A Test in Spam Comments: Poor Hospital Experience

My wife had a poor hospital experience on her trip to Thailand. After blogging about it, she was inundated with spam comments. I’m wondering if bots crawl for the title/body, or if the spam was compliments of cheap Thai labor eager to drum up new business. We’ll see if this post yields similar results!

Update: so far, no new spam comments. I guess something is different…

That’s PhD Candidate Seth Holloway to You!

Yesterday afternoon I proposed my work, “Simplifying the Programming of Intelligent Environments.” I passed with a few good suggestions but no major revisions required; I’m told the outcome is about as good as it gets, however, I hope this is not how “as good as it gets” feels. I’m officially ABD (all but dissertation), so the fun begins!

Thanks to everyone who supported me in-person and in-spirit! I’m very lucky to have so many great people in my life.

I’ll be proposing “Simplifying the Programming of Intelligent Environments” next Tuesday

I sent an email to the Students in Software Engineering, but I’d like to cover my bases and make the announcement public. It is rather unorthodox to invite everyone to a proposal, but I’m doing great work and I’m ready to spread the word!

You are invited to my Ph.D. qualifying exam on Tuesday, November 10 at 2pm in ENS 637. If you are considering a PhD, I encourage you to come and learn the process! The talk should also be entertaining for those of you interested in intelligent environments (e.g., smart homes). These presentations generally last one hour.

Please do not feel obligated to come; if you can make it and you’re interested, you are welcome.

Who: Future Dr. Seth Holloway
What: Simplifying the Programming of Intelligent Environments
Where: ENS 637
When: 2-4pm Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Useful tool for academics: wikicfp.com

Recently, my ever-helpful labmate, Dr. Drew Stovall, suggested the call for papers wiki, or wikicfp.com. The site is well done: easy to navigate, intuitive, open, and free. Basically, you subscribe to the conferences you’re interested in, then the site will email you approaching deadlines. They also offer an amazing calendar view so you can plan your vacation submissions.

As I prepare to propose and begin the sprint to the finish, I was reviewing target deadlines on the site. I noticed that a conference recommended by one of my favorite researchers, Dr. Andy Ko was not on the site. In about two minutes I was able to add the IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing 2010, not only to my own list, but to the site as a whole. Now, other HCI aficionados can sign stay abreast of the conference . See the CFP here. There’s probably a slant towards technical fields, which is to be expected because technical people are most likely to use a tool like this; however, the platform is incredibly powerful and open-ended, so I hope everyone uses the site.

I hope this is helpful for other paper-writers. Are there other cool tools I’m missing? I’d love to find out how to do my job more efficiently, so please share!