Wow…I feel old…My blogging system thingy is telling me that this is my 100th entry…the time has gone by so fast. 100 entries in 5 months or so is roughly 20 entries per month. I’m happy with that, and hope that I can keep it up in the future. On such a monumental occasion, I better make this entry a good one.

So I lost an election yesterday…to a guy that wasn’t even there. I was running for my department’s graduate organization (GISA) Vice Prez of Professional Development. It’s not a huge deal, though in my speech before the vote I suggested that myself and the other guy share the position, since I don’t know a thing about the Bioinformatics profession, and he doesn’t know a thing about HCI. Then I left the room and I guess they decided that one Vice Prez is the limit for this job…I hate that kind of rigidness in organizations. (I should note that the reason I lost was because all of the other elected board members were in HCI, so they wanted to make sure to get a Bioinformatics person on the board) In the end it didn’t really matter if I won the position or not, because I’ll be active in the organization anyway (and perhaps not having an official title or duties will free my time to actually do projects that interest me), but why can’t an organization bend and break rules that hold it back? I think people need to be open to creative thought and not let silly things like titles get in the way (especially in an organization that is very, very young with members who have next to zero collective experience in major organizations).

Ok, enough ranting…I’m generally much more positive than this. How about creating a list of GISA goals for the year:

• Start a local SIG CHI chapter (and perhaps spread into one for the greater Indianapolis area)
• Get food & drinking fountain in the Informatics Building
• Raise funds!
• Start an alumni database/website
• Help Erik start a Friday afternoon colloquia series
• Make & Sell T-shirts
• Connect GISA and Iota Nu Phi, the National Informatics Honors Society that I cofounded 😉
• I’m sure there are millions of other things to do…and I’ll be there to help out, most definitely…