david giesberg dot com

Why should UT students care about social technologies? I got suckered into volunteered to get involved in UTweet, this post stems from our first discussion about the organization and our goals for it.

Archana and I met this weekend at Austin Java to talk about UTweet and the state of social technologies at the University of Texas. I think that in general, students at UT are fairly clued into technology and social networking - you can’t walk around without seeing people on laptops, using cell phones, or listening to MP3 players. You’ll see people on Myspace or Facebook with totally blinged out profiles (which is cool with me, if that’s what trips your trigger - just don’t slap me with a large trout or whatever). Both of those sites are, in my opinion, fantastic for maintaining person-to-person connections, but are not very good for facilitating dialogues in an easy way or enhancing true communications with one another.

I believe that we (UTweet) can help show the UT community the strength of new and emerging social technologies as tools for helping us do the stuff we do every day more effectively. Social and general web technologies and services can help us connect with each other, as individuals, teammates, peers, organizations, and the community as a whole.

We polled community members and alumni via Twitter on why students should care about social technologies like Twitter, here are some of the responses:

	hayesdavis @davidgiesberg i agree. i get value from twitter in the form of real-world connections. facebook, et al aren’t meeting their potential. 05:23 PM June 29, 2008 from web in reply to davidgiesberg
	conniereece @davidgiesberg Students should care because these are now business tools and they need to learn how businesses use them. (my short answer :) 03:38 PM June 29, 2008 from web in reply to davidgiesberg

I think Hayes and Connie hit it on the head - this stuff has moved from being a way to connect to people you already know and maintain those connections to a way for us to conduct business and make more worthwhile connections with people that we might not otherwise have a chance to. Twitter is a fantastic example of a tool with a low barrier to entry for staying connected with people on a day-to-day basis and connect with people in a way that we could not before.

The way I see it, we can help show UT how to use these cool technologies and make the UT community just a little bit tighter and a little bit better connected.

Hook ‘em Horns!

Picture courtesy of flickr user mr3wan.

Wow! I spent yesterday at the very first Innovation Camp, which was held here in Austin. It was a great gathering of people that “want to learn about innovation by doing it rather than listening.” I got to meet a number of techies, entrepreneurs, startup folks from Austin and the surrounding communities. The best way to describe the sort of people who were there would be to say that they are the folks that want to take their businesses, projects, or communities in unconventional directions - forward-looking thinkers.

It was an ad-hoc style conference (based off of the BarCamp concept) where there were no set-in stone panels speaking at the attendees; instead, there were sessions set up with loose topics and voted on by the attendees with free discussion and debate. It was a very egalitarian setting in which everyone was encouraged to participate and argue debate about a very wide range of topics with the common thread of changing the way things are done in our community.

Here are a couple of the discussions that I participated in along with a few of my thoughts (stay tuned this week as I go into more depth on some of these discussions):

• Co-working in Bryan/College Station, TX
  The guys from The Creative Space were there to discuss their experiences as the first co-working space in Texas - very interesting discussion about the different issues and approaches that a group encounters going from an informal group of independents working together to a group with common business interests and a shared space. Here is an interview with Cody Marx Bailey, one of the founders of The Creative Space.
• The University of Texas ACTLab
  The ACTLab is a group folks at UT doing a whole lot of creative and innovative projects centered around doing, not standard educational regurgitation. Their enthusiasm was infectious and inspiring to everyone there - they are building the sorts of free-thinkers that we can always use more of in the world…
• Austin as an Emerald City
  Everyone has different ideas about why Austin kicks ass, we wanted to find a shared vision for what we can do as Austinites going into the future
• Co-company Case Study
  The guys from Conjunctured had a great discussion about how they are developing the co-company concept - taking a group of independent creative workers and allowing them to maintain a great deal of autonomy while still having the resources of a larger brand to depend on
• The Austin Startup District
  Dane led a discussion about his and John Erik Metcalf’s vision for building a cohesive environment and community for independent entrepreneurs and startups here in Austin. It was a very thought-provoking view of how enterprising millienials in Austin want to change how the startup game is played as we enter and take the the reigns in the community and business worlds

So, I’ve gotten tired with the present look of the website and I am looking to go back to something a cleaner and faster (longtime readers will recall the old look of this site). I am presently playing with blogtxt - a very fast, fully W3C compliant theme, and I think this might be the one. Here is a screenshot (click for a bigger view) of what it looks like right now:

Check it out, let me know what you think of it…

I’m a month and a half into my summer internship doing QA (Quality Assurance) for AMD in Austin and I have already learned several big things (and confirmed others) that should serve me quite well for some time to come…

• I hate commuting! - What better way to feel like a mouse in the exercise wheel than to spend an hour+ everyday doing the same stop and go shuffle with thousands of other people? To expand on that a little more: In the last several years, going to school and work for me has never involved driving more than 3-4 miles each way, at most, and with my current internship, I’m doing about 17 miles through the heart of the city.
• I enjoy working with people - A great deal of the time I spend in my job is doing head-down engineering/testing; I spend a great deal of my day just sitting in my cube running through tests and identifying bugs. I do not spend much time interacting with other people or working collaboratively, which is something that I need more than I would have suspected in the past.
• Cubicles are not interesting - But you knew that already, didn’t you? And just to make sure that they stay this way, the powers-that-be have stated that “Changing the look of your cube also affects the consistency and professionalism of the cube area and can negatively affect sound management.” Which basically means that I can’t do this.
• I’m not made for this sort of work - Most jobs can be classified into two categories (pardon the computer engineer-speak) interrupt-driven and non-interrupt-driven; interrupt-driven means that the workload is driven by external forces on a task-basis (”Hey, I need you to test this product” or “Welcome to McDonald’s, how can I help you?” where the tasks are very similar day-to-day) as opposed to being driven at a macro-level (”Build a tool or program that will do this” or “I need a design for a skyscraper, do it!” where each project will vary and will have multiple milestones). The work I am doing at present, is driven by other teams, and we don’t get to see the big picture - just the micro one, something that I have a hard time dealing with. I can’t handle a grind like that, I need to be working towards an end - not flipping hamburgers as each customer comes in.

All of these things are going to be filed away in my mind as I continue to keep my ear to the ground for future job opportunities, hopefully I’ll find the right job.

This is an excerpt from a guest post I wrote for GenPink as a part of their Twenty-Something Advice Series:

People spend a lot of time worrying about getting things done and maximizing productivity, but more important than just maximizing productivity is what your goals are when you start off on down that road. Don’t use all of the time that you free up to load yourself down with more things to do, that’s a recipe for burnout.  I’m not sure if it is an engineering student thing to do, or what, but I have a tendency to let homework (and a lot of other work) expand into whatever space and time I have. Make sure to factor in free time into your schedule (whether that schedule is written down or just your game plan for the day), you need to use that time to eat, sleep, watch TV, spend time with loved ones, whatever it is that you need to make time for, the stuff that really matters.

To read the rest of this post, check it out on GenPink - a blog from another Brazen Careerist blogger, writing about life as a twenty-something woman.