Michael Karlesky

A cabinet of wonders. Minus the cabinet. And possibly the wonders.

Postcards

  • Me finding furniture that actually fits me at an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. I got to see an incredibly fun interactive exhibit.
  • Elyse. As in the very same Elyse who met me at the airport when I first moved to the city over a year ago. Because she is ridiculous she's taken to carrying around a humongous instant camera. We went out for an anniversary dinner of a sort — at the same restaurant we ate the night I arrived. As you may recall we had many adventures.
  • Tile work from Parkside Station (my subway stop).
  • World famous Katz's Deli where I had the best pastrami sandwich of my life. Also the location of the famous scene from Harry Met Sally.
  • The back wall of Think Coffee, a coffee shop across the street from NYU's Manhattan campus I sometimes visit. A small sign has this to say:
    The wood on our back bar was reclaimed from a warehouse at 211 Pearl Street built by William Colgate (of toothpaste fame) around 1830. Located in the heart of Manhattan's early commerce district at the South Street Seaport, the warehouse was one of only a handful of structures to survive the Great Fire of 1835.
  • A Manhattan cafe sign in SoHo.
  • A butcher shop window in Park Slope, Brooklyn (coincidentally near a BBQ shop called Pork Slope).
  • A lightbulb in a Brooklyn coffee shop.
  • The Space Shuttle Enterprise!! At the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum.
  • Manhattan skyline as seen from Governors Island in New York Bay (WTC Tower 1 is nearing completion).

My 15 Pixels of Fame

When I'm all finished, I will be awarded a degree from within the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at NYU•Poly. There's all sorts of different specialty fields within computer science. One of those fields is Human Computer Interaction. This is the umbrella under which I am doing my specific work that will one day be a dissertation that few are likely to ever read.

The Association for Computing Machinery is the academic and professional organization for all those of us in computer science. Among all the conferences and journals and events the ACM organizes, it also puts out a monthly magazine for HCI called Interactions. Interactions just published a short interview with my advisor about our lab.

I'm in the photos. Can't see me? Let me help. Open the article. Scroll down to the collage-style photo. Click it to make it bigger. Look in the lower right. Squint and cock your head to the side. The guy in the white shirt with his back to the camera? That's me.

UPDATE (Oct. 19, 2012): If you had trouble viewing the photo in the original version of this post, I figured out the problem and updated the instructions above so you can see it.

Big Words.

I mentioned in my previous post something about all the big words I now hear spoken around me. I decided to make a sample list:

  • ontological
  • affordance
  • pedagogy
  • social constructivism
  • panopticon
  • ethnomethodology
  • contextualize
  • phenomenology
  • technological determinism
  • cohort
  • ubiquitous

I've started to use some of these words when I talk to academics. And, yes, I have had to and continue to consult the dictionary to remind myself what they mean. If you hear me say one of these in your presence, you have my permission to look at me sympathetically and then remind me to not be a jerk.

Three Hundred Seventy Seven

I moved to New York City a bit over a year ago just a couple Fridays past. You might think, then, that a post twelve days earlier and titled with a slightly smaller number would have been appropriate. I do not dispute you on this — though I would ask if your calculations properly accounted for the leap day this year. Unfortunately, on the actual day of this anniversary I spent most of my waking hours flying to California for a smartypants workshop; thus, I missed my New York Birthday (this is a thing here). I just got back to Brooklyn Sunday night, and every day between leaving and returning was full up with said workshop. When they said “intensive”, they weren't kidding. Classes begin next week, and I'm already working on two papers for submission to conferences. I shall now inhale and then exhale slowly, making lip flapping sounds in a slightly exhausted, sigh-like manner.

Looking back, this past year has been something of a constant tension in the experience of comfort and discomfort coming to a new equilibrium. At times, that tension has led to ridiculousness, to the delightful, to holiday warmth, and, of course, to sadness. Those who are becoming new friends here tell me that it takes most people a year or two to fully adjust and settle in. Some of these same people nearly gave up and went back home in that first year or two. While it's been tough at times, I've never entertained that thought. Still I get where they were in that time.

So what did I learn at this workshop? Perhaps the two most important things had nothing to do with the focus of the workshop itself. First of all, I came to see that there's a big difference between smart people and good thinkers. Smart people can be as wearisome as they are intelligent. Good thinkers, however, are as inspiring as they are bright. And so I've become aware that I don't want to be the sort of graduate student who just throws around big words; I want to be the sort of student who wrestles with big ideas and communicates them freely and plainly. Secondly, somewhere among using a communal bathroom, sleeping in a hot and humid dorm room, and riding a school bus to a museum I was reminded how much more powerful gratitude is than entitlement. I don't have any fancy titles, nor am I in a place of much status. I barely have any possessions. I'm certainly not making big money. And, yet, though I never envisioned myself at the place in life I now find myself, this is all a blessing.

I don't exactly know how many more days this path of present course will require of me. In all likelihood, at its conclusion, I may very well write another post referencing a number well over a thousand. And so I am asking myself what I will do with the coming days as I reflect upon the past three hundred seventy seven — merely count their passing or choose to see them as adventure and live them with thankfulness. Easy as it will be (and has been) to forget at times, I intend to do the latter.

If you're wondering why I attached a photo of a tutu-wearing hobo clown atop a California CVS Pharmacy entrance to this post, allow me to explain. I took the photo during my recent trip to California. And it's a tutu-wearing hobo clown on top of a CVS Pharmacy entrance. Did you miss that part?