This is a busy week, so I really don’t want to be spending time updating a shared course that I’m not even teaching next semester… but I am getting to learn more about SSHing into a VM, and that’s legitimately cool.

This is one novella in Doctorow’s “Radicalized” collection, so I guess I could wait until I read all four and review them together, but I’d rather do four separate reviews. This story is so, so good. It’s an excellent anti-DRM screed and a compelling example of the social harms that can be done by technology to marginalized groups. Reading this back in 2019 is what got me (back) into Doctorow’s fiction, because it’s a perfect example of what he does best.

Teaching password security in class today, so time to talk about Ozymandias’s total lack thereof in Watchmen (and how dumb it is for a computer to say “almost there!” when you enter an incomplete password).

Cory Doctorow is one of my favorite authors, and I’ve also (mostly) appreciated the work of Humble Bundle over the past decade. When I learned this weekend that there’s an ongoing bundle of Doctorow’s fiction, I was ecstatic. The only thing that I was disappointed about is that I’ve already bought so many of these titles… however, that still wasn’t enough to stop me from buying all 18 items (it helps that while I own many of these already, most of the ones I own are in formats rather than epub, so now I’m a multimodal owner).

I like peer reviewing manuscripts that cite my work, and I especially like correcting manuscripts that misunderstand my work, but my favorite is reviewing a manuscript that gives my work too much credit so that I can say “hey, this guy doesn’t know as much as you think he does.”

We read Cory Doctorow’s “Unauthorized Bread” in my class on computer fundamentals, and I try to share actual examples of how tech companies going bankrupt can create actual problems like in the story. Bookmarking this for next time I teach.

USA! USA! Seriously, though, bookmarking for future teaching.

I’ve never been a fan of policing student behavior in my classes. I don’t take attendance, I’m pretty generous when it comes to late work and making up assignments, and I try to make participation in class something that’s organic rather than something structured and forced. In recent years, this hasn’t necessarily gone well. For example, the undergrad class I’m currently teaching has lousy attendance, and I struggle to get anyone except the 3-4 same voices to contribute to class discussions.

I’m normally a big “break is break” advocate, but family illness meant being behind on work, which meant taking over my father-in-law’s WFH setup today to finish a syllabus and course shell I needed to prep so other instructors could work off them.

I remember the first Floppotron, and 3.0 continues to be delightful. I may have to show this in class next year.

Discussing networks in class today, which is as good an excuse as any to show a clip from Battlestar Galactica. Computers without networks is one of the most interesting worldbuilding details in that show.

I got to teach counting in binary today, and it might be one of my favorite things to teach. Not every day you get to deconstruct and reconstruct your students’ understanding of numbers.

Small sample size (and very non-representative), but my summer students seem to be on board with treating internet access as a public good. Hope for the future!

There are a lot of joys in teaching, but there’s something awesome about being able to assign students to watch a scene from 1992’s Sneakers—the world’s finest hacker movie.

Proposing a new syllabus on department’s class on fundamentals of hardware and software, and I’m adding reflections on equity, society, culture as they relate to ICT. Tech isn’t just technical.

Can anyone recommend a good video essay, blog post, etc. on the absence of networks in the Battlestar Galactica reboot? Need it for a class. (Also frightened by the possibility that BSG is “too old” for my undergrads to know about).

One of the biggest perks of teaching in an ICT program is the ease with which scenes from the fantastic 1992 hacker/heist movie Sneakers can be worked into one’s lectures.

Teaching a summer class that includes fundamentals of computer hardware. Peak so far was this morning, when a student came in excited that she’d been able to follow along watching someone replace a server motherboard.