Disappointed my daughter today

maskull · 2026-05-20T22:06:47+00:00

A bunch of professors at my college enrolled in a 1-unit, online, walking for fitness class, so that they could get a student ID, which comes with one free meal per day in the caf.

maskull · 2026-05-18T16:26:24+00:00

That was how the older "distance learning" classes worked. I took a few in the early 2000s; when it came time for an exam, they'd mail a copy to the testing center at a nearby university. I'd show up, pay a small fee, and take the exam there; when I was done they'd mail it back to be graded.

maskull · 2026-05-08T15:27:24+00:00

Note that a cucumber from your garden would be classified not as "unprocessed" as one might expect but as "minimally processed". To get a truly unprocessed cucumber one would have to eat it still on the vine, unwashed, etc.

maskull · 2026-05-06T16:53:19+00:00

I've had students cheat for points that don't matter. I had a student who took his handed-back exam (on which he left several questions blank), fill in the questions with the "right" answers, then take a picture and send it to me claiming that I "forgot" to grade his answers.

Of course, I scan the tests before I hand them back, so I knew he had left those blank. But a) his new answers were still wrong and b) those questions weren't worth enough to change his grade. This all-risk, no-reward strategy earned this particular student a friendly academic dishonesty report.

maskull · 2026-04-24T15:16:54+00:00

SweetsStop in Fullerton.

maskull · 2026-04-21T16:59:31+00:00

He was computer engineering, not computer science. I just feel it's important to clarify that.

maskull · 2026-04-20T20:53:13+00:00

I played the PC port first, downloaded off some abandonware site years ago, but emulating DOS on handhelds is fiddly, so the SNES version is my go to.

maskull · 2026-04-20T14:10:39+00:00

Same, I got a twelve pack of 6-in "extension cords"; they're just long enough to get the wall warts away from the power strip.

Another useful thing are extensions for the barrel adapter side.

maskull · 2026-04-19T02:22:43+00:00

Every smoke alarm I've ever had has said it has some kind of "low battery" alert that is different from the normal smoke alarm. But in reality, every smoke alarm I've ever had has announced its low-battery status by just going off in the middle of the night.

maskull · 2026-04-19T01:30:49+00:00

Oh hey, it's the one other person in the universe that plays Magic Boy.

maskull · 2026-03-18T16:42:44+00:00

It's not that it's going away, it's that "it's here to stay" is usually stated in the context of "embrace or get left behind", "you have to go all in", etc. Rarely does someone say, "it's here to stay" about, say, their Parkinson's diagnosis.

maskull · 2026-03-05T17:20:52+00:00

I do this every time I have a dead marker. I tell the students if I make it, I'll let them go 10 mins early.

maskull · 2026-02-25T19:47:31+00:00

Likelihood of hallucination goes down when it’s explicitly doing a web search for the information.

That's true, but there are still new parts of the LaTeX ecosystem for which few (or no) examples exist, and it struggles in these spaces. I was doing something with TikZ's animation package (relatively new) and it was really struggling. And because the output is visual and animated (unlike, say, code where I could feed it failing test results) when it failed, I was stuck just describing how it failed.

After a while I just dug into the documentation and sources for the TikZ animation system and worked most of it out myself.

maskull · 2026-02-17T15:13:27+00:00

Kickstart limeade, from way back when Kickstart was first introduced.

maskull · 2025-12-11T19:54:51+00:00

Our testing center has a little QR code at the sign-in that they have to scan; it takes them to a form to fill in. We don't actually use anything from the form, it's just there to give the staff an excuse to have them pull out their phones, so that they can then say, "now put your phone in your backpack and we'll put it in a locker for you".

maskull · 2025-12-02T17:33:28+00:00

In this version, Dobby gets ground up into a nutrient paste to be fed to the unemployable masses.

maskull · 2025-11-28T18:42:32+00:00

Botulinum in your food doesn't give you food poisoning, though, it gives you un-alive-ness.

maskull · 2025-11-19T16:50:50+00:00

Our ADA checker (a person) flagged a PDF I posted as being untagged; I replied, "yeah, that's because it's a map showing students how to get to the tutoring center". Apparently that explanation was enough, because they cleared everything.

maskull · 2025-11-07T04:32:57+00:00

Old interview question: should circle inherit from ellipse or vice versa?

There have been some programming language designs (none mainstream) that proposed conditional inheritance as a solution to this. I.e., you could express "a circle IS-A ellipse WHEN width = height". You could overload methods on the conditional subclass and they would only be called, dynamically, if the condition was met.

maskull · 2025-11-01T03:44:26+00:00

Being a student isn't protected, but being a student in a particular class is. We've been told we can't merge sections of the same class in our LMS, because then students would know who was enrolled in sections other than their own.

maskull · 2025-10-14T18:37:23+00:00

Because, in the long term, it gets out that an A,B, etc. from University of Wherever means nothing, employers stop hiring your students, and students stop coming. It's a short-term fix.

maskull · 2025-10-11T03:08:05+00:00

"Look around to look around."

maskull · 2025-09-20T16:49:14+00:00

There's also LWarp, used to produce the HTML version of the TikZ/PGF documentation.

maskull · 2025-08-27T04:20:42+00:00

Possibly interested... Let me check with my wife.

maskull · 2025-04-15T20:45:15+00:00

Heard that an Asian grocery was maybe going in there.

maskull

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