Well, another semester has begun at the School of Information, and so I figured I'd share my latest classes and books.

As of now, I've boiled my classes down to the following:

• Mixing and Remixing Information
• Interface Aesthetics
• Social and Organizational Issues of Information
• Strategic Computing and Communications Technology
• Information Law and Policy
• Cyberlaw

And somehow, I only had to buy three books and four readers this semester, for a total of $315. Somehow, this is more than last semester when I had five books and four readers. Oh well. The books from this semester are:

• Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy
• Software and Internet Law
• Pro Web 2.0 Mashups

So far, classes are going well, but at least one of them will need to get cut. It's going to be hard to decide, but luckily I don't have to for another few months.

This semester for my Computer-Mediated Communication class I had the opportunity to work with a couple of guys on a project aimed at solving a problem that we have in our society. While perhaps not the greatest problem, the one we identified was how to choose music in a public location that maximally pleases the maximum number of people, and further, how to encourage real-world interaction among and between those people. In other words, how to choose good music, and how to get people to talk to each other rather than bury their nose in their computer.

To long-term readers of this blog, this may sound familiar, as I proposed the idea of a democratic music jukebox a while ago.

All in all, the project went quite well. It was a great team, and we were able to write several papers explaining how such a system would work, and what kinds of problems it would solve. We weren't able to really make the system, however we were able to create a wireframe mockup which should give you some idea of what we had in mind.

For those interested in the idea, I've attached our final paper and poster presentation to this blog entry. The poster itself is a bit cut up so it could be pasted together on poster board. Apologies for that.

Well, we got back from Peru on Sunday (pictures forthcoming), and today was my last day at work with the Community Services Bureau of Contra Costa County.

I've never worked somewhere for so long - all in all, it was about three years, during which time I progressed from Temp Clerk to Intermediate Clerk to Assistant Manager. You do gotta love working in government.

In a way, I've been planning on quitting since about December of 2006, when I first applied to go back to school. Now that it's a year and a half later, I'm surprised I'm not more excited or elated about this change. It's possible it hasn't sunk in yet because I have been on vacation for the past two weeks (and am used to not going to work), but ultimately, I feel pretty normal, which is odd.

Tomorrow is the first day of school at the Berkeley School of Information. I've got my classes all set up, and I'm shocked at exactly how awesome the classes are.

Here's the official list as of now:

• Information Organization and Retrieval
• Distributing Computing Applications and Infrastructure
• Politics of Piracy
• Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation
• Computer Mediated Communication
• Photovoltaic Materials: Modern Technologies
• Metrics of Sustainability

A lot of classes, eh? It's 20 units as of now, so I am definitely going to drop a number of them. It's going to be hard to decide which to drop though. It's a three-way split between classes offered through Haas school of business, the Energy and Resources Group and the iSchool. I guess we'll see which float to the top.