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What did you do this week (and weekend)?
As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!
I competed in my first mountain bike race! The Sea Otter Classic is in town and I ended up competing in the amature Enduro for my age bracket. I joined a few friends who were part of a much bigger group (like 10-15) who all had their matching jersey's. It was pretty sweet! We had to get there by 6am to hit the practice laps at 7am and they brought amazing pastries from a local bakery that sponsors their group. I was not expecting a fresh pain au chocolate from this group!
I was pretty nervous, as the first stage was also the downhill course, but I believe it is quite tame by downhill standards. I will say I think it's build for pro speeds, because hitting it at lower speed made for quite a squirley ride. I put up by far my fastest time on the first practice run and was just bouncing everywhere and keeping myself from getting bucked. I managed to clear some of the gaps, definitely cased others, and even made the final stepdown going full pucker butt.
Catastrophe hit on the second practice lap when one of our friends went full send on the stepdown (you couldn't see the landing from the takeoff) and someone had crashed in the landing. The race team at that section had shit the bed and weren't warning people. So he tries to keep from hitting him after this 10 foot drop and heads up going OTB and gets launched off his bike. Our next friend narrowly misses both of them and starts yell "rider down! rider down!" so that our friend behind him can warn the other approaching folks. I'm 8 people back and the race team just above the jump section was just getting into action to slow people down. The first friend ended up breaking his collar bone and it definitely slowed the rest of us down for the remainder of the day.
Two hours later we started the actual race and boy howdy was I slow. I was kind of shaken from the first 2 runs and didn't want to end up with my own gnarly injury. But I got through the course and enjoyed the run! After that we made our way to the slalom course - which was bizarre. It was a partial section of the dual slalom course, but it was like roped off sections, so it was hard to figure out where you were going and how much speed to keep or how much to pedal. Again, I ended up pretty slow. After that we cruised over the stage 3, another bizarre choice by the event organizers. The event itself is in Laguna Seca, which sits next to Fort Ord National Monument - home to pretty decent MTB trails. For some reason they ended up just flattening a grassy hill and cutting down a few bushes but leaving the stumps sticking out like little spears. There weren't fun flowy sections, there weren't many features. It was this weird, bumpy, hill that they had you sprinting on. 1/10 would not suggest they do that again. The last course was one we all knew and liked, though we all consider it an uphill route to a much, much better downhill one. Again, weird choice. The route followed a gravelly fire road onto a trail that is really sandy and washed out. I ate shit 4 times. Once on the 90 degree turn from the gravel to the trail. Once getting out of the way of the rider who had caught me post spill. And twice more for good measure in the sandy washouts. All and all though I just came out with road rash so I'll consider that a win!
The boys had also stashed beers along the route for our mellow bike back to the event which was a very nice surprise. All in all I'm not sure I'll race again - at least not here - but I was stoked to make some new friends, experience what a race is like, and generally have a nice day in the saddle!
I started taking classes, and I have spent countless hours trying to figure out how to write forum posts with APA citations, and trying to find proper sources to even cite because this is an introductory computer science course so the prompts are a mixture of outdated, vague, and just too simple to figure out what a good source for it would be. Like, I wonder if I should just cite dumb websites at this point. I think I'm really being broken because everything needs to be in APA in this course and that's making me feel like I need to write a really high quality academic paper when the professor probably just wants me to do some googling.
I'm seriously hoping that the other classes I will have to take will not be as bad as this one is. The first reading had some really terrible mistakes and weirdnesses that honestly made me wonder if it were written by an alien. It talked about computers in terms of generations, including a "fifth generation" - which is aparantly a thing, though it talked about it being some futuristic thing. Ironic because the photo they used to illustrate that point was an i387 clone from 1990. There was a section on input devices that listed light pens and had as a figure a photograph of an iPad with a stylus resting on top of it.
I hope your experience is better than mine, but if it isn't... buckle up. My professors only got worse and more ridiculous the closer I got to graduating.
My best professor, for computer science and just generally, was my first one. The one who taught the introductory programming classes at my community college.
Teaching at the community college wasn't even her main thing, she just did that for income. She volunteered to teach computer science at prisons throughout Texas, and considered that her "main gig".
So yeah, fucking one hell of a lady.
After her, the next computer science professor I had that I would say was actually good, came two years later.
Sorry, I hate to be the bird of ill omen. Hang in there. It's probably going to be worth it in the end.
This isn't my first go-around. I got an associate's degree at my community college a while back, and now I'm going for my baccalaureate. But this time I'm doing this through University of the People, which is 100% online.... so yeah.
I really think that the majority of my problem is me just inventing problems for myself right now, though. It took me all day, but I finally got this paper written.
I think this is a great and healthy thing to recognize. If I could offer any advice, it'd be to keep this frame of mind when dealing with *the bullshit*
Like yeah, some professors, assignments, schedules, and due dates suck. They might be inconvenient or vague or strict, and all around just grating to deal with.
But they're also temporary, and one way or another, you will get through it.
Having been through a BS and PhD in ECE, this is one of those exercises where the entry level training bears little or no resemblance to the task it is supposed to prepare you for. I mean, citing sources is a valuable thing to understand, but it's part of a research process. Taken out of that context and focused on such basic computer information, you'd technically be better off finding a good dictionary of computing terms and citing that over and over. (While noting that most textbooks are not peer reviewed, it beats the shit out of finding a citation for light pen. WTF)
Some bits of practical advice - nobody writes their citations by hand IRL. IEEE, ACM, and most other academic paper platforms including Google Scholar will let you download your citations in any format you want ready to paste in. Unless it's considered cheating, this is definitely the way to do it.
If you have a big paper to write, I would use a tool that supports citations. We used latex/bibtex for most of ours. I'm definitely not recommending it though, it has a steep learning curve and extremely arcane syntax. I believe Word has some features for citations, though I haven't used them.
My dad died last Sunday. Tomorrow is his funeral.
Very sorry for your loss.
I am at a Forestry / Woodlot management conference today, and tomorrow I'm volunteering for Red Cross outreach and volunteering recruitment booth.
I love the one Mi'kmaq presenter who said that "Private woodlot owner services" is a string of nonsense words. Land shouldn't be privatized and owned by one person or a small family; a forest is for forever and it's resources go far beyond optimization of sellable wood; services imply buying selling tit for tat between stakeholders only instead of a relationship and caring for the common land because it's everyone's. -- that being all said, most people here are private woodlot owners and not clear cutting monsters.... So, valuable viewpoint that will take a slow slow journey to make sense to folks. The presenter seemed patient and not at all antagonistic though, water drips on a stone approach on our cold calculating colonizer hearts.
I spent the week studying for 2 exams, my 3rd of Bio 1 and 1st of Developmental Psych. I got a 96 on bio, and so far 73/80 on psych (2 essay questions at the end, waiting for those to be graded still). I am exhausted and anxious still about it. I have a bunch of homework for both classes to get done this weekend.
Aside from work, I've been doing a lot of reading, playing with my animals, and picking locks. Currently reading "The Tainted Cup" which is pretty good so far. And lockpicking is a newer hobby of mine. Been learning a lot, and it's like a fun mechanical puzzle.