Innovation & Design
The Technical Hedonist on Vacation
| Unplugging is Very Hard, Especially With Wireless Technology | |
| posted 06-30-2009 |
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Guess what—a week or so ago this workaholic here decided to take three days of a vacation. Adjacent to the weekend, I decided to spend five days at a state park in the mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania camping. I was looking forward to some alone time with my close family. By the end of the first day, I noticed that I made two major mistakes. I took my BlackBerry with me, and asked a colleague to lend me a wireless stick for the laptop (Well, three mistakes, if you count taking the laptop along). I do realize that I am a workaholic, and there are no support groups for this when you love what you are doing. I typically work 10-12 hours a day over typically a six-day week. For this vacation, I was leaning toward having some relaxing time staring at the trees, the skies, and the mountains. I was trying to keep away from technology—but it was there. And so were fires to be put out. So I spent my vacation talking to staff and vendors. I came to realize that these machines are actually integral, functional prostheses of myself. But, there was work to do, things to take care of, bigger and better things to work on! Imagine the frustrations of the technological hedonist that planned to have some down time! One, the Internet is much slower on stick when the signal strength is at most two bars, and in certain spots only, too. If you drive around and try to sightsee while talking on the phone, you are likely to have your call dropped a couple of times per mile traveled. The disconnect between what my prostheses can do for me and their restricted performance based on the “state of the ether” was more than frustrating. It got me thinking of what life before the Internet was like, and if I still remembered it. I am a Gen-Xer, and my first machine was Commodore 64 that I played Wolfenstein on, and learned how to program in Basic. I did not get the chance to start using the Internet until I was a freshmen in college. There was that period between the Commodore 64 and the first PCs when at school we played Frogger on CP/M machines with keyboards that you have to jump on the keys to register a click! But then I wonder if life was that much different then. Perhaps it was. Maybe when I had a breather, my first choice would be to read a magazine or a good book, rather than nosily look into what my Facebook friends are doing and discovering. I believe I cared more about what I knew and the amount of trivia (and jokes) that I kept in my head at all times, that I now heavily rely on Google to fill me in. The present hit back again when the Blackberry registered an incoming email. By the way, as it is becoming a tradition in this blog, you are probably wondering what fun literature I am reading this week. I am reading a book with a provocative title, but great contents: Group Theory in the Bedroom (And Other Mathematical Diversions) by the great scientific writer Brian Hayes. It is about math; trust me. When I get to the Group Theory chapter (the very last one), I will be ready for a new post.  ______________________________ Dr. Goran Trajkovski, aka Fred, is the Director of Product Design for IT/Engineering at the Laureate Higher Education Group. In this role, he builds programs and courses for the schools in the Laureate network, which includes Walden University. He works with a group of talented people that build not leading, but bleeding-edge learning objects for online delivery. Bob and Jeff are the course developers, Tricia is the instructional designer, Mumtaj is the media producer, and Craig is the project manager for the team. The blog may refer to them every now and then as Fred’s “Dream Team”. Fred has held several positions in private and public universities both as a faculty and a manager. He started his career teaching Calculus in Macedonia some 15 years ago. But, he is “classically” trained in Computer Science. When he is not building courses, he likes to observe animal and people behavior and write about it. What he learns from these observations, he models formally. Then, he applies these models on artificial agents, such as robots, to see if these (artificial) societies would give further insights in the human cognitive processes. His research focuses on cognitive and developmental robotics, and interaction and emergent phenomena in agent societies. He has authored over 250 papers and written and edited 10 books to date. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Agent Technologies and Systems. He now resides in Baltimore, Maryland, with his family, a dog and a cat. He is a TV addict. His favorite shows are Match Game, Are You being Served?, and South Park. |
