The Opening of the Prairie Line Trail on the UWT Campus

Yesterday marked the opening of the Prairie Line Trail on the campus of the University of Washington Tacoma.  Congressman Derek Kilmer, Regent Herb Simon, Interim Chancellor Kenyon Chan and many other members of Tacoma and the South Puget Sound community were on hand.

The UWT campus has always been a beautiful one, with its own distinctive character.  The buildings are a mixture of old and new, with the oldest of them the beneficiaries of a historic preservation.  The old warehouses of the terminus of the transcontinental railroad once housed buildings such as Birmingham Block and West Coast Grocery.  Now they house classes and faculty offices for a multitude of academic programs.  You can earn your Computer Engineering degree while sitting in Birmingham Hay and Seed.
 

With designs from landscape architects PLACE Studio, LLC, the project has transformed the 80ft wide rail corridor through campus into a vibrant new open space.  In the earlier part of the day, when the fence first came down and the sun was shining, I took this picture with my phone.

The trail itself carries on the campus tradition of historical preservation and introduces sustainability and ecological urban design as well.  The original tracks that carried the railway engines down to the waterfront remain.  Where Abraham Lincoln once participated in a ribbon cutting, another ribbon cutting took place over one hundred and twenty years later.

The 15th South Sound Technology Conference to be Held March 14th, 2014

It is that time of the year.

March 14th, 2014 in William Philip Hall we will be holding the 15th Annual South Sound Technology Conference.  The event will begin at 9:00 and go until 3:00 o'clock with a great mix of speaker and panels covering the biggest trends and impact of technology and technology solutions to the South Puget Sound area.

Two scheduled tracks will cover similar topics to the last couple of years because the impact has not been waning.  One will cover information assurance and cybersecurity and the other will over how we manage and gain knowledge from the massive amount of data we are collecting.

Currently on the roster is a panel overview of the security tech audits that were conducted by Masters of Cybersecurity and Leadership graduates on several local organizations and utilities, as well as a panel discussing the breach at Target and the advent of insurance policies that cover cybercrimes.

On the big data front there will be presentations and discussions on refining predictions of consumer behavior through social network analysis and crossing my fingers for a guest speaker announcing a big project launch.

www.southsoundtechconference.com

Beginning of the School Year 2013-14

This year we start with a record number of Computer Science, Computer Engineering and Information Technology students enrolled at the Institute of Technology at the University of Washington Tacoma.

The newest of them were welcomed to the programs by faculty and staff prior to the quarters start.

To launch the year, faculty, students and members of the community participated in Convocation last Friday.
A small sampling of the brain trust getting ready to march to campus as part of the event.
.

Best and Worst Movie Adaptations - Top Ten Tuesday Thoughts

My daughter Savannah is a writer/blogger and along with her contributions to the Looks from Books column on www.collegefashion.net she also maintains her own blog (going on four years now) playinginthepages.blogspot.com.

From there she has occasionally caught my attention with a "Top Ten Tuesdays" weekly countdown meme, from the web site the Broke and the Bookish.

It is a multi author blog which describes itself as

"a group of college aged and twenty somethings that have an unhealthy obsession with reading and would spend every last penny on books even if it meant skipping a few meals. We are the people who lurk in the library, buy handbags based on how many books can be stashed in them, and who refer to characters in books as if they are personal friends."

This weeks theme was best and worst movie adaptations from books.  It was fun to read the numerous likes and dislikes from the various contributors.  

I have decided to narrow it down even further and provide what I believe to be the best and worst movie adaptations of Stephen King novels.

Best:
Two of the top movie adaptations come from the same publication, Different Seasons 1982, a set of four novellas.

Considering the two are The Shawshank Redemption 1994 (from Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption) and Stand By Me 1986 (from The Body) that is a pretty good read.  Apt Pupil also was made into a movie, but not with the same impact.  Shawshank was nominated for seven academy awards and Stand by Me won a Golden Globe for best picture drama and a Oscar for best adapted screenplay.

Carrie (from Carrie) has been made into two movies and recently a musical as well.  Another adaptation is due in theaters in October of this year.  It is the Brian DePalma 1976 adaptation though, that showcased a very young John Travolta and received Oscar nominations for Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie and featured one of my early movie crushes Amy Irving.

Misery 1990 (from Misery) featured an amazing James Caan and Kathy Bates, who won an Oscar for her role.  A relentless foray into claustrophobia, it was also adapted into a stage play by Princess Bride author William Goldman.

Christine 1983 (from Christine) had a movie treatment in the same year of its publication and if you have seen it, you will understand that there wasn't much Oscar worthiness there.  However, from the beginning of the film, when the automobile known as Christine moves down the assembly line to George Thorogood's "Bad to the Bone", to the wrecking yard finish, this is one of my guilty pleasure movie treats.

Worst:
Stephen King's It (the miniseries1990), Television all-stars and Tim Curry may have scared me a little as a child, but now it simply disappoints on multiple levels.  The repetitiveness and the finale were ludicrous.
 
Maximum Overdrive 1986 (based on the short story Trucks) written and directed by Stephen King.  Loved the short story though.

Children of the Corn 1984 (from the short story collection Night Shift) has somehow spawned eight, count them, eight sequels, including Children of the Corn 666: Isaacs Return and Children of the Corn: Urban Harvest with Charlize Theron in a non-speaking role.

and Stephen King's The Mist 2007 (from The Mist) featuring one of the worst movie endings ever.

Special Mention: Great movie but King hated the interpretation The Shining.

Bridging the technology gap: Generation Connection

The end of the quarter in my Managing Technical Teams class means I get to see presentations from student teams of 5-7 people and the work they have done over the last seven weeks. (two weeks to form teams and decide on a project that makes a contribution to the community utilizing technology and the writing of a post mortem on the project bookend those weeks to fill the ten week quarter.)

I require a press release as part of their project launch presentation and will post a few of them here.  Below is the first.  I stripped out the contact information that normally would come with a release.

Bringing technology to older generations to keep them connected to friends and family

Auburn, WA, May 15, 2013– Today, millions of senior citizens in the United States have not seen their families or loved ones in over a month. Many older people today do not believe technology is for them; however in our rapidly changing world that is unfortunately just not true. Technology can help reduce loneliness by providing access to invaluable online resources and the ability to keep in touch better with friends and family.

“Generation Connection inspires older people to use technology, and in doing so, delivers digital training to open a host of opportunities, like reconnecting with loved ones or pursuing hobbies.” – Jared Eades

Generation Connection is a group of students in the Information Technology and Systems Bachelor of Science program at the University of Washington Tacoma. They wanted to give back to their community by applying some of their technological talents. After many ideas were brainstormed they decided the most rewarding project they could do was to help teach the seniors in their community. Generation Connection found an assisted living facility (Wesly Homes) where they could teach the seniors there how to use the technology around them and show them that technology is for them too!

“We greatly appreciate what Generation Connection has done here. Not too many people would take the time to do for us, what you have done for us.” Millard

Located at the University of Washington, Tacoma, Generation Connection was founded in 2013. Generation Connection is the best company that offers technical assistance to elderly people in order for them to communicate with their loved ones thru the use of technology.

End of the Quarter Colloquium for Spring 2013

An exciting end of the quarter colloquium today.  We have a new, fast moving format of presentations resulting in new topics every fifteen minutes.  Though much of it is overview based, some are able to go into more specific detail, especially when there are teams of two and three who go for up to one half hour.

For an idea of the many topics covered, check out this schedule.

End of the Quarter Colloquium for Spring 2013 Schedule of Presentations Session One:     9:00 to 11:00 (sign ups start at around 8:45) Igor Odnik - Internship with Electronic Outlet Services Sambath Sok - Directed Reading - Windows 8 Matt Rigg - Competition Specialties Web Development Lawrence Grass, Dwayne Tucker and Kyle Philips- Pierce County Mobile Application Development Internship Jacob Yong and Maggie Liao - Field Technicians for UW Tacoma IT Department internship Long Pham - Directed Reading SQL Optimization Alexander Kramer - Weyerhaeuser Intern EHS Support Functions Session Two:     10:30 to 12:30 Nathan Adams - Expeditors International Internship Kavitha Yogaraj - Sofware Engineer internship at Versium Analytics Rodney Short - Directed Reading in Security and Certification Test David Everitt - Data Reduction Intern at AeroJet Kurt Hardin - Intel Undergraduate Software Engineering Intern Brad Porter - Malware Analysis Techniques Bob Flood - Nagios: A network monitoring system plus directed reading Session Three:  12:00 to 2:00 Jordan Hanna  - City of Tacoma - IT Department Internship with CISO Paul Federighi Joseph Stout - Directed Reading Making Decisions in Agile Software Development Michael Morris - Revitalization of Sporcle 3.0 Shane Kwon - A Survey of Graph Database Systems with Emphasis on In-Memory Computing and Traffic Security Heegun Yang - Cloud Based Free and Open Source Software Solution for Small Business Mattew Selfors, Roger Trottier and Major Bruno - Game Development for Dropkick Games James Andrew Marquardt – Independent Study of Natural Language Processing Techniques Session Four: 01:30 to 3:30 or end of day. Pritpal Singh and Michael Jagielo - TPI Android Application Paul Aquino - Software Development Intern at Avanade Ainsley Herndon - Working with Symbology on the Role Player Work Station Vinh Pham - Internship at Weyerhaueser Michael Schweiger - Malware Analysis on the Cloud David Souphommanichanh - Directed Readings Information Technology Infrastructure Wen-Chung Chen - Directed Readings Network Engineering Benjamin Kim - Directed Readings Agile Testing Amandeep Jhajji - Internship with Small Business Otis Alexander - Towards a Cybersecurity Specific Data Historian for an Attack-Aware Industrial Control System (ICS) Soon Keu Bang - A Grounded Theory Analysis of Knowledge, Skills, And Abilities for Software Assurance and DevOps Victor Palanchuk - Network Security Operations at Avanade
	Message 14 of 7748
Powered by Alpine -

Top Ten Tuesday: Words/ Topics That Instantly Make Me Buy/ Pick Up a Book

Taking a cue from my daughters blog Playing in the Pages.

She did a post on her book centric blog which covers reviews and reading, and I didn't want let my answered only appear there, so here are mine ...

What Will Make Me Pick Up a Book

1- Short Horror Stories: Quick scary, thrilling or laughable reads. Try the Stephen King collections.

2- Detective series: Began with Encyclopedia Brown, entered the Agatha Christie stage, moved on to Travis McGee and others. John D McDonald was the forefather so give Travis a chance.

3- Set in the Northwest: Still like Seattle settings, but the city has gotten a little full of itself. If set in Tacoma I will give it a read.

4- Energy Solutions: Maybe it is non-fiction, but it is still escapism to me cause I doubt I will ever build that solar powered, rain filtering, trash compacting solution. Still, read “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind”.

5- Origami: Give me a model and I will fold it.

6- Trendy economic books: Call me a slave to the news cycle, but if everyone is freaking out about a flat world economy driven by a creative community, I will likely feel compelled to read it. Try Freakanomics and Collapse.

7- Books for kids: If there is a kid to read them to, I will want to read it. Mine are now too old, but I can babysit and someday I may have grandkids.

8- Near future science based Sci Fi: Michael Crichton is my go to author for this, with the Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park and Coma being three great ones.

9- Cyber Punk: William Gibson inspired from Burning Chrome through Mona Lisa Overdrive.

10- Detailed historic work written like a novel: Tom Wolfe did it with The Right Stuff and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.