Notebook of Sand

• Recent Publications
• Recent Projects
• Conferences & Speaking
"Comparing Spatial Hypertext Collections"
  ACM Hypertext '09
"Archiving and Sharing Your Tinderbox"
  Tinderbox Weekend London '09
"The Electronic Nature of Future Literatures"
  Literary Studies Now, Apr '09
"The World University Project"
  St. John's Col. Cambridge, Feb '09
"Ethical Explanations,"
  The New Knowledge Forge, Jun '08
Lecture, Cambridge University
  Tragedy in E-Lit, Nov '07
Hypertext '07: Tragedy in E-Lit
Host for Tinderbox Cambridge '07
Keynote: Dickinson State Uni Conf
Upper Midwest NCHC'07: Speaker
eNarrative 6: Creative Nonfiction
HT'05: "Philadelphia Fullerine"
  Nelson award winning paper
NCHC '05:
 Nurturing Independent Scholarship
Riddick Practicum:
  Building Meeting Good Will
NCHC '04:
  Philadelphia Fullerine
  Lecture on American Studies
WWW@10: Nonfiction on the Web
NCHC '03: Parliamentary Procedure
ELL '03 -- Gawain Superstar
• (a)Musing (ad)Dictions:

Ideas. Tools. Art. Build --not buy. What works, what doesn't. Enjoy new media and software aesthetics at Tekka.

Theodore Gray (The Magic Black Box)

Faith, Life, Art, Academics. Sermons from my family away from home: Eden Chapel!

My other home: The Cambridge Union Society (in 2007, I designed our [Fresher's Guide])

The Economist daily news analysis

Global Higher Ed blog

• Hypertext/Writing

Writing the Living Web

Chief Scientist of Eastgate Systems, hypertext expert Mark Bernstein. (Electronic) Literature, cooking, art, etc.

Fabulous game reviews at playthisthing.

• Stats

Chapter I: Born. Lived. Died.

There is a Chapter II.

Locale: Lancaster County Pa, USA

Lineage: Guatemala

Religion: My faith is the primary focus of my life, influencing each part of me. I have been forgiven, cleansed, and empowered by Jesus Christ. Without him, I am a very thoughtful, competent idiot. With him, I am all I need to be, all I could ever hope for. I oppose institutional religious stagnation, but getting together with others is a good idea. God is real. Jesus Christ is his Son, and the Bible is true. Faith is not human effort. It's human choice. I try to be the most listening, understanding, and generous person I can.

Interests: Anything I can learn. Training and experience in new media, computer science, anglophone literature, education, parliamentary debate, democratic procedure, sculpture, and trumpet performance. Next: applied & computational linguistics, probably.

Education: Private school K-3. Home educated 4-12. Graduated Summa Cum Laude from Elizabethtown College in Jan 2006. As the 2006 Davies-Jackson Scholar, I studied English at St. John's College, Cambridge University from 2006 - 2008.

Memberships: Eden Baptist, Cambridge Union Society, ACM, AIP, GPA.

Alum of the Elizabethtown College Honors Program, sponsored by the Hershey Company.

What I do for fun
Friday, 21 Jan 2005 :-:

From time to time, I get that certain feeling -- you know what I mean, we're human after all.

At times like these, I'm restless. I can't focus on my reading. So I get up. I walk to where I know there's fun to be had, where I know things will warm up a little bit.

Yesterday's afternoon jaunt was way hotter than I expected.

** * **

After stripping it bare, Brett and I installed RAM, hard drives, a processor, and a heatsink to my new server. We pulled out a drive to make room. But when we powered her up,

Whirrrrrrr....Beeep! ....Whirrrrr....(silence)

After a few hours of trying things and thinking, I went over to ask Dr. Leap for advice.

Dr. Thomas Leap

He had some suggestions, and Brett tried them while I helped Dr. Leap compile a custom Linux kernel for one of his dual proc GNU machines. I yo-yoed back and forth between Leap's office and the lab.

Then, while we were trying to figure out how USB hotplug was crashing when we never enabled USB support, Brett popped his head in.

"It's the heatsink."

I breathed a sigh of relief. When I got back to the lab, the box was running. We installed an even bigger heatsink, just in case, and the machine purred happily.

** * **

PDP8 Ignition KeyThe random urge to wander by the computer science people in Nicarry Hall often bears strange fruit. Last semester, I was in the lab with Brett Lojacono, and I noticed a DEC PDP-8 buried under a stack of keyboards.

"Does it work?" I asked.

We then checked with Dr. Leap.

"I powered it up almost a decade ago, and it worked fine then. One of the lights is out. But maybe we can get it to work," he said.

But then finals engulfed us all, and we forgot.

Two days ago, I asked Dr. Leap about the machine again. So yesterday, in Operating Systems class, he dragged it out and made the lights blink.

PDP-8 at Elizabethtown College

I'm not in the class, but Leap is going to let me write programs for it.