I was laid up for most of Tuesday and half of Wednesday, possibly from food poisoning. I had to lie very still to avoid the stabby feeling in my guts. I’m all better now and on the good side, I had hours and hours of uninterrupted research time on the Internets.
Here’s what I was up to:
- Turning over all accounts and files related to the website I created
- Looking into free data analysis and visualization tools and resources
- Taking online classes in the C programming language from this guy on YouTube
- Fiddling with Yahoo Pipes for a media monitoring effort
- Lots of lying and sleeping in the mummy position – Michael called me Paigepalegic
Here’s what I learned:
- It’s useful to go through the motions of implementing a business idea just to go through the motions of exiting; my website was literally and virtually a ‘business in a box’ for someone else. Cha$hing! I’ll go ahead and give credit here to someone I learned a lot from in this: Jarom Adair.
- IBM sponsors a bunch of cool research geared towards collaboration and visualization. And it makes its stuff easy to find, hoping someone will come up with a brilliant way to apply or reason to further develop protoypes. Check out this site, a NY Times site deployment, this one, and these three Twitter feeds.
- C really is a lot easier than HTML or CSS, the two languages I can claim I know other than English and non-verbal body.
- Yahoo Pipes looks deceptively easy.
- I love being physically active and am thankful that I still have the ability to run, bike and paddle around on this blue-green Earth!