rider course. The entire time we were looking at bikes at the Javits Center the only thing going through my mind was that as soon as this tenure crap is done I have to get my license.
We spent more than a few hours looking around at the show. I am really loving the Honda Fury, but she fell am in love with the Suzuki Boulevard. The Fury is way too much bike for me since I will just be getting back into the riding groove. I am looking something a bit more practical like the Kawasaki KLR 650.
I was recently part of a panel discussion at the 2013 CUNY Information Technology Conference on the academic uses of social media. The presentation included short introductions, followed by a roundtable discussion, in which the educators on the panel examined which social media practices they had employed over the years succeeded and failed.
This year Thanksgiving took on a slightly more poignant tone as I realized that it had been far too many years since my closest male cousins and I had been in the same place. I should say we were more like brothers than cousins. We all grew up within a few blocks from one another, and were all very close in age. But yet over the years various circumstances have prevented us from getting together. I hope that this year marks a change in that trend.
I try not to rant to much on this blog but sometimes things just can’t be helped. I don’t know if it is because of my recent tenure notice, or the fact that the holiday season has begun, but I have been feeling extra salty as of late. All I know is that life is too short to deal with people that do not bring out the absolute best in you. It doesn’t matter whether they are co-workers, friends, or family. If they diminish you, or those around you, then you should cut them loose. If they change their behavior at some later point then you can decide if you want to re-engage with them. But until then they need to kick rocks and keep it moving.
I was never really a fan of the Doctor Who series until the reboot of the franchise in 2005. Just like most of people born in the US, the show always had seemed entirely too “British” for me. You always had this old and relatively out of shape guy defending the earth from death and destruction armed with nothing but a blue telephone booth and a screwdriver. He dressed like a moron and usually talked like an individual that escaped from an asylum. He never used guns and rarely ever fought hand to hand. As a person raised on Captain Kirk and Han Solo as my Scifi inspirations, the early episodes of Doctor Who really failed to connect with me. I just didn’t get it. However all of that changed Continue reading “Here is to another 50 years”
I haven’t told many people but exactly two weeks ago I received news that my college has decided to award me tenure. I haven’t spoken much about it because I keep waiting for the feeling of elation that some of my colleagues who have gone through the same process have reported. But it hasn’t happened yet, and I don’t know if it will. For the most part I just feel numb.
I am not going to go into extensive detail about why I feel this way. I have already discussed some of my reasons through my research and my media appearances. Suffice it to say, it has been a long and difficult process. Several long years in fact, and it has been Continue reading “I feel numb”