The Desert of My Dreams

One of the benefits of attending SI is the school’s strong alumni network. You can find alums working at some of the hottest companies and in almost every industry. This aspect of the school was a major draw for me when I was applying to grad schools. If others who attended the […]

HBO has produced an excellent documentary about the UM/OSU rivalry. I just watched it and thought it was extremely well-produced. It goes through the history of both football programs and the roots of the rivalry between the two schools. They even trace it all the way back to the two states fighting […]

10. backchannel IM
09. cereal as dinner
08. grocery shopping at 11 p.m.
07. excessive use of Gill Sans
06. wheat thins + babybel = perfect snack
05. ipod as social “do not disturb” sign
04. laundry at 11 p.m.
03. playing “let’s see how many anorexics I can spot today” at the gym (arguably much easier to play at the IM […]

A few weeks ago, I came upon the SI is Broken blog, through another SIer’s (Andrea?) del.icio.us feed. Like an ill-conceived SI student project, the anonymous blog starts off with an overly ambitious goal but then miserably fails to deliver on its objectives. With only three bad posts and no follow-up on any […]

A couple of weeks ago, I was invited to speak at a private two-day conference (entitled the Conference on Blogs and Democracy) sponsored by the U.S. State Department. I am honored to have been selected and am very grateful for getting the opportunity to hear some of the most influential people in this area […]

For anyone who might be interested, I have posted a condensed online version of my master’s thesis, which was a study of relationship formation in three blog communities (Kuwait Blogs, UAE Blogs, and DFW Blogs).
Comments and questions (whether about the results, the experience of doing a master’s thesis at SI, or the online presentation) are […]

SAA has created a centralized aggregator of all decentralized bottom-up things created by SIers - blog posts, del.icio.us bookmarks, and Flickr photos. The aggregator is the closest thing that SI has to a formal knowledge base/Intranet (the lack of which has been a huge pet peeve of mine). Nonetheless, as exciting as a […]

Since we were at CHI for the Student Design Competition and as student volunteers, we didn’t really get a chance to explore Montreal. Our hotel was several blocks from the Palais des Congres so I saw a little bit of Montreal every day as I walked to the Palais. On our last day […]

apete, mattbot, d*, and I went to the CHI conference last week to present Fitster at the Student Design Competition. Out of 48 entries, we placed third! Fitster was by far the best group project I’ve ever worked on (with all due respect to all of my former teammates from other projects) and […]

Rejoice dear readers for I have completed my master’s thesis!
Whenever my niece Maryam does something she considers to be a big deal (this could be merely walking down the stairs), she rejoices, “I did! I did! I did!” (instead of “I did it!”). So now all I want to do is run around […]