keithtom.com

so its been a while since i’ve had anything useful to say.

circuit city rant
today, i went to the circuit city and it seemed somewhat cleared out already. i gotta say, for a going out of business sale, it kinda sucked. i mean at first look, the sales were okay, 20-30% off their stuff, so if you were on the fence about something, it would be enough to make you buy it. but when you consider they have to mark things up a decent amt compared to an online store, you were barely walking out with a deal. in fact, a lot of their old inventory like usb keys or memory sticks were really overpriced, and overpriced for prices back when that stuff was good, so even now when they offer a 20% discount, its a damn joke because you can find 2-4x the product at half the price. kinda sad. k, nuf circuit city bashing.

education rant
at osu again today, and i really forgot how shitty school can be for somethings. bitter, old, cruddy professor who don’t want to teach, overpriced textbooks gouging students and dumb ass tests that want you to regurgitate the class lessons and the way they taught it. (btw, that opinion kinda built up slowly over my visits to the university). i wont go into this rant too much, and i’m not saying its all like that, but there are those parts of school that i’ve forgotten how crappy it was – i have a lot of problems with the education system, and for some reason, it really frustrates me.

math site
luckily, i was giving more thought to my online tutor/textbook site. with this idea, i hope to do a little more than rant about education problems. i think i’ve come up with some more good ideas.

first, i definitely want to leverage crowd sourcing on the site. so there will be a comment/ wiki component to the site, so students or other writers can contribute too. they can create problems, provide solutions, provide their own pts of view for understanding a concept, and expand the texts. i really find everyone has a different way of seeing the same concept and to have people provide their insight is really valuable. i’ve probably tutored for probably 5+ yrs now and have learned many different ways of seeing the same thing. if one way of explaining doesn’t work, another usually does.

another good idea is that i want this online textbook’ to be of actual use in a school. i think about 2 years ago i would have been happy with conceptually good site, but i want this to be practical. which means, for a particular school and course, they’ll have a syllabus, and you need a textbook which corresponds to the taught material. so, i’ll find a way to let students (or the teacher) from a particular class make their own syllabus, which will just be an appropriate collection of links to the right material. you can think of it a textbook that is very plug and play. you can grab the chapter from calculus 1 for review, then make a link for the second chapter on continuous probability distributions. this works well with a topic like math because the fundamentals will almost certainly never change.

lastly, i think the whole thing will be released under the creative commons. i really want everything to remain free and extensible.

peru
there was a comment about peru but it seems to be broken on my site and it’s not worth it to track the bug down an fix it. this time in peru i’m probably looking at something like sandboarding, para-surfing, going to the amazonian jungle, swimming with seals and beach/seafood. if i’m luckily, we’ll get to squeeze it all in.

a while ago I mentioned I am trying out kiva, and i thought i’d give a bit of an update + some pics so you can check it out. I put in 100$ and so far have gotten 36$ back, which I re-lent out. here is my portfolio of 5 loans of 25$:

unfortunately, all of them are behind schedule with my money! i don’t wanna get all stewie on them, but a deal’s a deal ;) i seem to be doing under average for repayments but these guys are still trying to repay, even if its late. truthfully, i’m not really expecting to be paid back.

I’m approaching it more just out of curiousity, but I gotta say, it’d be a lot more fun if you had to manage the portfolio to get some kinda return. at least then you can turn it into a game, and have more fun with it. as it is right now, I don’t receive any interest and actually donate to Kiva almost every loan – so this is just leaking money, but in a good place.

• cable companies will now broadcast only in digital
• because of this, there is a spectrum of airwaves unused
• issue: should the government license those airwaves or let some if it be public
  • like wifi but better
  • these airwaves can go further and through more obstacles like trees
  • having these airwaves be public will provide opportunities for new devices, innovation and entrepreneurship
• vote happens nov 4th (a big day)
• broadcasting lobby filed an emergency request to stop the vote from happening

For a fuller story, checkout:

• http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2008/10/down-to-wire-on-white-spaces.html
• http://www.freetheairwaves.com/