Day 43 - Seminar Prep and Feedback

I spent part of the morning preparing my faculty development workshop materials. I'm going to do a series of three workshops before I leave. One will be on information and cyber warfare, one on IPv6, and I think the third one will be on establishing a student ACM chapter at NMAA. By the way, did you realize that we're going to run out of IPv4 addresses some time in 2011? Of course NAT will keep us going for a while, but I think it's finally time that we take IPv6 transition seriously. No offense intended to anyone that has already been taking it seriously, unfortunately, most of us haven't been.

I attended another feedback session with the CompSci faculty and students. This time we met with the NMAA Juniors. They are all taking networks and Java programming right now. I think I mentioned this before, but they start the whole session by reading the names of the failing cadets. Interesting approach. The NMAA Dean (BGen Hamdallah) was there with us today. He was upset that not all the Junior CS majors attended, and basically threatened to punish those that didn't come. They are reasonably strict, and very direct about some things. I noticed also that he was handed an attendance list on the way out, which I have no doubt he'll follow up on. I'm glad I was there ...

I got some good news today from the ACM. They've been negotiating with the Ministry of Culture already, and plan to have a deeply discounted access rate for the digital library in place by the end of the year. It looks like the US CDRF (Civlian Development and Research Foundation) is going to cover nationwide access for the first year to two. They did this in Iraq, and it got the ball rolling. I also worked a way with them to stand up a student chapter here for a much more reasonable cost than I had thought. I'm planning to be the faculty sponsor since I already pay annual dues for the ACM, so we should be able to get things going in the next week or two.

Our planned softball session with the cadets was postponed today until tomorrow. I'll try and get some pictures if possible. Like I said, we're working hard to ween them off cricket...