Spent today at an Open House for school. Given a lack of details, I wasn't sure what to expect going in but it turned out being a day full of good information. Started off the morning with some of the SDM staff giving relevant information about their specific areas. While much of this information is on the website, it was good to get the important parts distilled out given the flood of information that's there.

Then we had lunch with some current students. Ended up with some guys who are finishing up the program in January so they have more views on more of the classes than some of the others I've talked with. The afternoon was largely spent q&a form with the director of the program. Lots of questions about the direction of the program in the future as well as a lot of comparisons with other similar and not so similar programs. And after all of that, I'm even more certain that I'm in the right place. Even though I am a little hopeful that I can swap out a class or two to make the program a better match for me. The nice thing is it sounds like the flexibility is there; I just need to do the legwork to make it happen.

Ended up with a nice break after this and squeezed in some work. Managed to catch up with mail as well as fixing a few pirut bugs. The latter was helped by the fact that it was a little slow to get access to MIT's wireless network and there were a few bugs related to not having a working network connection. Unfortunately, the live CD isn't fitting again — that's the todo for tonight.

After that, I headed over to do more meeting, greeting and mingling. And I have to say that everyone is incredibly open and friendly. And they all seem to know about Red Hat and open source too based on class discussions. That promises to make for some fun discussions for me too 🙂 Tomorrow I'm planning on spending part of the day at the SDM conference — the afternoon session is titled “The Internet and the Human Network” and is focused around how to more effectively use the web for collaboration and one of the portions is going to be led by Sir Tim Berners Lee. Which should be pretty interesting, informative and useful. Look for an update on it tomorrow.

Starting in January, I'm going to be going back to school part-time at MIT to pursue a Master's degree as part of the System's Design and Management program there. I'm pretty excited about this as it will be good to get back into some academic things. And one of my big concerns when looking for a program was to not just go back and get a Comp Sci Masters; but at the same time I don't want to turn into an MBA-toting suit 😉 The SDM program is nice as its a bit of a blend and also has the flexibility to take some other things — like I'd really like to take a class to help get a better handle on IP law.

Of course, doing this will have some cost… I won't be able to spend every extra waking moment I have on Fedora as I often-times do now. But I should still be involved and I'm still going to be working full-time and my main work tasks are Fedora-related, so it shouldn't be that drastic. But if you notice response from me dropping off a little, that's probably why.

Anyway, now back to fixing Fedora bugs for Fedora 8.