My grandfather passed away last night. He was a great man. He taught me to be humble and quiet, yet loving and respectful. He taught me that growing old doesn’t mean that you have to give up the sports and activities you love. He showed me how to be a quiet fighter; lessons I need to learn to make better use of when writing here and elsewhere. I can only hope to become the kind of person he was.
I’ll miss you.
I had my last undergraduate class this morning and did not even realize it until now. I have quite a bit of work left to do, but I’m almost done with my undergraduate degree. Pretty crazy.
Of course, the Masters program runs straight through the summer (”No breaks!”, even for my undergrad graduation), and then I have another semester of classes, so this year seems quite daunting.
Underground mall
Originally uploaded by jmissig.
This mall was under the Hyatt where most of the Wednesday-night parties were. Too bad there was that fire alarm…
Tuesday I found out that no one from Carnegie Mellon was selected as a finalist in CHI’s Student Design Competition. Based upon what my advisors have told me, there is no single set of criteria with which the entries are judged. This makes it very difficult to know exactly what to do to win. We knew this going in, so I was not surprised to not be picked.
Given that this was the Student Design Competition, I spent quite a bit of time trying really hard not to tie our design to any specific technology. It seems, however, that the finalists all were very specific in their implementation details, and most had actually prototyped the designs (whereas we had just prototyped the interface but not the actual technologies which could drive the device).
The winner was “Chick Clique”. They actually looked at the same user group we did (freshmen college girls), attempting to mitigate potential dietary problems (as we did). Based upon what I saw of their project and what we saw in readings and heard from the nutritionists and health specialists we interviewed, though, it seemed to me that their proposal could actually encourage the anorexia or bulimia issues we were trying to prevent…
But C’est la vie (hey, I was in Montréal, I can say that). Turns out next year (CHI 2007 in San Jose woo!) they will have a Student Research Competition. That should be interesting.
Peter Saint-Andre says it best:
Peter Millard, my friend and a longtime contributor to the Jabber community, died last night. Peter fought a tough battle with cancer last year and seemed to have won. Suddenly, in the last few weeks, he faced a new battle with complications from his cancer therapy; he fought long and hard but the damage caused by interstitial lung disease was too much.
Peter was one of the first people I met in the Jabber community in late 1999. He was unfailingly generous, dedicated, hard-working, and honest. His software (first Winjab and then Exodus) was used by hundreds of thousands of people across the world and introduced Jabber to Windows. He was an expert on Jabber technologies and often helped me understand obscure aspects of the protocols, especially in the early days when I was a clueless newbie. Over many years he led our efforts to keep the jabber.org infrastructure stable and reliable. In short, Peter is a big reason why Jabber technologies are where they are today.
Peter will be sorely missed in the Jabber community, but our loss is as nothing compared to the loss experienced by his wife Christina and young daughter Zoe. I plan to soon create a way for Exodus users and others in the Jabber community to help them in their time of need.
Rest in peace, my friend.
Sorry for the repeat, Planet Jabber users, but I’d like to have this on my blog as well. I did not know Peter as well as many of the people over at Jabber, Inc., but I did meet him several times and the description above is apt. He was a good person.
In the early days of the protocol, no one worked as hard as Peter to ensure that the client side of things functioned.
I don’t know what else to say. I feel so sorry for Christina and Zoe.
Yesterday I attended the Security papers session, which focused on phishing attacks and encrypting email. The overall feel seemed to be that even with browser vendor buy-in, we’re nowhere near having the phishing problem solved. We don’t even have the right ideas for a UI yet.
It was nice to see that someone from Mozilla/Firefox was there and seemed quite interested in incorporating fixes into Firefox, but it was unfortunate that the researchers don’t yet have an answer.
Balance Pass group photo
Originally uploaded by jmissig.
Following up my earlier post, here’s a group photo of us!
