2014-09-16: A long and tortuous trail to a PhD
(or how I learned to embrace the new) I am reaching the end of this part of my professional, academic, and personal life. It is time to reflect and consider how I got here. The trail ahead. When I started, I thought that I knew the path, the direction, and the work that it would take. I was wrong. The path was rugged, steep, and covered with roots and stones that lay in wait to trip the unwary. The direction was not straight forward. At times I wasn't sure how to set my compass, and which way to steer. In the end, there was more work than I thought in the beginning. But the end is nigh. The path has been long. At times the was direction confusing. The work seemed never ending. This is a story of how I got to the end, using a little help from "a friend" at the end of this post. Bringing the initially disparate disciplines of graph theory, digital preservation, and emergent behavior together to solve a particular...