So, I’m on sabbatical for the 2009-2010 academic year.
I applied for it almost a year ago and had to describe what I was going to do. Really? Am I really supposed to know what I’m doing a year ahead of time?
Fortunately, I’ve reached the point where I figure you may as well be honest, so one of my goals was to live with my husband. We’ve worked in different states since January 1990 and thought it might be fun to try being in the same town for a while. So far, so good. We made an offer on a house in Gainesville last week, had it accepted (okay, we’d done lots of verbal negotiation before going to G’ville to sign the official offer), got a mortgage preliminarily approved, and did the home inspection. (Yeah, Charlie was busy.)
I also wanted to get some time to explore something in depth. Teaching 6 different courses a year ranging from Excel for business students to Compiler Theory for computer science majors has kept me a generalist. Even my extra-curricular work has kept me in a lot of different areas. As program chair for CCSC:SE, I get to evaluate a broad range of papers (with the help of some wonderful reviewers), but as member of the APCS development committee, I get to do first year computer science education in lots of depth. And then there’s the programming contest, where I get to think like a code hacker. So, depth in one area would be fun.
So far though, I can’t shake my internal generalist. I have spent some time doing more Rails, working through Head First Rails. I have gone to Rails Conf a couple of times, but that’s usually right at the end of the academic year, so I can’t go back to school and start using what I learn (and the class that ties in best with Rails is taught at most once every other year). And I’ve just downloaded the Mojo SDK to create apps for the Palm Pre. That’s a whole blog post in and of itself. It wasn’t quite ready for prime time, but there are lots of great hackers out there who are posting cool work arounds (I got to edit a msi file–what power!). I’m getting ready for an APCS meeting in early August and am looking at getting certified in .Net (since I teach that almost every fall). And, in my copious spare time, I’m getting back up to speed on CMMI to prepare for the main thrust of my sabbatical, working in an industrial environment.
And then there’s the knitting, but I’ve only finished one of the 5 things I really wanted to get done before our 25th anniversary trip. Pictures soon of it (but it’s a wedding gift and I want it to be a surprise). I may get 2 of the other 4 things done on the trip, but I’ll believe that when I see it.
But now we’re getting ready to go cruise around Alaska for two weeks (guess how sad I am that Sarah Palin won’t be governor for most of the trip, just try to guess!), so I can forget about sabbatical for 2 weeks.
Laurie White's Blog 