Science Fiction and the Polymath Throughout my junior high years I was a huge science fiction fan. One of my favorite authors of the time was Isaac Asimov. I was quite surprised to learn that Asimov not only wrote science fiction but had also penned books, short stories, and essays that ranged from religion (Guide to the Bible), chemistry (he was educated as a biochemist), engineering, and the list goes on. This realization intially confused me. How could a science fiction writer be so bold as to write on so many different topics? How could he know enough in each of those fields to qualify himself to write books on them? It would be many years before I encountered the term “polymath”, but surely Asimov earned the title. ...

Me? A Manager? Not so Much For the past year or so my manager has been after me to move into a management role. I managed to avoid doing so until fairly recently, using my work on my doctorate as an excuse for not really having the time to take on all the work of learning the role, learning the courses I would manage and so forth. Recently, however, I was approached again and, having all-but completed my degree, really didn’t have a good reason for ...

The Power of Curiosity I have always been a curious person. I’m the kid that took toys apart to see how they worked (and was sometimes able to put them back together again, too!) I was the kid that enjoyed reading the WorldBook Encyclopedia because, well, just because. Learning about different stuff fascinated me. Even as a very small child I was curious. My mother used to tell the story of the time when I was maybe 3 or 4 years old and came in crying because my eyes were filled with sand. I had apparently held a toy over my head and looked up as the sand fell out because I wanted to see what it looked like from that angle. ...

Nextcloud, OnlyOffice, and the Like Every once in a while I get this notion that I need to move my data off of sites like Dropbox, OneDrive, and so forth. When I do, I start playing around with self-hosted services such as NextCloud, OwnCloud, and so forth. I’m currently in one of those cycles and have been playing around a good bit with Nextcloud. I’ve even coupled it with OnlyOffice so that I can edit documents in the ...

Connecting the MacBook to the Edgerouter VPN Today I fixed a problem that has vexed me for some time. Reading through the search pages, it seems it has vexed quite a few others, as well. I thought I’d share my solution to this problem so that others might benefit. What’s the problem? I’ve setup a VPN server on my Ubiquiti Edgerouter-X. The VPN works great with my Windows clients, but I’ve not been able to get my MacBook or iPhone to connect. Until today. The problem turned out to be quite simple, though it took a bit of reading to figure it out. ...

Making Progress … Slowly There has been a lot going on the last few months. I have been struggling to get my dissertation done. The biggest obstacle has been locating participants for a qualitative study. I finally got responses to my recruiting efforts and have been able to interview 7 people. That’s not a great response, but is better than nothing (which is what I had in the past!) and allows me to move forward. Did I say I was excited? ...

Moving to a Self-Hosted Bookmarking Service There’s a hint that bookmarks are going away. Services like Delicious that used to provide great web-based book marking services have closed down. In their place are the likes of Instapaper and Pinboard and the like that break stuff into different types. Instapaper to store sites that you want to read later, Pinterest for images you like, and so forth. That doesn’t work well for me, though. I want everything in one place. That’s also why I decided to try a ...

Is Education Relevant One of the questions with which I have wrestled for a while now is the question of what it means to be ‘educated’. The problem, of course, is that there is no one definition and that, I think, creates much of the problem in evaluating educational programs. The state of Georgia recently put on the ballot a bill that would create an “Opportunity School District”. In an effort to address “failing” schools, the state proposed taking them over and doing whatever is necessary to ‘improve’ outcomes. As I pondered the proposal, one of the questions that I continually confronted was what does it mean for school to “fail”? Who determines this? And, on what is it based? Advertisements for the plan suggested that “only 12% of third graders in our failings schools are reading on grade-level.” That, of course, raised other questions for me. For example, how does this compare to third graders in those schools that are not considered to be failing? What does it mean to read on grade level? Recognizing that people learn at different rates and that skills such as reading are commonly dependent on external factors such as how much reading goes on in the home, is the standard even appropriate? These and several other questions brought me back around to the question of what it means to be educated. ...

Learning the Challenges of Jekyll So a few days ago I decided to use Jekyll to generate a static website to host all – well, most – of my writing. Jekyll, I’ve learned, is a different beast from most applications used for these purposes. I’ve found several themes that I really liked, but they all had some sort of quirks that made them less easy to use. I’m finding, though, that “easy to use” and “Jekyll” probably don’t belong in the same sentence. Each of the themes I’ve looked at require slightly different structures, use categories differently, and just generally appear rather finicky. I’m sure for people that have played with it for quite a while, these quirks are just part of the landscape. For people like me, who haven’t really spent much time with the software, it’s a challenge. ...

Getting Started with Ham Radio One of the goals on my bucket list has been getting my Ham radio license. I don’t remember, really, when it first landed on my list. I was a teen and it most likely was the result of some movie I saw or book I read that extolled the use and excitement of reaching out to the world through radio. The desire wasn’t helped, I’m sure, by having an uncle that got into it after he retired. ...