For the last 15 months I’ve been a programmer at the Center for History and New Media. It would be hard to find a smarter, more dedicated group of folks building new media projects in academia, however programming just isn’t the career I want. I started working part time this month and by March I’ll be down to around 12 hours a week.

Sylvia has two and half more semesters of law school, at which point we’ll most likely move out of Baltimore to greener pastures. Where, exactly, is an open question, but Berkeley and Boston are on top of the short list at the moment.

My plan for this year is to think about exactly what I want to study and then apply for PhD programs in December. Along the way, I have some goals:

1. Build a non-trivial robot. I’m working on two very different designs, one is a gantry setup with an arm for manipulating items on a table and the other is a suspended rig that interacts with people from above.
2. Read more. I spend a lot of time reading news and other articles on the internet, but it’s been a long time since I got all the way through a book. Sylvia and I recently founded a book club (we’re the only members) and started From Molecule to Metaphor: A Neural Theory of Language.
3. Blog it out more. I would like to write a post a week, which would surpass my previous best of a post every twenty six years.
4. Publish something. One of my few regrets from my time at Berkeley is not contributing to any peer-reviewed publications. It would be lovely to have at least one peer-reviewed publication on my CV, even if it’s not a full paper. Part of this challenge will be to read broadly across journals and conference proceedings to find out where I can and want to fit in.

This is shaping up to be a real banner year. Check back for updates. I’ll be posting some robot sketches soon.