Had quite a week last week. Not only did I learn that I had been acepted into the Masters of Computer Science program at UNO next fall, I also presented my first research poster. My course of study will be Bioinformatics, which the masters program for that isn't up and running yet. Hence why I'm enrolling in the Computer Science, once the program is up and running (I'm hoping some time next year) I'll transfer over. I've spent the past year taking courses in CS in order to be able to apply, so this was very welcome news. I'll keep you updated.

Tomorrow, the UNO Athletic Training Program, the Maverick Athletic Training Students, and the School of HPER are hosting the 1st Annual Metro High School Athletic Training Day. This event is designed for high school students in the Omaha Metro to learn more about athletic training, visit our campus to see what UNO can offer them, and to have some fun! I first thought up this idea as a "Olympics-style" event to pit different high school AT programs against each other... but that idea gave way to a more general outreach event to give students a chance to see what athletic training at UNO is all about. Based on some early feedback and the postponement of the event last spring, I thought we would get about 20-30 students to register. We started planning, finding donors and sponsors, and generating interest in October. Then the registration forms began rolling in...

On the eve of our event, we have 60 registrants! We have 10 different high schools represented, with students with widely-varying levels of experience in athletic training. Twenty-eight of our current ATEP students have volunteered their time to organize the event and do most of the "dirty-work"- and the 6 students that chaired the committee have done some really amazing things! We have 4 sponsors that have donated over $2000, and 13 local businesses and university agencies that donated prizes. This event has truly exploded beyond my expectations- and tomorrow we see how the whole thing comes together!

 I will be taking pictures all day tomorrow and will post the results here. I am just so excited, anxious, nervous... I can't wait to see how this whole idea takes shape tomorrow! If nothing else, we have truly reached out to the local high schools and the students interested in athletic training- and showed them what we can offer them at UNO. I can't wait!

The weather here in Nebraska has been picture-perfect for 3 weeks, so we finally decided to get out an enjoy it! Scott, Mel, and Kiera spent all afternoon hiking the trails and bluffs at Platte River State Park, with a total distance of approximately 4.6 miles. It was such a gorgeous day, and with the leaves turning yellow, orange, and red... we had a fantastic day! Kiera, in particular, loved the bridges and creeks (she even got to wade in the creek and stand on a waterfall!). Next weekend, if the weather is cooperative, we hope to drive down to Indian Cave State Park (in the very SE Corner of NE) for some more hiking!

One of the things that Scott and I love about living in the Midwest is the fresh food and produce. There are some major benefits to living in "America's Breadbasket"! We try to get down to the Farmer's Market, located on Saturdays inOld Market and Sundays in Aksarben Village, as often as we can in the summer. While the market operates from May-Oct, August is our favorite time because the variety (and amount!) of produce is amazing. As you can see from our picture, we were able to find everything from corn to watermelon, jalapeno peppers to fresh-made feta cheese, garlic to peaches (which were too good and didn't make it into the pic!). Oh, the best part is everything cost less than $30! 

Scott and I have tried to become as environmentally-conscious as we can since moving to Omaha. The grocer that we use most frequently is a locally-owned, locally-sourced (as much as possible) store called Wohlner's. Living 1.1 miles from UNO allows both Scott and I to walk/bike to work (although, we were not very good about this over the past year, something we hope to remedy). The recycling program in Omaha is pretty comprehensive (much better than Durham, not quite as good as Portland), but we recycle everything we possibly can. Scott bought a push mower when we moved here, and although we loved the lack of gas/fumes, the slope of our yard made that decision short-lived. We have energy-star appliances and a fantastic high-efficiency washer and dryer. We are not perfect, but we are working hard to take care of our planet. Next year, we are planning on planting a little garden in the backyard... if veggies and fruit grow as well as the plants there now, we should be able to have even fresher produce!

About two months ago I committed Facebook seppuku (ok, well maybe it wasn't that violent), but I wanted to remove myself from Facebook's servers. This wasn't done as any big statement or in the belief that it would change anything, but for me my time spent on Facebook was at an end. I thought I would try and capture the thought process that lead me to that eventual kill page, and provide some insight on how I've held up. A lot of this is going to be inside baseball. I'll state it early on, if you are happy with Facebook, and don't have any problems with it, then by all means stay with it. There are plenty of valid reasons to use Facebook. For me those reasons weren't enough to stick around.

To be up front, this isn't the first time I deactivated my Facebook account. The first time was back in 2007. I finally had signed up and shortly after my initial set up, Facebook rolled out Beacon. To boil down what the intent of beacon was for users to share their tastes and purchases with their friends. It was along the lines of "Oh John just bought tickets to the movie I want to see, I should join him!". Obviously it didn't work exactly as intended. They rolled it out in November, so the obvious Christmas gifts spoilers were present. For example, there was a girl who received notice that her boyfriend had just bought something from J-Crew. Curious, she looked to find out that it was the gloves she had said she wanted a few weeks earlier. In addition you may have decided that you were going to take you sister's kids to the movies. Little did you know your trip to see "Alvin and the Chipmunks" would be sent out to all your friends. This wasn't Facebook's first overreach, but it was one of their biggest to date. Beacon was shut down just under two years later in October of 2009.

Here was the other element that had bugged me. When I deleted my profile back in 2007, it turns out that I really hadn't deleted it. The standard method provided to its users is to deactivate the account. Meaning your information still lived on Facebook's servers, it just wasn't active. That may not seem like that big of a deal, but I'll come back to why it was a problem for me.

This misgivings of Facebook were a big reason why I didn't really use it too much. I reactivated my account when I had a surge of friends sign up in late 2008. I was pretty much a Facebook lurker, and the reason for that is the heart of why I dug down all those layers to find the very well hidden kill link. In a nutshell, I don't trust Facebook. Through their actions and posturing I can see where Zuckerberg and Co. want to take Facebook, and I don't approve of their methods or trust that their have their user's best interest at heart. Facebook has always operated on a "Just do it, and ask forgiveness later". If anyone has been through the several major site redesigns they always follow the same string of events. 

1. Facebook rolls out a radical layout change
2. Facebook users are confused and not sure about the changes
3. A group will spring up and demand they roll things back to the way they used to be
4. The ruckus will grow and Facebook will apologize to the users, but essentially give them the finger and say this is how it is now, deal with it.
5. Uproar dies down and everyone goes on with their life.

This wouldn't be a big problem if this occurred only with site layout, but everyone of Facebook's controversial moves have been opt-out. Meaning it is up to the user to stay abreast of what is going on and take an active roll in managing new settings and features. This plays counter to how Facebook's audience used the site. People just wanted to play social games with their friend, keep tabs on folks, and provide the opportunity for others to do the same with them. In addition, these changes were minor, but ofter complicated and wide sweeping. Back in December of 2009 when Facebook underwent a major privacy settings change, even the Zuckerburg, the CEO, didn't set his settings up right. As a result he had private photos exposed to the web and were sniffed out. A condition that was quickly remedied once discovered, but it hammers down the point. If the founder of Facebook couldn't figure out the settings, how could the average user. Heck, most of the Facebook population couldn't even tell you how the changes impacted them much less how to change it back. This is the danger of an opt-out system. Plenty of those folks who didn't know they needed to fix their privacy settings were blissfully ignorant because they had already gone in and set their privacy setting before the major change in Dec. of 2009. But what they didn't know was that all of those choices were reset. This wasn't just a expansion of the town's boundaries, this was eminent domain.

I've also noticed a trend of overstep your bounds by three steps, when people get pissed, take one step back from Facebook. This method has appeared every time there has been a major site layout redesign. They drop the new design on people out of the blue, when the get pissed, they make a few minor tweaks, but never a full rollback. This has lead me to believe that ultimate goal from Zuckerburg is to divorce it's users from the data. The amount of personal details Facebook's users have pumped into the site is a marketer's gold mine. The only problem for Facebook has how to cash in on it. Beacon was their first major attempt, and the next attempt has been to push everyone out from the walled garden and into the open web. If you take a look at the infographic of Facebook's privacy evolution, you can see the systematic breakdown of the walls, pushing folks more and more out onto the searchable web. This is why Facebook has lost my trust. For years they marketed themselves as the safety vault for you to store your information and serve as the custodian, allowing only those of your choosing to take a peak into your safety deposit box. But now they've turned on their own users, and are trying to move that safety deposit box out to a street side bazaar.

So that's a pretty good encapsulation of my feelings about Facebook, I really just don't trust them with my personal information. To prove that point I'll return to my issue with only suspending my account when I first quit Facebook. This can be seen as benefit, keeping all of your previously entered data, so  if you do return sometime down the line it will save you the trouble. But there is the rub, if you are going to "save" my information let me know. At the time, I again saw this duplicity when I actually killed my page. The actual page is buried pretty deep down, with the distraction of disable my account option (puts it in stasis) put well before you can find the kill page. After lighting the fuse, you must stay away for two weeks (not clearly explained) because if you even try to log back into your account with in the that time frame, the kill order will be removed. That's right, if you try to log in to your account after you kill it with in those two weeks in order to verify if the account is gone, the account deletion will not occur. Again, there is a valid reason, a person may decide they don't want to get rid their account. Instead of using an elegant solution, such sending someone to a landing page that tells them their account is due to be permanently deleted in X days, and offering them the options: go ahead and kill it now or I've changed my mind, they again take actions behind the users back with out verifying them with the user. This mentality sets the picture in my mind that Facebook feels it is their data, not yours.

How have I held up with out Facebook? For me, it has been fine. With my reservations about the site being so high beforehand, I never fully exposed myself and limited my interaction on the site. Plus my closest friends never were that active on the site either. One think I've learned for the entire process was that while Facebook can be an excellent tool to remain in touch, it also can fool you into the belief that enhances, or builds on your more distant relationships. From my use of Twitter, I discovered that both Facebook and Twitter have more pseudo-relationships than actual. The mere clicking of a follow button, or accepting a friend request doesn't generate anything, it just a couple of bits passing in the night on the vast sea of the internet. Sure their updates and statuses will be delivered to you post-haste, but how often will you scan right past their posts. If you are not actively interacting back and forth, how is it any different than your mother filling you in on what a childhood friend is up to after running into their mother. You are aware of what they are doing, but that doesn't build anything, it is just information. Hence, my lack of participation on Facebook is what eased my exit. For somebody like my wife, who does maintain relationships via Facebook, it becomes a bigger dilemma, you may not like what Facebook has been up to, but what choice do you have if the cost of exiting the collective pool is the loss of that connection. It is a really tough call, hence why I've been pulling for a proper competitor to appear on the scene to provide folks options. I'm pulling for you Google.

Even though the Google Voice app rejection by the Apple App store is old news, I came across this gem that just ticked me off. I had a friend who developed an app for the iPhone/iPod touch awhile back and he had an idea to help promote it. In his app description he said he was going to offer a $10 iTunes gift card from a pool of people who posted their scores on twitter during a certain period of time. Apple contacted him and told him that his offer was against the terms of service and he would have to drop the contest or have his app pulled from the store. But an app designed to rip people off for $450 got the go ahead? I thought the whole point of the app store review group was to prevent crap like this. Instead we end up with 185,000 3rd party apps, with probably only 10% that are worth their price (including the free apps). But honestly, letting an app get through that is about as honest as Three-card Monte.

I've decided to put the website back up. Had taken it down for several months, but I decided to bring it back. I'll try to bring several of the areas back up to date. As for the timing, well, my current career track that I am pursing may endow me with new skills that I may have a chance to employ here. If that's the case, I'll be sure to let you know.

The big move is just around the corner, and I know that will be just a blink of an eye away. Had a great week last week with Melanie defending her dissertation and passing (i.e. she gets her PhD now), I had some progress on the job front, and my Dad got his second hole-in-one.  Mel's folks came out from Washington to witness her defense and provide support. We enjoyed their company and I know it meant a lot for Mel to have family there.  Biggest thing that is dawning on us is that it is that time to start saying our good-byes. With how busy folks in the lab are, we've got to stay on the ball to think about who we will see again in this two week window, and who we won't. Lot of people to catch, and two weeks isn't much time. Lucky for us, there are some big events planned during our final weeks. We've got a wedding and now one last tweet-up which should help with our goals of saying adios.

So you may have heard a few weeks ago about this thing that was going to "change the internet forever" and that thing was Wolfram Alpha. Like all things online, the hype did get a blown a little out of proportion. Is it going to change the internet forever? Yes, but not for everyone.

I've been digging around a poking Wolfram Alpha with a stick during the short periods of time I've had free over the past couple of weeks, and it boils down to this. It's difficult to wrap your head around it at first, we want to pick it up and play with it like all of our other favorite toys, but when you do it's so underwhelming. But don't blame Wolfram Alpha, its the part of the computer that lies between the keys and the chair that's screwing this one up. Even the press couldn't get it right, this isn't a Google killer, it's something entirely new. Just like a new board game, you need to understand the rules before you can play.

Wolfram Alpha wasn't designed to search the internet, it was designed to USE the internet. If you think about how we use Google, it's our transport around the web. We tell it where we want to go, and it will fetch that information back for you and let you skip off to the web site of your choice. This of course is an oversimplification, but it suits my case. Google is a guide to the internet, a filter useful for cutting to the chase. Wolfram Alpha wants to do something entirely different, it wants to turn the web into a data set. What is so exciting about Wolfram Alpha is that it aims to help us congregate information so we can navigate the data in a more meta fashion.

This leads me to my prior point, will Wolfram Alpha change the web forever? For most people, the ripple with be a subtle change, something where you notice thing a bit different but don't put too much thought into it. For those performing research and data mining, it will usher in a new frontier. Either way, it's fascinating to play with, if only to try and get a hang of it. Its like riding a bike, first few times is confusing, and then once you get it, you get it. Give it a try, but check out the recommendations for sure.