I owe a lot of updates to you all. Here’s the quick list:

My Washington-New York City-Baltimore trip went well, but was very tiring and I’m afraid it brought some serious illness with it. After being laid up for a weekend, I started to catch up on everything in time to fly to Upstate New York for an interview at SUNY Brockport. That went well, and I will definitely consider it if they offer.

I flew home on Saturday, it’s now Monday, and I fly out to present at SITE tomorrow. Yeah, busy.

The report of the National Research Council evaluation of Title VI and Fulbright-Hays (part of the Higher Education Act) will be released tomorrow. I participated as a “data analysis consultant,” and I’m cited in Chapter 11 (or I was in the last version I proofed). For those interested, the public hearing will be webcast (details).

The enormity of working on that project for me cannot be overstated. It was fortuitous that they contacted me, and it led to my invitation to speak at the U.S. Department of Education IEPS workshop last month (part of the abovementioned tour). I met some truly influential people, ate some wonderful food, and gained more in knowledge and experience than I did in money (though they paid me well).

This summer will be a busy time for us. I knew I was heading off to interview at the University of North Texas on May 8, and I knew that the SSRC was trying to contact me. I thought the SSRC wanted to talk about the appendix I wrote for their National Research Center report, which was on the limitations of the EELIAS database. What I didn’t know was that the SSRC wanted talk about continuing my consulting work with them, and referring me to another research group.

So, in the matter of two days, I added trips to D.C. May 17-19, New York June 2-3, and Woods Hole, MA, sometime in July. I’ve already contacted a old Arclite friend, Brant, in D.C., and extended my stay in New York by a few days (June 1-7), to spend some time with my parents. Brooke and the kids will be flying out around the same time, so we’ll hang out together. We thought about going to a Yankees game in New York, but they’re playing the Red Sox, so the cheapest tickets left are $40.

On campus, I’ll be finishing up my last project and defending my prospectus, while working for the NMELRC. My work there will include evaluating the current state of Arabic Without Walls and porting Dr. Dil Parkinson’s ArabiCorpus to Hebrew.

With the rolling over of the site, I guess I need to give an update of what I’m doing for employment.

During the Summer, I work full-part-time (40 hrs/wk) as a measurement specialist for the National Middle East Language Resource Center (NMELRC) where I fight a constant battle to nurse data out of complex data sets and draw conclusions that are both statistically and practically significant. For example, I currently have access to a HUGE database from the department of education. We had been hoping it would answer several lingering questions, but after we ran the preliminary data we had extracted by someone familiar with the real numbers, we were told they could not assure the accuracy of the data.

One great part of this job was that, after an argument with the department secretary, we decided to put me on contract so as to bypass her (all time cards had to go through her).

During the school year, I cut my hours at the NMELRC to 10 and work the rest of the time teaching Technology for Educators. Basically, this is a teacher ed course where we show teaching majors how to properly integrate technology into their classroom teaching. There is plenty of importance there, and my dissertation will focus on measuring changes in the students attitudes.

Further I do some freelance work developing measures and instruments for other grants. That is the primary source for my bike fund.

For the moment, I work as the technical director of the National Security Education Program Language Project at Brigham Young University. I do everything from administer a Windows 2000 domain and Linux servers to design pedagogy.

I’ve been working here under the direction of Dr. Bush, and with my project manager, Margaret, for the last year and a half. It’s been very rewarding and I’ve gain valuable experience in my field.

Specifically, here are the technologies I use:

Systems Administration:
Windows 2000/XP workstations with Active Directory
Windows 2000 Server with IIS
Apple Macintosh OS X workstations
SuSE Linux server and workstation
Debian Linux server

Programming/Markup Languages:
VB
HTML
JavaScript
CSS
ASP
XML
PHP
SQL
Perl
Regular Expression
Java

Specific Packages:
MS Office
OpenOffice
Flash
Spruce DVD Maestro
QuickTime
Cleaner
After Effects
MySQL
Apache
Samba