Where have you been?

Sam, you made it to a one-year anniversary. You wrote a few more musings. Then you disappeared. What happened?

Way too many things happened. Let’s see if I can count them all.

The crazy week of writing put me way too far behind.

I had a series of six or so CSC 151 readings and labs that took me about three times to write as normal. The saddest part is that some of these were ones that I thought would be short. But I discovered that they needed a whole new set of examples and writing good examples is perhaps the hardest part of writing a lab or reading. Oh, yeah. One of the labs required that I develop a set of macros. C macros I’m great at. Scheme macros not so much. I think I spent three hours on the macros for two lab problems, which is not a good use of my time. But they are done It’s Wednesday. I’m now caught up through next Monday’s class. Next Wednesday may be a completely new topic.

Michelle and I drove to Lincoln Nebraska and back in one night to see Kelly …, the author of [We Are All Shipwrecks](we-are-all-shipwrecks].

The hard drive that stores all of my media, including all of my music, died. To make things worse, in preparation for the musings on mix tapes and musical taste and such, I’d moved any music that was on my other backup drives to that drive. I figured it was safe because the drive was only eight months old. I’ve been spending too much time trying to recover those materials. At least Toshiba will refund the amount I paid for the drive if I send it back to them.

Lots of little and not-so-little things have also been coming up. The department has been trying to figure out next year, and tasks like that occupy my mind a lot. I’ve also been trying to help students get ready to attend the Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing [1,2].

I’ve been fighting with the Dean’s office on what I see as a major breakdown of policy and governance [5]. That and the department planning also take significant mental and emotional energy, which I suppose means that I should muse more, rather than less [6]..

Oh, yeah. Almost forgot. I also got really sick.

My good days have been starting at 6am and ending at 11pm or later [7]. At that point, I was ready to go to bed and not to write.

But I’m back, or at least I hope I’m back. I probably won’t catch up on the missing week of musings, but I’ll try to get back to one or two each day.

[1] I think Grinnell is sending close to twenty students. Since we’re sending that many we get to have a table in the exhibitors room. But we’re not yet approved to hire, so I can’t actually do anything with the table other than sit there and advertise LACAFI and support our LACAFI peer schools [2] is sending close to twenty students. Since we’re sending that many we get to have a table in the exhibitors room. But we’re not yet approved to hire, so I can’t actually do anything with the table other than sit there and advertise LACAFI and support our LACAFI peer schools.

[2] LACAFI is something like Liberal Arts Colleges Affiliated for Faculty Inclusion. It’s a group of SLACs [3] who work together to encourage prospective faculty from underrepresented groups, who may be less likely to think about careers at SLACs, to consider SLACs [4].

[3] Small Liberal Arts Colleges.

[4] Faculty careers at SLACs are awesome. You get to teach. You get to do research. You get to mentor students. And you generally have small enough classes that you see the difference you are making in your students’ lives.

[5] Nope, I’m not writing anything else about that.

[6] Musing is a good release.

[7] One of the nights that I was sick, I collapsed into bed at 9pm. But the other nights I’ve been up late.

Version 1.0 of 2017-09-20.