Dave Kellam

There are some articles popping up on news sites about Northface University, a new computer science school in the States, that’s heavily backed by corporate sponsors (not that most schools aren’t). You pay $60000, do a CS degree in two and a half years and get a bunch of certifications. I equate it with a diploma mill or maybe a nerd mill. Yeah, they’re going to pound out good corporate citizens that have tons Microsoft and IBM training, but they won’t be well-rounded.

Meanwhile, my school has been heading in the other direction, trying to give their computer science students a more balanced education. I was one of the first to get a redundant sounding degree, that I can see them renaming: Bachelor of Computing, Subject of Specialization Computing. It’s essentially the same program as the old B.Sc but they require at least 5.0 credits to be in courses other than Math or Stats and 1.5 of those credits in the humanities.

One of the big things that people are starting to realize is that computing is everywhere now. It’s not just mathematical theory and producing hardware. Almost everyone in a modern environment uses some form of computing at home and work every day. And they’re not all dorks. What may seem like a simple and intuitive interface to the programmer is not for the end-user. Computer Science should act as a technological bridge between Arts and Science; their needs to be programmers with backgrounds in fields like biology, chemistry, economics, english, and fine arts, that help produce intuitive software.

The world needs hardcore dorks like the ones Northface will produce. But we’ll also need computer scientists who understand people as well machines, so we can stave off a citizen’s revolt against computers and technology.

Was sick of the red. Here’s something different but the same.

Depending on how long you’ve know about this site, you may or may not remember Conform. It’s a project that I used to run for Suffocate.org (an old group of designers). I decided to revive it about a month ago and received pretty good response. I’ve been almost finished for awhile, and I wanted to have at least four images finished before it went live.

Parts of the design are a bit hacked, but it should probably be valid CSS (I haven’t checked yet). It may look like shit in some browsers, it’s fine for now though. I could sit around and keep tweaking it but i’d never get it finished. There are some things I still have left to finish, like the bottom tagline thingy, it will have more variations. And the etc section, it’s empty right now. The archives are sparse too.

It’s now loose on the world. With that, I’m going to return to Brockville for a night and then go camping for a night, so I won’t be around to fix problems. yea.

the Conform Project — Go there and check it out.

I figured it was time to post some fun stuff on Bush; considering there’s an American election coming up and I wasn’t a big fan of him last time he ran.

First off, Bush was a cheerleader in college. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, it just seems kind a gay. I’m told he’s not big fan.

Next up, there’s the ol’ nosepickin’ video. We all go digging, but we don’t all own the Texas Rangers and have designs on national office.

And some tidbits from a Washington Post article, circa the 1999 campaign. This first one’s fun:

In the fall of 1967, when huge numbers of college students were marching on Washington to protest the Vietnam War, Bush was quoted in the New York Times defending the branding of fraternity pledges with a hot coat hanger, saying the resulting wounds resembled “only a cigarette burn.”

Looks like he had a penchant for torture nice and early in his career. Or at least claiming that it wasn’t torture. Ha ha, easy there Mr. Koppel, I call that the ‘Spirit Hood’.

I can’t always be harsh with Bush, sometimes he really does help give back to the people. The stellar athlete put in his dues and gave Yale and enduring legacy:

Stickball had always been played at Andover as a casual after-dinner pickup game, but Bush institutionalized it, his title duly noted in the school yearbook: “High Commissioner of Stickball.” He organized campus teams into a league that included every last uncoordinated soul who wanted to play. For this, many a former nerd is still grateful.

That’s about it, although a few more couldn’t hurt. He fell off his bike again, but that’s not surprising. Castro thinks all the coke Bush snorted and the booze he drank made him stupid. Bush was given elephant dung stationary by the Sri Lankans.