Yesterday I had a second calendar party. and were able to make it. Here’s what I learned:
– Last time, my goal was to ask people to enter everything, so I’d have a digital form of all the calendar information. This was turgid and difficult. Now I ask them to enter sparse notes as a guideline to Isaac’s life. This was much more successful. In fact, there was a tendency to enter more than I asked for, which I know will be a help later on.
– There are more patterns to be gleaned from Isaac’s calendar entries than I’d thought. For example, he wrote down all the times he had to do laundry. This tells me something about Isaac’s mental state, attitude, and organization. (No, I didn’t ask them to enter all those times in a computer! It’s an observation that will be useful later on in the research process.)
– Although we got a lot of work done, it’s clear I could use more “social capital” (as puts it) to get the overall task done. She kindly offered me her own social capital; she’ll see if she can some of her friends together to help me. All it will cost me is the cost of feeding them, and a geek gift. (I’ll see if I convince them to let me give them a pizza peel.)
– Add 200 points to ‘s geek score. She correctly identified the music from the original Star Trek TV series without any prompting.
– They both like Bear McCreary’s music as well. (Guys, the version of “All Along the Watchtowers” that you enjoyed is from the Season 3 Battlestar Galactica soundtrack.)
– ‘s knowledge of music helped me to assess a string quartet Isaac wrote when he was 24. pointed out that it’s better and bolder to create art, no matter what the outcome, then never to create at all.
– knows more about C++ than I would have guessed. He seemed to understand my confusing explanation of the Standard Template Library.
It was a successful gathering of minds. Hopefully we can make it happen again!