Inside the mind of Seth Holloway
I am a PhD student in Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin with a broad skill set and an endless stream of thoughts.
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Get notifications when concerts come?
Posted on June 17th, 2009 1 commentDoes anyone know of a website or method to be notified when your favorite artist is coming to town?
For example, I’d love to see Mike Doughty, Ben Folds, and They Might Be Giants in concert, but I always miss the ticket sales. I’ve tried to check their websites periodically, but I forget for a few months then miss the show. I’ve listened for announcements on the radio, but I do not listen to the radio consistently enough. Most recently, I’ve subscribed to RSS feeds from my favorite artists and this method is working, although I feel it is suboptimal.
My brother just mentioned a similar experience where he missed seeing the guitar-thumping virtuoso Andy McKee. (If you don’t know what I mean when I say “guitar-thumping virtuoso,” check Andy out below.)
While not the pressing issue in the world, not receiving relevant and timely updates for artists seems to be a common issue. Is there a solution? Show your 1337ness and help me out. Any tips would be appreciated!
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Get Things Done: Related work… or Why don’t tech sites use modern technology?
Posted on December 2nd, 2008 1 commentAs I perfect my PhD workflow I’m learning a lot. I’ve gotten much more efficient at finding related work and target conferences; I’ve improved my writing and organizational skills; I’ve found a number of tools that make my life easier (for example I use Google Docs to track references and write drafts so that I can view them from any Internet-connected computer). However, now I’m at the point where I know my topic and I need to stay current on the research. From what I can tell, most academics do this by reading the program from conferences related to their work. That’s fine as a backup, but there’s got to be an easier way! Why not automate the delivery of related articles or entire conference proceedings?
As a dedicated RSS fan (RSS feeds are a great way to keep up with the latest news!) I would love to subscribe to my 10 conferences and have them publish to my reader as soon as the proceedings are available. However, IEEE and ACM do not publish papers or articles via RSS! I understand conferences are big money makers so you may want to make people pay for the content, but I get emails and magazines from IEEE that I could receive instead as an RSS feed. Groups that represent the height of technological research are 10 years behind the times!
Thanks to blogs, twitter, facebook, and the raft of immediate media, everyone is a publisher. IEEE and ACM seem to be following the print newspaper style which is not 1) economically feasible or 2) good for spreading your brand. Don’t try to horde content in hopes of making more money. I get more interesting research from Wired than I do from IEEE because IEEE withholds the work. (That’s hyperbole of course–my job is to cruise for papers and UT has an amazing infrastructure in place for doing so–however, Wired does make it much easier to find interesting technology).
Until I find another way, I plan on setting up Google alerts (sent to my RSS reader) to notify me of conference proceedings and/or make related work searches into RSS feeds (i.e. get a notification when a new rolling alarm clock is discussed). Does anyone else see the irony in all this? Has anyone found an easier way to stay up to date with research in your area?
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