Updates and yet more updates ...

Some rather unfortunate things have been happening in my life, things that just happen because the are bound to happen sometime, like losing my father.  I'm reminded of the good things and that life will just continue.  In one of his more salient and conscious moments he said to me, as I was pondering my pending trip to Edinburgh, to continue my PhD research and “Go and get the damn thing done!”

I did that, returned, and shortly afterwards he passed away.

I'm going to keep that sentiment going, roll up my sleeves now, and get back at the things that count--both professionally and personally.  Here's my professional list and in no particular order:

1. Green Turtle needs to evolve and I think JSON-LD is the right thing to consider.  I think marrying the RDFa API and JSON-LD would be fantastic.  I already have an internal data structure that could easily be adapted to be JSON-LD.
2. I have a new project out there that is a repository for my experiments in local services that use RDFa.  I'm submitting a paper to XML Prague 2013 that is all about this technique and the derived services.
3. I have another paper in the works for the WWW 2013 that details a technique for using RDFa for geospatial tabular data.  It is all about my actual PhD research on spatial scientific data on the Web.  The deadline for that is the same as XML Prague. :(
4. Of course, there is my actual PhD research at the University of Edinburgh .  How does one properly evaluate "good" and "better" without getting mired in the politics of any particular science or government agency?  I have the technology and solutions to identified problems but I need a good set of evaluations.  I have work to do there but I do think I know what I need to do.  I suppose that is good.  I wonder how much more gray my hair will get surviving this process?
5. The straw man for my research is geospatial weather station data.  I've been geeking out on Internet-connected weather stations and, as the price of the weather station drops, the cost of the data loggers that put the sensor readings out onto various mesonets does not drop.  They are way too expensive for what they are and so I need roll up my sleeves and fix that.  I have a raspberry pi board sitting on my desk Waiting for Godot.  I need to put that to use and make a data logger out of it.
6. Being a science geek and someone who believes we can do a better job of teaching science to children, I want to put those weather stations to work here in San Francisco.  One weather station at every SFUSD public school would cover the city quite nicely.  That would give the schools and US National Weather Service a lot of good real-time data.  The next trick is to get someone at the Center for Science and Mathematics Education at SFSU to do a masters project on creating easy-to-use curriculum for K-12.
7. Not last and not least, there is XProc 2/+/3/π/NG/... (whatever we're going to call it) that needs to happen.  I use XProc all the time and it needs to move forward.  I'm suppose to be editing several documents right now .

And there is some sleeping, eating, children, their homework, etc. thrown in there too.