Correspondence/Harding 05-23-2024

To Tucker Harding 5/23/2024:

Hi Tucker,

     I've been bothered by drowsiness that makes it hard to read well. That's a problem of fatigue, which has arisen, I think, because I've got too many projects in mind and have not prioritized well among them. That's a good definition of getting old — a person slowly becomes incapacitated by an accumulation of unfinished projects. It's a prolonged start and stop cycle, full of big ideas and then finding too little drive to push on with them as soon as I see what carrying them through will entail. But I don't give up on it and if I rest a little, restart it, or another of the unfinished schemes. I look for ways to combine them — working of this just so will also move that ahead. Often the combination then just becomes a third separate one. Probably, I must exert more discipline and finish one thing before starting another, but at this age that's a hard trick to learn.

Lately, I've become fascinated in how the websites of major universities are developing. Columbia is an example, although an even better one is Princeton.edu. I think it is an unplanned long-term effect of Covid, but the sites are ceasing to simply publicize the institutions and provide key services within it to becoming another locus of the university as a whole, like the campus itself, the place where what happens at the university happens on and through its website. I'm amazed at how much of the Princeton site is open and accessible to anyone. I'm beginning to rethink A Place to Study as a kind of personal wiki designed to help a person plug into these larger sites and the collections of resources through libraries, museums, etc. When my thinking here is a little less fuzzy, I'll contact Mark Philipson. There is a Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton which I will try to connect to during the summer.

Here at Windrows, I'm back on its technology committee, swinging between manic and depressive mode. It wants to bring technology practices here out it its current 1950ish state into the 21st century. Unfortunately, the chair and most of the members are stuck in the technology options of 1980 to 1990. I should probably let it all go. There's too much more going on, but I should not try to say anything as my intentions towards it are much up in the air.

If in your explorations of the employment markets you need any supporting recommendations, let me know. I'd be glad to be helpful!

Regards,

\Robbie