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.”

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ».

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.

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.

I do not believe in using AI detection software, but I reserve the right to be annoyed by the students whom I suspect of taking advantage of that belief.

After the brilliant first season of The Mandalorian, I put some related art up in my office. As the show has gone on, though, I’ve gotten less and less impressed with it, to the point that I wonder why I keep the art up.

My favorite detail from Homestar Runner production is how the off-brand voices in the low-quality animation segments are just the best efforts of the non-voice-actor guy to imitate the voices his brother does.

The RSS feeds for my local newspaper don’t seem to be compatible with my current feed reader, and I’m torn between building myself a web-scrape-to-RSS workaround for the fun of it or just pivoting to another local news source.

The Mastodon bot that posts random Homestar Runner screenshots is back, and I’m so happy. Refusing to unfollow it despite it not having posted since July was a wise choice.

That feeling when data you’re coding is just so bizarre that you don’t know what to make of it. Online communities are a heck of a thing to study.

You know you’re working in the right place when you casually bring up Squirrel Girl in the copy room, and someone replies “oh, yeah, she defeated Thanos.”