- kudos:

Between my kid’s nascent interest in search engines and my students’ using generative AI despite my discouraging it, I’m thinking a lot this week about directly teaching epistemology as a foundation for other concepts.

- kudos:

Rather than feel dumb for losing control of my bike taking a turn too fast, I am choosing to focus on the wreck’s superficial similarity to the Akira slide.

- kudos:

Finally trying Bigelow’s “Constant Comment” after several months of meaning to. So far, it ranks pretty high on my list of non-desserty teas.

- kudos:

Kiddo, covering up one of the tines on a fork: “Look, now it’s a threek!”

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Kiddo, putting away laundry: “My sweater! Come feel its soft wrath!”—

- kudos:

This morning, I’m realizing (and somewhat to my horror) that some of my reflection on whether to change up one of my classes essentially mirrors the ed psych debates about constructivism versus direct instruction that I found so intolerable in grad school.

- kudos:

I expected Naomi Alderman’s The Future to be good, but I didn’t expect an interesting, responsible reading of the destruction of Sodom to be a throughline of the story.

- kudos:

Back in 2020-2021, I made the decision to pivot from Twitter as a research site in case data ever became less available—and so I could focus more on right-wing online spaces. It was a good call but still hilariously mistaken at the same time.

- kudos:

Finally subscribed to the excellent, non-creepy Tinylytics service, and now I’m getting distracted trying to figure out why a couple dozen people clicked a Facebook link to my CV earlier this month. I’m not on FB, and I don’t know who else would be posting my academic credentials there.

- kudos:

… and as long as I’m posting about fun-but-unnecessary website hacks I don’t have time for, I’d also love to redo the taxonomies and templates on my site to make it easy to navigate media reviews by author, title, series, etc. No one would use it but me, but I’d have a lot of fun with it.

- kudos:

One of the biggest gaps in my current website-first approach to social media is an inability to snap a picture and quickly post it. I’ve wanted to tackle this for a while, but an upcoming cool vacation has me thinking I should really go for it.

- kudos:

Il y a beaucoup plus de photos de train sur mes fils Mastodon et Bluesky qu’il y en avait sur mon fil Twitter, et ça donne de la joie.

- kudos:

I teach in a tech-focused program, and I think it’s reasonable to ask how we’re going to address generative AI in our curriculum, but I still resent the expectation that we must jump on this bandwagon simply because it’s there.

- kudos:

My most recent research compliance completion certificate was clearly thrown together in a few lines of HTML. Not only does that feel especially phoned in, but it also makes it harder to save for my records, which is the only useful aspect of one of these certificates.

- kudos:

Il arrive que je passerai bientôt quelques jours en Alsace, et j’accepterais avec plaisir des conseils pour quoi faire pendant mon séjour.

- kudos:

“Your browser settings are preventing an optimal experience with Microsoft 365.” Yes, and that’s how I know they’re set up properly.

- kudos:

Despite all the Bad Stuff happening right now, what my brain has chosen to get anxious about this morning is how I have my RSS + Micro.blog + Mastodon + Bluesky reader set up.

- kudos:

I have resorted to cheating to figure out the best ending of kiddo’s current “choose your own path” comic. Cheating has helped me determine what the best ending is, but not yet how to get there, so more work to do.

- kudos:

Teaching my project-focused WordPress class keeps me humble: I answer so many student questions with “I don’t know how to do that, but I know it’s possible. Let’s figure it out together.”

- kudos:

Happy to report that I won this morning’s game of precipitation chicken—didn’t even need the rain gear I put on out of caution.

- kudos:

Another fun bike commuting game is precipitation chicken: How much of this rain can I wait out before delaying my ride in makes me late for class?

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I’ve been scheduled for a while to preach on hope during Advent. It was always going to be about hope in the face of bleakness, but I can see the tone changing a bit now anyway.

- kudos:

I don’t know what (if anything) to make of this, but the roller rink appears to be a dependable place for experiencing parental pride.

- kudos:

I have long felt that “Anne Ominous” would be a good name for a character in a superhero story—and long bemoaned that I’m not creative enough to create that story myself.

- kudos:

One of my favorite things that Lexington does is to hold a bike light awareness “Glow Ride” the night before the fall time change. It’s been a family tradition for us and a lot of fun.

- kudos:

In our big content management systems class project this semester, students are knocking it out of the park in a way that makes me proud of them but also reassures me that maybe I understand this stuff despite no formal training after all.

- kudos:

Between class, early voting, and Halloween yesterday, I did not get to much of my email inbox. Today’s going to have to be “All Sends Day.”

- kudos:

I first met my spouse in college, where she was doing biology while I was doing French, so even though I’m now a tenured professor in a technology-focused major, I still think of her as the “STEM parent” for the purposes of helping with kiddo’s homework.

- kudos:

Time to go combine some favorite things: bike commuting, libraries, and early voting.

- kudos:

Pretty sure I just saw a student dressed up for Halloween as a Skrull, and it occurs to me that anyone could claim to be in costume as a Skrull.

- kudos:

Sometimes I feel like I’m nagging my data science students when I tell them to use function x in R instead of almost-identical function y. Other times, I remember that function y has awful output that makes grading their work a pain, and I stop worrying.

- kudos:

Some switch has recently flipped in my brain so that I can hand out Bs, Cs, and worse without being anxious about it. I still have real concerns about grading as a concept, but I’ve stopped worrying about taking off points as though I’m the one being penalized.

- kudos:

A lot of my Hugo hacks are ugly, but I’m happy that I’ve figured it out well enough to be able to do the hacks in the first place.

- kudos:

The only good thing I got out of reading a blog post arguing that ChatGPT leaves open the door for young earth creationism just now was a reminder to reread Hervé Le Tellier’s « L’Anomalie ».

- kudos:

Sure looks like someone finally got fed up with the majority of Harris signs in our cul-de-sac and decided to swipe them all overnight.

- kudos:

Hier, je me demandais combien de temps encore cette période de bonne santé mentale (qui existait depuis quelques mois) durerait encore. Ce matin, j’ai malheurusement la réponse.