This past month, specifically the past few weeks, has been rather busy for me. It’s the beginning of yet another quarter at RIT and I have an overwhelming feeling of relief. I decided to take on 20 credit hours last quarter. I did quite well (all A’s), but I don’t miss that feeling of always having some homework assignment, project, or paper looming over me.

This quarter I should have a lot more free time since I decided not to continue working as a grader. That said, I am going to spend this free time doing the numerous projects that I have wanted to finish up/start. I am really excited about this because I have been wanting to finish these projects up for quite some time. To start with, I have decided to work with a friend of mine, Heewa Barfchin, to start up a few new initiatives here at RIT.

There has been a lot of talk recently about the One Laptop Per Child project. After looking over the current state of the project, it is fairly evident that there is still an unmet need in the amount of software that has been ported to/created for it. There are a number of project ideas that I have related to this project, so Heewa and I decided to try to get the RIT CS department involved in OLPC. So far, we have a couple of professors interested in the project and now the ball is in our court. We plan to develop a fully-functional application by the end of the quarter that can be used as a “prototype” to showcase the potential of the project at RIT and potentially establish an OLPC lab at RIT.

Another idea stemmed from discussions with Heewa has brought light to a new club, the Society of Lectors. Check out our Google Groups page. Essentially the idea is to encourage collaborative education. It is impossible to learn every thing you need to know to be successful in your field by just going to your classes. A lot of my friends have specialties in a lot of different areas. Not only that, but sometimes I am not able to take a class on a topic I may be interested in. So, we decided to start a club that meets weekly and allows its members a venue to lecture one another on a topic of each individual’s choice. This society is not at all limited to RIT students. We encourage anyone to stop by and listen or to even give a presentation. Students, professors, industry professionals, researchers, community members, visitors to the area, etc. Our first meeting is this Wednesday. All the information on the meeting is available here.

In addition to all of that, I plan to develop a few individual software and hardware projects of my own. More on that will come as the ideas are further developed and realized. Though, I’ll mention one of them – I have an old wireless router and boombox that I plan to combine to make a portable wireless mp3 player.

Oh, one more thing – BarCampRochester3. If you don’t know what a BarCamp is, go check out the wiki. I agreed to help co-host the event this year at RIT (handling the finances and filling in wherever else). BarCamp is an excellent, unique opportunity to meet up with some cool people and discuss a large variety of topics. The idea is very similar to the Society of Lectors – a collaborative exchange of knowledge. Essentially it is a day full of presentations; the catch is you are not only an audience member, you are a participant. I’m really excited about this year’s BarCamp. The date is set for Saturday, April 5 10am until end in the Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences at RIT. Check out the wiki page for all the details. Hope to see you there!