Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

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Being Thankful
 
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Exceeding Customer Requirements: Bad for Business
 
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Emergent Semantics
 
Maximizing Workspace Utilization
 
RFID Privacy Being Ignored
 
Community Source Development: The Higher-Education Road
 
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Our Kids Are in Big Trouble

Being Thankful

Today, the U.S. Thanksgiving Day holiday, is my second anniversary in an on-line M.Sc in IT program.  My first course began on Thanksgiving Day 2002, and that is how it goes.  It is an international program and it knows no national holiday schedules (except that there are no classes held in the few winter holiday weeks coming into the New Year).  In this age of globality, I study for a degree from the University of Liverpool delivered by a company in Amsterdam using distance-learning coordination systems hosted in Toronto.

Last night around 10pm Eastern time where she is, I am kvetching about some things with my M.Sc Dissertation Advisor and moderator of the IT Project Management course I am in the middle of.  Here she is, taking care of our course and interacting with students while it is late in the evening where she is visiting with family for the holiday.

Unhappy with how mean-spirited and stingy I find myself being, I stop and give thanks.

I am thankful for my wife Vicki, our three sons, our three sisters, and the friends, family, and colleagues that we have in our lives.  I am thankful for Royal B. Leach, my chemistry teacher at Lincoln High School in Tacoma, for encouraging me to apply to college when I had no idea of going.  I never told him the difference he made in my life.  I am thankful for the devotion of teachers who stand for us and take risks with us, never sure whether they have made a difference and rarely learning how their efforts mattered in our lives.

That is what I am thankful for.  Right now.  In this place.  In the present moment.

Simpler geek pleasures.  Yesterday's mail brought announcement that I can now upgrade my 640kbps DSL service to 1.5Mbps at no increase in cost.  I wonder what's the catch, and I'm guessing it is a competitive response to the penetration by cable.  I don't ask the off-shore upgrade service representative about that nor do I volunteer that we don't have a television and don't have cable service and probably never will.
 
I had been wearing out the extension keyboard at my laptop until the space bar started sticking.  Today I have a new wireless keyboard and mouse just like the one on my desktop sytem.  At last, every keyboard in the house has the same layout and feel.  I am now learning that I brush the spacebar with my right thumb and even rest it there. The new keyboard is too sensitive for that.  I'm now gaining extra spaces instead of missing ones.  I get to retrain my hands to poise over the keys differently.  If I don't wear out the backspace key first.

posted by orcmid at 11/25/2004 11:01:56 AM