Quick Update

Life is definitely getting busier in Denmark.

Leysia is absolutely swamped with stuff to do. She's been writing papers, writing grant proposals, and participating in some very active research projects here at Aarhus. Things would be manageable for her if it wasn't for the fact that she submitted a very large grant proposal related to the use of communication technologies in disaster situations to the National Science Foundation (NSF) just before we left for Denmark and now Hurricane Katrina has happened and so she's trying to monitor that situation from afar, getting as much information as she can to help her research.

My work at the University if also picking up. I've been getting up to speed on a networking technology called "Peer-To-Peer" to study its use in creating flexible software architectures that can be used to debug highly distributed systems, especially systems that span a range of hardware from traditional servers to mobile phones to small sensors. I'm also looking at the issues surrounding context-aware hypermedia and what it means to monitor a person's work at a computer workstation to attempt to establish their "digital context". Traditional context-aware hypermedia has only looked at a person's location and the time of day and now we're interested in expanding the notion of "context" to include what tasks they are performing on their computing devices, where "device" could be anything from a cell phone, a tablet, a laptop, or a traditional desktop computer.

In addition, I have started attending another Danish language class that meets once a week on Thursdays in the afternoon. (Yesterday was the first class.) Its an intermediate level class that is MUCH harder than the three-week introductory class that I took back in August. But, I'm going to stick with it and see what I can learn. The class was pretty much conducted entirely in Danish, so I spent a lot of the first class with a confused look on my face, but I was generally following the conversation and the teacher encouraged me to stay in the class.

Finally, just to make things interesting, both kids decided to get sick this past Sunday with coughs and runny noses! :-( I stayed home with the kids on Monday and Tuesday to help them rest and, fortunately, they were ready to go back to school on Wednesday.

I've got to bring this entry to a close, but here's a recent picture of me with the kids to hold you over until next time! The picture was taken at Legoland which we visited this past weekend. And, yes, that construction of Copenhagen's harbor behind us is indeed done all in Lego Bricks! (Note: Lilja would have had a better smile but she was busy saying "Cheese" at the time the picture was snapped!)



Enjoy!

Ken