2657 Productions News

While Amy and I were at the TATA-Dhan Academy wandering around, we ran across this wild turkey. Yummy. But they are all veg people at the academy…. Oh well….

So, it has been a pretty busy month for me, and as such I haven’t really written much here. I just finished another class (Integrating Educational Technology in the Classroom) and jumped straight into another (Standards-Based Curriculum and Instruction), installed MediaWiki on the IFMR server and put up some articles to start the “content” base, and all the other random stuff that goes on….

Another Thanksgiving abroad. So far, I’ve had Thanksgiving in Vietnam (in Hanoi—they even tracked down turkeys for us and cooked a special meal), China (in Jinan—tried to find turkey, but settled for Peking Duck instead) and now, India. Since we don’t have a real oven, and since cooking here is pretty annoying anyway, Amy and I decided to go to one of the fancy hotels that had advertised a Thanksgiving dinner. A nice costly Rs. 1,000 (~ $20) per head bought you an all-you-can-eat buffet.

At the table, Amy and I were accompanied by Vidhya (Amy’s good friend from Harvard), Davina (one of the French ladies here who heads one of the IFMR centres—also Amy’s first Indian roommate), Eddie (a cool guy who works with Davina), and Nick (a friend of Eddie’s). And the table was pretty much constantly piled with food. Turkey, rosemary chicken, duck breast, lamb-chops, made-to-order pizzas…. So, we pigged out.

After all, for the past couple of weeks, Amy and I have returned to the hamster lifestyle, running around on treadmills or frantically spinning our legs around on elliptical machines—at least three or four times per week….

During my first week back to working out, I decided to do weights one day—upper body—and had an embarrassingly sore two days following my workout where I could barely move my arms. I’ve always know my upper body to be considerably weaker than my lower body, but this was a pretty uncomfortable experience. There is one trainer at the gym who is actually really good though, so, perhaps one day, I might be able to do more than five push-ups in a row….

Chennai has been fine. Pretty uneventful, honestly. I’m getting ready to start a really cool project—a second-round of the map of microfinance project that I did earlier this year. This time around, I hope to have everything linked to an online database to make the information much more usable than it was the first time around.

The first time around, it was a mass of Excel spreadsheets which were somewhat organized, but would have been much better as a database of some sort—even if it were just an Access database. A colleague actually had to physically go to the MFIs and collect the data, which he then entered into a spreadsheet, and gave to me to figure out some way of displaying it on the web. My main issue was how static the presentation was—any data change resulted in my having to change the maps in Photoshop and then make changes on the web-page as well.

This time, what I hope to do is use PHPSurveyor to develop a self-reporting web-form for the MFIs to use. The form will include branching questions, so for example, it will ask them to report on one state of operation, and the final question would be something like “Are you operating in any other states?” If the answer is “Yes” they will be presented with another data entry screen and so on…. This information itself is all stored in a MySQL database, so I can use PHP to retrieve the data and have it dynamically updated on the website. That way, we don’t need to wait until all responses are available before we can start our presentation.

Furthermore, I hope to convert all our maps to SVGs (scalable vector graphics) and have the maps be fed data either from an XML file or using PHP again. Perhaps, for example, I can set my fill-colors to be based on certain data ranges which can be read dynamically from the database.

Then again, perhaps this is all way over my head.