The thunderstorms in Las Vegas aren't that exciting, but they're more exciting than nothing. The last couple days we've had some on and off thunder. While they've mostly been flashes on the horizon, there was a good one that felt pretty close this morning. I can currently hear a few low rumbles as it continues on, but it's really just background noise because it's happening too far away.
The last couple weeks have been pretty good in terms of getting classes ready. The trigonometry videos are on their way to being fully published on YouTube. I've also got my 3D modeling for 3D printing course notes all put together. Those came together pretty quickly because I had already semi-organized myself earlier and it was just a matter of picking examples and projects for the class.
My next target is to really come back to the MATH 125 course, which is the Math of Games and Programming one. I've started to organize the main sections of the course. I had done some work earlier in the year, but I'm going to abandon much of it because I just didn't like the overall feel and direction. But I do have some concepts that only need to be reworked, rather than created from scratch, which is is good. We're going to start of with games of complete information and puzzles to develop the concept of a game tree, then we're going to use game trees to look at probabilistic outcomes, then we'll turn the game trees into decision trees for competitive games. And that should pretty much take the whole semester. Now all I need to do is all the work of putting it together.
I still have my MATH 181 (Calculus 1) course to build, but I'm planning to do pretty much what I did last time with that course, and so that one should come together pretty quickly.
Late on Friday afternoon, I got the Glowforge to connect to the campus wi-fi, and we were able to get our first laser etch/laser cut project to work for us. Everything seems to be functioning the way it's supposed to, and it's pretty easy to use. I'm going to have to put in a few hours over the next week or so to run some test prints and figure out some of the manual settings. Because we're almost certainly going to go off-label with this and see what we can do with it. We already have a couple projects in mind, such as building a zoetrope with interchangeable panels and maybe one that works more like a projector with a flashing LED in the middle. So we'll see where this takes us.
At some point in the last week, I got an email from the Advance HE Senior Fellowship program letting me know that they've received my portfoilio and it's going to be reviewed. I think they even put an approximate date for their review to be complete, but I honestly don't even care at this point. I submitted my thing, I'm about 90% sure it's good enough, which is good enough for me. I've never heard of this program before I was invited to participate, and while I appreciate the idea of having an internationally benchmarked honor, it doesn't really have any impact on my day-to-day work or pay. So it's just a thing to do to have in the back pocket in case I need to leverage it for something down the line.
On the other hand, my Full Professor portfolio is not something that I can shrug off quite as easily. I did a lot of work earlier in the summer, and spent some time in the last two weeks rereading what I wrote and updating a few things. I think a few of the edits on this go-around were good, including a slight reorganization of the materials so that the evidentiary files are a little easier to match up with the text of the narratives. I'll probably give it one more close reading in a week or two, and then I hope I'll feel good enough to just submit and walk away. One of the challenges for this is that it sits in a folder that I can access, which means the temptation to worry about something and open up the files again to make sure will continue to exist. But I think I can manage that.
I haven't done much with the online textbook project. I'm just going to let that one sit for a little while as I focus on my course prep. I think I'll probably put in some more time with it in early August or so.
I got to see some old friends from my UCSD days this evening. It's been at least a decade since I last saw Karen and Chad. We met up around 6:30 in the evening to avoid the hottest part of the day, but it was still 107 or so. And for the next couple hours, we sweated and chatted. It wasn't the most ideal way to do things in terms of comfort, but stupid COVID continues to do stupid COVID things like mutate to the BA.5 variant. It was made slightly less comfortable because of the humidity, but it was tolerable enough, and the company was fantastic, so there's really nothing to complain about.
I broke the streak of non-piano playing and have two days of something that actually resembles some practice time. On our last visit to the Bay Area, we got a couple pieces of sheet music from Joan's grandmother, and I'm trying to learn one of the songs. It's an early 1900s piece with a ragtime/stride feel. The sheet music itself is kind of interesting on its own, as it might be 100 years old. It's in good enough condition to be used, but the edges are pretty tattered and so it probably doesn't have much monetary value. I looked it up on EBay, and someone is selling it for about $7 for a 1912 printing. So the value is really just the music at this point. The piece itself doesn't seem too difficult. It's mostly going to be about getting my left hand to operate without me thinking about it to bounce back and forth between the bass note and the chord. The right hand isn't too hard, either. So it's something where the only barrier is really just practice, and so we'll see how well I do.
Other news: Thor is doing fine. Soup-making it still kind of where I'm at. Last time I mentioned that there was a bomb threat, and it turns out that it was a part of at least 100 bomb threats to colleges across the nation over a span of a few weeks. It probably didn't hit widespread news because it's the middle of summer and the number of students that have been impacted is very small. I believe that if this had happened in October that it would have had much more coverage (for better or worse). My phone's charging port is acting up now, so I might have to take it in again (which is kind of annoying). The church I used to go to has become a branch of a large church organization (Eastside Church). I don't know much about it, but it seems to be a fairly large church organization. Maybe I'll check it out at some point. Or not. I don't know. And I guess that's all I've got for tonight.
