Long weekends are great for catching up on items you should have dealt with long ago. Over a month ago I was invited to participate in a conference at Princeton. Invited meant all expeses paid, travel and hotel. I knew it was important when they sent a strech limo to fetch me at the airport and take me to the nobelis of hotels at Princeton.

The conference, Leading Change in Science and Technology, was geared towards Princeton Black Engineering and Science Alumni. I was invited to speak on a panel titled: Increasing Diversity: Academic and Coporate Resposnisbity. Everyone on my paenl had some link to Bell Labs, the meca of Science and Engineering research. Almost all the panelist were participants in the Bell Labs CRFP (Cooperative Research Fellowship Program), a fellowship program that paid for six years of graduate school. Another panelist and I had participated in the Bell Labs Summer Science Program in the 80s and early 90s. This program exposed minority middle and high school students to science and engineering through two week summer programs and 10-week summer internships.

My office just moved from Jack London Square to downtown Oakland, meaning that instead of driving, I take BART daily. Last night, while on the train, I read a really fascinating article entitled, "What Lessons Can Progressives Learn from Evangelicals?" (Zach Exley, In These Times, http://www.alternet.org/story/49376/)

Hey all, I stumbled upon this great organizing tool called Meeting Wizard, which does some of the hard work for you in terms of checking schedules to organize meetings. Given our tough, busy schedules, this website cuts down on some of that back-and-forth e-mailing to finalize a meeting date and location. Although, you'll still have to work to narrow down a date! And yes, it's free.

Check it out:

Well another day on the teaching job. It seems like new problems arise ever day but Today was quite interesting. I am currently working on a commercial production unit with my students and I am trying to use the opportunity to teach them about the power of advertising in their lives.

We have gone through several lessons and experiences to address this and today to cap it of a showed them a film called "The Ad and the Ego". In fairness I would say that this film is not a work of cinematic genius but it is a work of academic genius. And it was produced in part by Sut Jhally a professor of mine in school.

I was having some challenge today thinking about what to do with my advanced students. They are on the eve of their firstday of production on their short films. THis project is bigger than anything they have ever done and they have no idea how much it is gonna take.

So I was thinking today about what I could do to help get them in the right mind set for tomorrow. I have given them plenty of speeches. I have givin them the "don't disappont me speech" the "I set the bar speech", the "what do you care about", the "integrity speech", and the "if you fuck up again I am going to kick your ass to the curb".

Today I realized that I really like my job.

It took me a while to get to this position--and this mindset for that matter-- having worked almost a new job for every year I've been out of school. At last, I feel that I'm in a position that challenges me, forces me to develop greater skills, and gives me the opportunity to work with so many different people, both inside and outside of my organization.

Tonight, I e-mailed Diana my feedback on the website, a list of items for troubleshooting, and as she rightly pointed out, I didn't offer much positive feedback.

I had omitted one very important piece of feedback, the OTM website is beautiful! This is an incredible accomplishment for all of those involved in making this website a reality as well as for OTM. This website is a living, breathing example of the incredible growth of the OTM community and what it is capable of doing once it puts its mind to something. I'll be absolutely proud to point my non-Verger friends toward this site, as it demonstrates what we've been trying to say all this time about OTV and OTM, that it's such a gift as a community and here is this beautiful website that offers a piece of that OTV/OTM community feeling. It's absolutely needed. It is a fantastic piece of work.