Remembering Frank Nack

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 11:17:23 -0700

On July 10, 2026, Dr. Frank Nack passed away. He was a professor at the University of Amsterdam’s Informatics Institute. More so, he was a dear friend and mentor to me. I came to know Frank when I was a newly minted PH.D. publishing in ACM Multimedia’s Interactive Arts track. Part of Frank’s research focused on communication, creativity, and interactive narratives which were all themes in my research at the time. I still remember the thoughtful conversations and helpful guiding feedback he provided me when we first met.

Hello, world (now with POSSE)

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 13:48:01 +0200

Welcome! Here we are again restarting with blogging again. I won’t lie...part of the intermittency is my attention span. Part of it is infrastructure. To be quite honest, migrating just became exhausting. But I think I found the right beat. But first, a bit of history.

I heard about blogging before it was called so in the late 90s. A sysadmin at the university I was at was very excited about a self-publishing platform. Years later, early 00s, I set up a blog: probably Movable Type but I forget exactly which one. It was a complex install and upkeep and probably had tons of security holes. It was fun! I could post funny stories about my day to day life with the occasional photos and my friends (like the people in grad school with me) could comment. No strangers. No creeps. No (anonymous) jerks. This site was running on a developer box I had in graduate school and it got wiped; I lost my stories and photos and content. I moved to a Wordpress self hosted (a much easier install!) but lost that when I left that university. I tried to stash a backup this time but never figured out how to restore it to a new host. Since then Tumblr, Twitter (micro-blogging), and other consumer hosted things came my way. Then I started using Medium which was cool but never felt like it was mine. Substack seems to be the latest cool place but I want to own my content.

Blogging on ayman's blog:

Remembering Frank Nack

Hello, world (now with POSSE)