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What did you do this 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 weekend. Did you make any plans? Take a trip? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!
I got my legal name change order in the mail! I was not expecting it to come so quickly, the normal turnaround time is 3-4 weeks, but they did it in 1 week! Changing it everywhere else will not be easy, but at least I can begin the process of scrubbing my deadname out of my wallet and my life.
Bless you for going through with it. Names are important; chosen names even more so.
Hope the rest of the bureaucracy will not be too much of a mess to deal with.
Congrats!!!!!
I suppose you are transgender? Or just wanted to change your name for whatever reason?
Yes, I am trans.
Great! I find trans people to be incredibly strong. Some people don't have the guts to wear a colourful shirt for fear of whatever, but trans people completely change their identity. Good for you! It's really cool and motivating. Do you write about yourself and the process anywhere?
I seriously wish you the absolute best. May the universe smile on you and may you have the life you dreamed of from here on out.
Don't think of him as a guest. Guests don't stay a couple of years, they fuck off after a week or two or start pulling their weight. I mean, you don't seem to have the authority to kick him out or anything.
He sounds insufferable.
Yeah i dont have any authority which i'm selfishly glad about. It puts my dad in a impossible place. My sister is still head over heels for him, so if my dad kicks him out she'll follow and they have nowhere else to go but to keep someone in the house who was so abusive may be enabling or putting off the inevitable.
Abusing someone in the manner that he treated you is unconscionable (and a major red flag for his relationship with your sister). The fact that he did so when he's effectively living on your turf and using your stuff for his own personal gain makes it all the more outrageous. To add on to @vektor's assessment of insufferable, he also sounds toxic to me: unappreciative, unempathetic, and selfish.
Unboxed my new PC!
Was like a kid on Christmas Day when it arrived. Been enjoying installing Linux (for the most part), bringing old files and settings over, and relishing the big improvement in speed and power over my old box.
That's one hell of a machine. Happy early Christmas!
Covid has officially knocked me on my ass for long enough that work wants me on disability, so I feel like I'm in a twilight zone episode where I always wanted to quit my job and would rather do anything else in the world (but not really because it's an okay job and I can work remotely), but now that it is an option that is actually on the table, I'm conflicted by it.
Nothing at all - at the same time I have an insane amount of work to do. If anyone knows any good tips to be productive at the drop of a hat that does not include anything illegal - holler at me.
Friday: Whispered into my wife's ear that I was happy the week was over, because although it was not the most active week, it was emotionally draining.
Saturday: Woke up and immediately embarrassed myself. Later, drove the wife and dog to a park where we could let the dog off the leash. Away from the dog park portion of the park, there were way too many people there crowded together and although we were able to avoid them, it was somewhat infuriating to see. Later, we went to an Asian grocery store to stock up on essentials and some non-essentials as well, and bought fresh fish.
Sunday: Went to a farmer's market where we gave them $50 and obtained some cute wooden coins as scrip. My wife made a really delicious fish soup and we ate that for dinner. Watched Troop Zero on Netflix, which was a little too cutesy for its own good but inoffensively so.
Been working on bringing v1.2 and the mobile version to
password.Took me some work to figure out a few things:
tap,swipe) that aren't natively supported by JS (I used a modified version of TinyGesture)The mobile version of gameplay, based on the order you have press keys in, is working already. There's a few issues to polish, but you kinda play it already.
Went for walks in nature, sat under a tree to read, the sun starts to get toasty here but there was a fine breeze. Got eaten alive by all kind of insects. Finally finished Villette, a bit sad about it but I can still read Shirley. Thinking of doing something about my social anxiety that got pretty bad with the lockdown.
Finished the setup and modifications to my sand/soda blasting cabinet, stand, and air lines. Only thing left is to print the dust collector (part 1 currently on printer, 27 hour print) that I finalized the design on this weekend as well, and then mount the vacuum on a high shelf out of the way. That should all be done by this weekend and then I'll be able to address the stoppage on the stroker engine I was rebuilding for one of my project cars.
After about a dozen attempts to print a piece I designed to upgrade my printer I've thrown in the towel and just ordered it from a printing service. The catch-22 being that in order to print the piece I'd need an upgraded printer, in order to upgrade my printer I need the piece. I likely could have gone another route, designing and printing a piece that would work in the interim then print the piece I want on the printer, but that idea was thrown out as to my surprise printing service prices have absolutely plummeted from the last time I looked. It has been admittedly a number of years since I last tossed up a model for an estimate, but I recall even simple ABS or PLA prints to be over $50 to print at the time. The part I have coming was $12 shipped and is PA12 nylon! Once here I'm sure I'll toss up my opinions of the quality during this weekly conversation.
And finally helped a friend with ideas on a couple of budget friendly PC builds for her and her teenage child as she has never built a PC and has grown tired of laptop gaming and her child's inherited-from-their-uncle PC with a nearly decade old GTX 580 graphics card being held up by a block of wood just isn't cutting it any longer. To get started she sent me the games her child wants to play and darn it, they're just so wholesome. No Call of Duty or Fortnite here, they want to play rescue and world building games and even though I have zero problem helping if they wanted to play FPS games I just adore the fact that their main goal is to play something well meaning.
Sunday was May 17, the Norwegian national day (celebrating the signing of the constitution in 1814, or, as we tell children, it's Norway's birthday). Celebrations were naturally not as usual due to covid-19. Normally, the most important part of the celebration is a children's parade, where school-age kids march waving flags, marching bands play, and adults cheer on from the sidelines. Naturally, it couldn't be held due to social distancing. Instead, people came up with a number of more or less creative ideas to celebrate in a pandemic-friendly way. In the municipality I was in, that was a car parade. This was way out in the countryside, so naturally the parade was headed by a sequence of tractors decked out with flags, with the drivers exchanging their usual working clothes with suits or dresses. This news photo is from a neighboring town, where a marching band donned inflatable tires to keep the prescribed social distancing intact.
I celebrated with my parents, my sister and her boyfriend, and my cousin's girlfriend and their two young kids (said cousin is a sailor, so he spent the day quarantined in a hotel in Tel Aviv). The children were delighted when fire engines and police cars and ambulances passed by slowly, sounding their sirens and horns and waving, which was nice to see.
Overall, it was a nice day. I'm not the biggest fan of large crowds, so in a way it was nice to be able to celebrate and avoid that for once, although I'm sure next year, the crowds will be back in full force.
Update: here's a photo I took of the tractor/car parade. Two days earlier, it was snowing, so we got kind of lucky with the weather, too.
I really struggled with my math test, and it makes me feel really dumb because it's not even a real college math class. It's called "business math" and I know how to do the actual math bits, but it's all word problems, and I never know what math bits go to what words. And it super sucks because the main TV in the house is my computer screen, and my husband or son will come in and sit down and I'm struggling, and they say something like, "you just..." like it's that easy. And it probably is, but it doesn't pan out that way for me, so something inside me just shuts down and they get aggravated with me, but I didn't invite them in to help, and it's just all super stressful. And for some reason I thought it would be a good idea to do 21 credits this quarter since I'm not doing anything else because covid, and my head is above water, but everyday is anxiety ridden, and this weekend it was math.
I'll echo @cfabbro's advice: please ask for help here if you're struggling!
Math is something where there's a huge divide in how people process it. Some people intuitively understand how to apply it to situations, so for them answers are often obvious, while for others it's opaque. When people who intuitively "get" math try to explain it to people who don't, it can often be patronizing because they make it seem effortless or make the person who doesn't understand feel small or stupid for not getting it. It sounds like your husband and son might be coming across this way for you, though they probably have no idea and don't realize that it's impacting you negatively.
Word problems in math require both problem-solving and process, so for those for whom the problem-solving is easy, they often skip right to process. Getting them to explain the problem-solving portion is probably what you need: not "how do I solve the problem?" but "how do I know how to solve the problem?". In order to get better help from them, you could try redirecting them with questioning. Try phrasing like "I know you can see the solution really clearly, but I can't. Can you help me see it how you do?" or "How do you know that's what you have to do to solve this?".
There are also usually different ways you can arrive at an answer for word problems, so if you're finding you're hitting a wall in one area, ask them if there's a different way it can be solved or looked at: "What if you had to solve this a different way?" This might open up a separate line of explanation that works better for you. On the other hand, if their presence in your work continues to be a bother to you, it might be good just to set the expectation that it's something you need to work through on your own ("I know you want to help me, but I need to figure this out for myself. I will let you know if I need a lifeline!").
Finally, I'll say that I've found loosely that people who intuitively "get" math tend to be good at mental modeling. Numbers, objects, situations, and relationships all can kind of exist in their heads and fluidly be manipulated and evaluated. It's like visualizing when you're reading, where you "see" the characters and setting and events in your mind, only it's mathy and more based in number sense and procedures. For some people, however, this visualization either doesn't occur or is too much to keep in their head. There is nothing wrong with this; it just means they need a different solution.
To counteract weaker mental visualization, I am a huge fan of modeling situations on paper. I draw a lot of boxes that represent trains, cups, people... whatever. Labels and arrows and lines represent whatever's happening in the problem as I make sense of it. Having an abstract visual representation of the situation on paper often helps me visualize the math in the way that some people can do in their heads, and it might help you with your struggles.
Thank you for such a thoughtful response. I need to work on my communication skills when I get frustrated. I'm usually the type of person who walks away from a situation when I feel myself getting ramped up and come back to it later when I am of a cooler head. But I don't do that with school type frustrations and tend to keep plowing along until I get through it. It works most of the time. I think with this math thing, there's also a lot embarrassment, so when that's combined with frustration, I really don't want to be looked at, much less spoken to. I think it's more of a me problem, then a them problem. I think I will take what you said under considerations and speak to them about how to speak with me when I'm struggling and do so at dinner or something when it can be light conversation.
Thank you for also suggesting different ways to look at word problems. I've done a lot of drawing for my science classes but zilch for math. I'll give that a go!
I've had a relevant experience back in 9th grade physics or so. Teacher made me help out a group of struggling classmates. The problem was something along the lines of "two cars approach each other along a given length X with speeds Y and 2*Y. Where along X do they meet?" - and my thought process completely glances over the fact that it's part of the problem to know what the problem even is, in a way. My brain went instantly to "well, they split X into a third and 2 thirds, duh", and I really struggled to put into words why it did that.
Needless to say, the teacher did the right thing. I learned something from a task that otherwise wouldn't have challenged me. My explanation now would probably start with "what are the critical dimensions? (Space and Time.) Draw a graph. What do you know, what do you want to know?"
I am by no means a mathematician, but I am pretty decent at math word problems and logic puzzles, and I'm sure many other people here are more than decent at them and math in general (considering all the programmers on here)... so if you're struggling with anything in particular, you should maybe try making a post in ~science about it asking for some help, IMO. :)
I actually am a mathematician (by education anyways) and will also look at math homework. cc @monarda.
Lots of helpful people here who can pitch in!
That's a great idea, and I'll give it a go when I'm reviewing for the next test. Thank you!
Just want you to know README is a little lazy in the repo.
Are you referring to the title? Because I think that's a meta joke about the project.
Or maybe you're just pointing out the joke using sarcasm and this is a classic case of whoosh and why am I still talking
I fear this may come off as unprofessional to some, in as much as it appears as though it doesn't work as promised, on the very page that displays its "supposed" working.