I’ve been living and working in the Twin Cities as a summer intern for the super cool Kidblog folks (more on that later) and never got around to “officially” letting the world know. I’d hoped to catch up with some of the many friends, alum, etc., that live in this part of the world, and while some of that has happened, I now only have about 2.5 weeks left and realize how many connections I haven’t made. This is mostly because my job is cool and I really dig it (all of which is good), but I would like to connect with folks while I’m still here.

So, if you live in the area and would like to do coffee or dinner or something before I bug out, let me know! I probably respond best (at the moment) to e-mail (mcphee@morris.…) or Twitter (@NicMcPhee), but I’ll try to track my Facebook account as well.

Speaking of which, apologies to all my Facebook peeps. I really hate FB in a lot of ways and am happy to take any excuse to ignore it. The fun of work and other obligations meant I pretty much checked out of FB from late May until now, only to find that people’s lives have gone on without me! Wow. Thanks a ton for all the kind birthday wishes, etc., and sorry if you’ve been wondering why I’ve been ignoring you.

While our son was growing up, though, the idea of spending a summer away from my family really didn’t appeal. He’s now graduated from high school and is off in the world, so this has become a fairly realistic option. Consequently I’m talking to various friends, alums, and industry types in an effort to identify plausible opportunities.

I’m pretty flexible on this, but I’m definitely interested in doing development rather than R&D (the activity that my degrees and experience would tend to suggest). I’d probably prefer to be a member of an agile team rather than working primarily solo on a task. It would also be important that the job really just be a summer gig; my job here is more than enough to keep me busy, so I’m not looking for something that will bleed into the school year.

Anyone out there know of any opportunities that might make sense? Feel free to leave a comment or contact me directly (mcphee AT morris DOT umn DOT edu).

Many thanks!

P.S. In case you stumble here and have no idea who I am, a very brief synopsis: I’ve been programming since the late 70’s, and teaching computer science here at the University of Minnesota, Morris, since 1991. I have lots of experience with Java, also quite a lot of Ruby, Python, and Groovy. I’m useful with JavaScript and Grails, and have experience with Rails but it’s a little rusty. I was once quite competent at C and then C++, but haven’t used either in years. Most of my dissertation work (mid- to late- 80’s) was in Common LISP; more recently I’ve been teaching Scheme and Racket a lot, and also have some experience with Clojure, Erlang, and Haskell. I learn new languages, tools, and systems pretty quickly, as that is often required in my job. My primary research area has been evolutionary computation (EC), and I’ve led or assisted in the design and implementation of numerous EC systems over the years. I’m experienced in experimental design, data collection, and statistical analysis and data visualization. I’m an experienced writer and public speaker; my research is heavily cited and has won several best paper awards.

Tuesday we saw James T. Wilson, a two person show including Stanton Pavlicek in the title role. We know Stanton and his family from Morris (his dad was a huge help in building an enormous frame to hold up our gargantuan honeysuckle vine), and it was cool to see two 18-year olds just out of high school in this setting. The show itself was still struggling to become, and while there was a of potential, it’ll need some more work to realize that possibility.

Thursday we saw Speech!, an absolutely hilarious comedy about the goofy (and often twisted) world of high school speech competitions. The writing and performances were tres sharp, and the audience was rolling in the aisles from the start to finish. This show has received a number of well deserved nominations, including a best male performance for our friend and UMM alum Tim Hellendrung! Tim’s did lots of cool improv back at UMM (as well as being an excellent manager for the campus radio station), and has continued to develop at Comedy Sports in Minneapolis. It was great to see him do such a fine job in a great ensemble production like this. Big congratulations to Tim and the entire cast and crew!

Last night (Friday) we saw what will sadly be our last show, because we head back to Morris this afternoon so Tom can hang with his friends some before we come back to the Cities Sunday night. We went out with a bang, though, catching the amazing O(h) by casebolt and smith, a two person show unlike any dance performance I’ve ever seen before. They combined some great dance with liberal splashes of spoken word and singing, providing a rich piece of performance than transcended any simple notion of genre. There was wonderful (often comedic) commentary on both culture in general and dance in particular, creating a really fun experience that was also chock full of food for thought. They also received a number of nominations, and our group (two straight guys and a woman) all agree that a sweaty Joel Smith in Superman briefs is hot!

There’s a great section in this performance about intellectual property that inspired a long enough commentary that I’ve moved to it’s own post. It’s not often in my experience that a dance performance explicitly opens these kinds of doors, so check it out.

The May, 2010, issue of the Communications of the ACM (CACM – the flagship magazine of the ACM) features a photograph of UMM CSci alum Tyler Hutchison presenting research work done with Andy Korth and Nic McPhee at MICS 2007. The article is “Student and Faculty Attitudes and Beliefs About Computer Science”. Andy and Tyler won the best student paper award at that year’s MICS for their paper “On the impact of geography and local mating in evolutionary computation”. The photo (taken by me during Tyler and Andy’s joint MICS presentation) features some of Tyler’s artwork illustrating the material.

The graphics folks at CACM found my photo on Flickr, and contacted me via Flickr offering to pay me a small fee if I’d be willing to let them use it. I happily said "Yes", and the rest is history.

As well as being a cool computer-science-type, Tyler is also a cool comic-art-type, and did the nifty drawings for the cover of our book "A field guide to genetic programming".

Happy, happy, happy.

But I’m easily amused :-).

In fairness, this could well be the one and only time I ever get published in CACM. I’m not all that likely to submit an article to them (in part because I don’t tend to write things they might want), so this could easily be the pinnacle of my career in terms of the number of people in my field seeing my work.

Weird.

But cool.

The joy of programming is taking a crappy piece of code, full of hacks and bad practices, and rewriting it to be better in every way. — LynnKale

for a moment I couldn’t think of a word for “thing to tell me how to do other things,” googled ‘how to’ and figured the word (documentation) — _eli

It’s gems like this that make my day. Both authors are UMM CSci alum, now off doing cool stuff. It’s neat to be able to stay in touch on-line.