Well, the travel month from hell is finally over. The CHI conference in Montreal was very enjoyable (though it rained most of the time we were there) and my time in Princeton at the engineering school advisory board meeting was also very interesting and enjoyable. But it's so nice to be home, and it was great to spend the weekend with my daughters. I made cinnamon raisin scones Saturday morning, and I went to see my daughters' school play Saturday night. They put on The Children's Hour, which is pretty heavy stuff for a bunch of high school girls. But they were fabulous and I am so proud of them and all of their classmates.

In May, I have one trip, it's only to San Francisco, and it's only for one day. Yippee!!!

I'm in Montreal for CHI 2006, then on to Princeton for an advisory board meeting for their engineering school next week.

I'm working up a really good rant about air travel, snce my flight out here very nearly went wrong on Friday. But I'll save that for another post.

Friday morning I dropped my kids off at school, and headed for the airport. On my way in the car I was listening to Marc Broussard, and the untitled/uncredited song at the end of the CD came on.

I wish you freedom
I wish you peace
I wish you nights of stars that beckon you to sleep
I wish you heartache that leaves you more of a man
I wish I could be there, but I can't

I wish you places that sit so still
Where people never ever change and never ever will
I wish I could hold you and make you understand
I wish I could be there, but I can't

Be good for your mama
Cause she'll need a hand to hold
Boy, she loves you
More than you'll ever know
There are rhymes and there are reasons
And times when nothing stayed the same
But you know my love still remains

I wish you wisdom
I wish you years
I wish you armies to conquer all your fears
I wish you courage for all that life demands
I wish I could be there, but I can't

Be good for your mama
Cause she'll need a hand to hold
Boy, she loves you
More than you'll ever know
There are rhymes and there are reasons
And times when nothing stayed the same
But you know my love still remains

I wish we were together
I wish I was home
I wish there were nights where I was never alone
I know I've said it but I'll say it once again
I wish I could be there, but I can't

Damn. I wasn't ten miles from the airport and my heart was already achng to turn around, stay home, and spend more time with my kids. Particularly since I missed a performance of my daughters' choir on Friday night, and I'm going to miss opening night of the school play this coming Friday. In three years they're graduating from high school and heading off to college, and here I sit in a $^%&! hotel room in Montreal, two thousand miles away from them.

I really look forward to CHI every year, but this year the conference hasn't even started yet and I'm already dying to get home. But thanks, Marc, for reminding me where my priorities should be.

it's been long time from the last post....
this week was not quite smooth .... needa OT for 3 days.... back home @ 930pm ... hahaha.... apply for AL at fri pm... bak to UST for finding friends for playing.... however they seem to be unwilling to play too much this week ... everyone likes very tired.... i look like a fool..... begging everyonesss ... 'pls play with me!!' .... so ... at last.... i left @ sat night.... (originally ... i wanna leave @ sun noon.... )
but... coz of early leaving.... i can hv a 13 hrs sleep...... enuf rest... already hv much energy for another week 's works ....

MAYBE TIME FOR LEAVING MY SCHOOL LIFE.... BYEBYE... UST....

i am such a failure.....
i try every means to treat other good ... be tolerant every times .... as much as i could .... in return .... she or SHE .... just think i am not good enough .... i ask her or HER to go out .... one said 'i am soooooo tired lah .......... next time lah ....... ' .... the other one said ,'ohhhh..... i hv to meet other friends arrrrr.....' or 'i needa go home to hv dinner lah .... ' 
however, when they hv time..... they will ask me ... 'wawa.... i hv not seen you for a long time lah ... u r sooooo busy!!!!!!!!!!' .... 'wei wei ... wanna go to jusco (the place i went 1234234 times..) ... '
i am the person who is always WRONG.... WRONG for not being patient ..... WRONG for not being tolerant... WRONG for not being polite..... WRONG for not being obedient .... WRONG for not understanding other's feeling ..... WRONG for being silent .... hahahahahahahah..... that's me lah !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! .......

BAD GUY!! 

I don't know if it's just me trying to compensate for having gone to an undergraduate school where we didn't have a community around us (UC San Diego), but I've always really loved college towns. From my experiences in West Lafayette, Indiana where everything was Purdue-centric to our current home town of Boulder Colorado, built around the University of Colorado, college towns are my favorite sort of places.

That's one reason that a story about Lawrence, Kansas caught my eye: I've been there for a couple of academic meetings in the last decade and really enjoyed the small town community. In fact, I'd be as bold as to say that it might well be the most livable city in the entire state of Kansas! Why they're in the news is both interesting and very typical for the town: City considers banning cell phone use in cars.

It's a truism that smaller companies quake in their virtual boots when one of the market leaders decide to pay attention to their niche, but even with the overall increase in so-called natural food sales, it's darn interesting to see that the original 800 pound gorilla of retail, Wal*Mart, has announced an aggressive move into organics.

According to an interesting story from the Associated Press:

'Putting new items on the shelf this year, from organic cotton baby clothes to ocean fish caught in ways that don't harm the environment, is part of a broader green policy launched last year to meet consumer demand, cut costs for things like energy and packaging and burnish a battered reputation.'

OK, here's the deal.

Last Friday, I flew down to Northern California to visit with my family and participate in my fantasy baseball league's auction draft on Saturday.

Sunday I flew to DC. OK, that part's theory. In practice, I got as far east as Phoenix, missed my connection by 10 minutes, got rerouted to Las Vegas then on to a red-eye to Newark, then Monday morning caught a shuttle flight to DC.

Why, you may ask, did I put myself through that kind of hell to get to DC? Because I testified in front of Congress; specifically, the House Government Reform Committee, on exactly how broken the current processes are for trying to get a visa to enter the US. (short description: submit application, wait 3-5 months, come in for interview, get asked a few irrelevant questions, get random answer). So by getting to DC midday Monday I still had time to get briefed and prepped to testify (and get some sleep -- I arrived at our DC office on exactly one lousy hour of sleep).

Side note: I was flying US Airways/America West. They just merged -- sort of. The tickets and flight numbers are sort of merged. The branding is not -- it's a huge, confusing mix. And most of all: the employees are totally, utterly checked out. Zero customer empathy -- they don't care, and they can't be bothered. DO NOT FLY US Airways or America West. They don't deserve your business.

Testifying went well. Yo-Yo Ma was also on the panel with me, talking about how difficult it is for artists and performers to get into the US as well. The committee was very receptive.

Tuesday afternoon I spent 4 hours on the Mall in DC with my camera. Took almost 500 pictures. I've culled down to about 50 I like, and am cleaning them up for posting to my Flickr site. Stay tuned...

Wednesday morning I flew home and went in to work.

Tonight I head out with my daughters and their school choir (on another red-eye, two in one week) to Philadelphia and DC (another two-fer-one special this week).

So I'm behind on everything. Sorry about that. Next week will be better. Promise.

I'm in the first session on privacy issues. Clare-Marie Karat is presenting a paper on a system for how to express formal privacy rules in natural language.

Here's a useful and simple definition of a privacy policy:

Who has access to what personal information:

• for what purposes
• to carry out what actions
• under what conditions
• with what obligations

Many of the question revolve around ways to handle exceptions -- which is the downfall of most data and workflow automation systems.

Karen Tang presented a paper on how to preserve privacy/anonymity in mobile location-based services. Person-centric applications reduce the fidelity of queries to increase anonymity. But location-centric services/queries are different in some ways and does the fidelity-degradation approach work? (no) so what does work? The discussion of the work point out that this is really an application-layer system, and that there are many threats from other layers particularly if the application layer system is dependent upon lower layers to accurately label locations.

Kirsten Boehner is talking about 'Advancing Ambiguity' Ambiguity is 'the admitting of multiple interpretation' (Gaver, 2003).

Generally more information and awareness reduces ambiguity, but sometimes there are exceptions. 'If you have one clock, you always know the time. If you have two clocks, you never know the time.'

Wendy March talked about 'Girls, Technology and Privacy: Is My Mother Listening?' Question: do you make phone calls sitting in your closet? It turns out that lots of teenage girls do. (so their parents can't overhear)

Important learning: girls pay attention to 'location privacy' -- don't trust IM to be secret, just voice calls. But they don't feel like home is 'their place' and will take phone (cell or cordless) somewhere that they can have a private conversation. Will only use computer for private conversations if they can physically move it somewhere private.

If you are reading this post on my blog's home page, you should have noticed a new addition to the blog - a list of headlines from previous Warnie Award winners. This is all part of my mission to become a more influential blogger by driving you away from my own blog to the sites that I love! These people have much better stuff to say than I do - so go read their material, but keep coming back here to find it. The list of articles will always be bang up-to-date, so it's a great reason to visit my page several times during the day so you can see what many of the other Christian bloggers have been writing about.
The Warnies began as a somewhat tongue-in-cheek concept, but at the height of the award's fame, Christian bloggers would literally fight, bribe, and cajole their way to obtain membership in the highly-honoured club of Warnie Award winners. Now that the winners' headlines appear here, I fear that an all-out blog war may break out!

Today I have also awarded another two blogs the coveted Warnie Award – Resurgence and Together for the Gospel. Actually, I have decided to include headlines from the individual blogs of each of the writers of Together for the Gospel as well, since they are so fabulous. Resurgence and T4GB are two of the finest blogs on the planet, in my opinion, and should need no introduction to you!

I have gone through and updated the list of previous winners. (I don’t think that list left anyone out - please let me know if it did!) As a measure of the resilience of Warnie winners, only one has apparently bowed out of the blogging arena. Christweb was untraceable - any reports on the whereabouts of the Mac gratefully received!

John Mark Reynolds and Phil Johnson have both deserted singleton blogging, however, and joined group blogs. After careful deliberation the judges - ok me - have decided to officially appoint their successor blogs, Middlebrow and Team Pyro, as Warnie Winners.

All Warnie Winners remain eligible to place the coveted Warnie Award stamp on their blogs, but I ask that the link be changed to this home page, where you will be able to read the last ten headlines from Warnie blogs at all times. The Warnie winners are available in an RSS feed or to read in Google Reader.

I just am not sure about the placement of the headlines. If anyone from Google is reading this blog, a way to resize the box would be fantastic – then I could put it in the sidebar. Otherwise, it might move at some point to the bottom of the middle panel (where it sits on individual post pages). Anyway, here it is . . . and I hope you enjoy it! Let me know what you think, and go congratulate the new winners!

If you want to include the list of Warnie winners in your site simply copy and paste the following code:

<script language='javascript' type='text/javascript' src='http://rpc.blogrolling.com/display.php?r=82b9e2ba8203c458cd4d3087f22cb86b'> </script>

If you want to include Warnie headlines on your own site, just drop me an email and I will send you the code, or nick it from looking at my source code!

For previous winners who want to include evidence of their award in their sidebar (this is entirely optional) simply copy and paste the following code into your template - this will give you the stamp at the top of this post:

<a href='http://www.adrian.warnock.info'><img src='http://www.adrian.warnock.info/uploaded_images/warnie-714212.gif'></a>

Alternatively, Phil has updated the stamp with a new look, which you can use if you prefer.

The code for this new picture is as follows -
<a href='http://www.adrian.warnock.info'><img src='http://www.adrian.warnock.info/warnie4.gif' /></a>

UPDATE
Phil was first out of the blogs to welcome the re-launch of the Warnie Awards which look like they are here to stay now! In his own inimitable style he thanks me for the first Warnie I sent his way:

'Last year, just three days after the launch of my original blog, PyroManiac, Brit-blogger Adrian Warnock catapulted me to worldwide fame by bestowing on me the most coveted award in the entire Christian blogosphere: the Warnie!'

In the comments section, Phil has also proposed a new version of the 'Warnie Stamp of Approval,' and since he no doubt still has the file from when he designed the first version for me, hopefully it didn't take him too long as I don't see people queuing up to add the Smeagol edition of the warnie stamp to their sidebars!

Incidentally, one of the things that prompted me to revive the list was the evident longing some have for a Warnie - perhaps that graphic should be reworded 'Warnie Award Awaited.'

'Create in me a clean heart, O God.' (Psalm 51:10).

Today's Lloyd-Jones quote is the December 30th entry of 365 daily selections from a devotional book featuring words from the Doctor and edited by Robert Backhouse. It was originally taken from the Lloyd-Jones' book, Out of the Depths, and can be found on pages 71-72 of that book. Once again, although written years ago, the Doctor writes as if he were speaking today. This is no less true now than when he wrote it.

Nothing, it seems to me, is quite so strange as the way in which man by nature always objects to the doctrine of regeneration. There is nothing also, I sometimes think, that so demonstrates the depth of sin in the human heart as this objection to the doctrine of the rebirth or being born again. Read the New Testament Scriptures, and you will find that men objected to it in those days. When our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ spoke about it, He was always persecuted. People disliked Him for mentioning it. When He began to expose the depth of iniquity in the human heart and to talk about a rebirth, they invariably misunderstood Him. They disliked it then, and it has always been the same ever since.

When John Wesley was truly converted, he went back to his university at Oxford and preached a sermon on this very subject; and he was hated for it. Those respectable religious people in Oxford disliked this doctrine, and they made it impossible for him to continue preaching there. The natural man, the unregenerate human heart, objected to this great and wondrous biblical doctrine of rebirth and regeneration. And it is equally true today. People sit and listen to an address or sermon on what is called the fatherhood of God or the brotherhood of man and they never object to it. When they are exhorted to live a better life, they never express any objection at all. They say that it is perfectly right, and even though they are reprimanded for not living better lives, they say that it is perfectly true and quite fair and that they could do better. But if a preacher stands before the natural man and says, 'You must be born again—you must have a new life from God,' they ask, 'What is this strange doctrine?'

I'm in the CHI panel on Mashups.

The BBC Backstage guy is giving a 'Basics' talk on what Mashups are.

Why do developers get involved in building mashups?

• new business opportunities
• it's cool
• they're frustrated with missing features/abilities in what the main provider supports
• to get noticed.

BBC Backstage is BBC's developer network for supporting third parties creating mashups with BBC's data. They only support non-commercial use, and stress that all intellectual property remains solely with BBC. They offer broadcast schedule data, audio and video archives, plus travel data for the UK (train, road, etc.)

BBC launched today reboot:bbc.co.uk, a competition to re-design the BBC home page. Cool idea.

The Google guy is talking about the technical underpinnings of mashups. and why AJAX and lightweight feed protocols make it much easier to do mashup web apps. The data sources are growing faster than specific UI services are, which is a problem at one level and certainly exacerbates UI consistency issues since each mashup developer needs to roll their own.

A good question from the audience about how to address accessibility issues for AJAX applications and machups in general.

Not a lot of good answers to questions; mostly a lot of 'good question, there are people thinking about that, no answer today.'

The discussant is talking about the privacy and security issues behind mashups. For example: do mashups make it really easy to develop a phishing site?

Another issue: authentication for mashups. If you go to a mashup site and type in your password for another site, how do you know what's really going on behind the scenes? Will we see the return of Passport? or will Infocard pick up quickly, or will Liberty Alliance finally get going? Will SSL be required? (is that too costly in terms of getting an SSL certificate from Verisign?)

The discussant is suggesting that mashup developers should develop more like enterprise developers.

The Google guy just said that we need to be careful not to put too much burden on mashup developers to 'do things the right way.' and we should look for technical solutions instead. (my editorial view: there is a natural tension here, but if we really want mashups to take off, the responsibility needs to be both on the mashup enablers as well as the mashup developers)

Is there a separation between mashups on Web sites vs. cell phones? The BBC guy says no.

Some audience questions around the intersection of 'citizen journalism' and mashups, and the issues of accuracy, authenticity and reliability of information. Also if there are errors, how do we build a feedback mechanism from end-users through mashups back to the original data source providers?

Another audience question: mashups are a developer phenomenon today. Is there any chance to make it an end-user phenomenon? What would those tools look like? The Google guy thinks that it will happen eventually, but will just take time.

My takeaway: the discussant (Hart Rossman, SAIC) has thought far more deeply about the issues behind mashups than either the BBC or Google guys. Mashups are very very young, and the hype has masked a number of severe limitations. We've seen a set of relatively simple mashups where the end-users cna remain anonymous (like layering data on top of maps) and that maps (no pun intended) well to 3 of the 4 reasons stated above why mashups are getitng built: coolness, frustration, and to get noticed. The real business opportunities, in order to be realized, will require actually tackling the hard issues, and we'll have to see if and how that happens -- or if not, how quickly mashups dies as just one more fad.

I'm also disappointed at how little discussion there really was about the HCI issues related to mashups -- other than to point out that the HCI/usability community is not at all involved today.