Electron Hut: Kyle Bedell’s Blog

Identity. Let’s say your name is Bob Smith. If for whatever reason you couldn’t be called Bob Smith tomorrow, would you care? How much of our internal identity is tied to our name? If you’re not “Bob Smith,” who are you?

I don’t always have access to my WordPress dashboard whenever I have an idea for a blog post, so I tend to rely on my tablet (which is always two feet away from me) and Microsoft’s awesome OneNote 2007 application to tag any cool thoughts or ideas that come into my head. As far as digital notebook applications go, OneNote is hard to beat. It support various levels of navigation; you can have any number of notebooks, each with its own set of folders/tabs; each of those can have any number of pages and subpages. It handles just about every content type under the sun, as you can embed audio recordings and files into your notes, and most documents support being inserted as a ‘printout’ so you can write directly on your PowerPoint slides or what have you. You can also use the built-in clipping tool to grab screencaptures of specific applications or parts of a web site, something I do often.

You might have also noticed that I occasionally post entries in ink. While my setup using Windows Live Writer and the ink plug-in isn’t quite as robust as Sumocat’s build 51 implementation (which supports making inked words into links),I think it makes for a nice change of pace from the massive amounts of text (and the occasional image). I think ink adds a more personal touch to posts, even if my handwriting is terrible!

Some other cool tools I’ve found include InkSeine, a Microsoft Research prototype geared towards searching(and organizing the results) with ink alone, the Physics Simulator (included in the Microsoft Tablet PC Experience Pack), and Crayon Physics, a puzzle/physics game that’s more-or-less perfectly suited to the input methods on a tablet.

Yay! Katt and I just got approved for our first apartment down at Charlesbank!

When I in the middle of the college application process in high school, I knew I wanted to do something that involved either or both of the following:

• Working with people
• Working with consumer electronics products

I thought about going to school for psychology…until I realized that there was the whole problem of having to go for a doctorate if I really wanted to be a psychologist. How does one pay the bills in the interm? I told myself “Self, I’ll be damned if I end up being the ‘computer guy’ for the rest of my life,” so initially, I swore off going to school for any sort of computer science program. I settled on Bentley with the idea in my head that I would go for marketing. This was after seeing a particularly awesome class on product prototyping (with popcorn!) during an open house. I had planned on getting a minor in something like food science, then going off and doing research and development somewhere in the food industry. Science! Food! Products! People! What could be better?

Then I was informed, during a CIS information session of all things, that getting there required a decade or two’s worth of climbing up the corporate ladder (in sales! Noooo!). All of the recent CIS majors there had converted from marketing, and a quick survey of salary information said that marketing was probably not the direction I wanted to head in. I switched to Computer Information Systems soon after, though I ‘kept in touch’ with my love of the social sciences and people in general through lots of philosophy and sociology courses. (for electives).

I noticed throughout my undergraduate education that I enjoyed low-level hardware stuff the most. My favorite classes in the undergraduate CIS program were Irv Englander’s CS240 course (Business Processing and Communications Infrastructure) and David Yates‘ CS440 (Advanced Net-Centric Computing). While the other classes were informative (and I’m happy I know all about database backends and programming), I just didn’t get the same kick out of them that I did with my electives or the “nitty-gritty” CS classes. I figured out that while what you can do with a technology is important, I was happier learning and focusing on the technology itself. “Nevermind that this particular handheld has a GPS and navigation software built in; what I want to know is what’s running under the hood? How powerful is this GPS chipset compared to others? Is there a better technical solution?” It’s with the rare devices that I pick up that manage to impress me not only with their usefulness, but with their technical specifications as well, that I love the most. I know that sounds backwards, but that’s how my brain operates. I look for technical superiority first and then examine the ‘applications’.

But I digress. Around this time last year (Feb. 2007), I more-or-less realized that I didn’t want to program or do database work at all. This left me in sort of a pickle; how do I leverage my love of technology with my love of people? I like to dabble in all sorts of fields too, so I asked myself “How can I interact in as many fields as possible in a particular job?”

Human Factors was my answer. I had to go to graduate school to get a degree in it (and it’s been tough so far!), but I had found the major that combined everything I loved to do.

• I get to work with people all the time (users, clients, all sorts of folks).
• I get to dabble in tons of different fields, and I need to learn something about all of them to work successfully with a client. One week I can be working on medical devices, the next a website for a game development company. Maybe a telephone or some specialty accounting software the next week. There’s a lot of variety here, and I think that’s what appealed to me more than anything else.
• It’s part marketing, part psychology, and part technology. Evaluating and improving product and website designs from a user-centric perspective requires a passion for all of these things. I’ve always thought of myself as something of a renaissance man, so what better way to “do everything” than to work with people from all walks of life?

Does the walker choose the path, or does the path choose the walker? Either way, I certainly am excited about where this path is taking me!