I’m back at work full time now. It’s nice to be around students. We are ramping up to start the new semester on September 2nd. I’ll be teaching MAT A29, Calculus I for the Life Science, and MAT B41, Techniques in Multivariable Calculus. These are two courses that I’ve taught a lot, and I’m looking forward to teaching them again.
It is quite likely that I’ll take on a reading course student this semester. I’ve been working with some students on braiding using robots. In the photo above, they’re cutting out parts of a black track for the robots to follow. On the right, you can see three robots running a track that produces a three strand helix. Some related Desmos animations (for a figure-eight track) are attached to this office camera photo.
Right now, I’m just swimming in cool books. My policy of putting library holds on all the interesting stuff that I come across occasionally brings in a tidal wave of material. And so, at this moment, I’m tsunami’ed.
And I just put in an inter-library loan search for the books on La Baza Legolisto. Ack! So many good books, so little time!
All1 of my writing this week went to preparing for courses. I’ve been polishing up lecture notes, homework sets, and syllabi. Most of it is rather routine, but there were a couple surprises. For example, it turned out that I was missing Weeks 4–6 of a course. So, I had to go in and write those lecture notes.
My colleague, Paco, pointed out that I ought to write about the robot braiding project for a K-12 STEM education journal. He thinks the braiding project is a really down-to-earth and novel application of these robots. Perhaps that’ll be the next academic writing project?
This is my twenty-sixth week note. The first one went live on Feb 14, 2025. I’ve written these, almost every week, for a half a year now. Overall, they’re great!
As I said, back in Week Note 4:
I enjoy the rhythm of posting them.
They give me a place to write without having to think about setup or structure.
Whenever I’m on the computer, I have a vim session up with the current week note in it.
Week notes provide a place to dump all the stuff from the week, especially bookmarks.
Sometimes, I wonder about the choice of categories: reading, writing, moving, playing. There are other categories that I’ve thought about adding such as parenting2, teaching, or worshipping. I definitely haven’t done as much with moving as I would like to do. Each week, there isn’t much to say about moving. And yet, that’s lack of much to say is interesting in itself. The category makes me aware of the lack of movement.
One last meta-week note thought: it would be nice to intentionally review or summarize large chunks of time via week notes. Even though I write in my journal almost every day, and put these blog posts up once a week, I still lose the forest for the trees. Perhaps I’ll start writing “Semester Notes” since my life tends to follow the academic calendar of fall, winter, and summer semesters.
This week was main part of the ctrl-c.club Webpage Jam.
I decided to write-up the process of making this weird multi-timer gizmo inspired by Dave Gauer’s multimer from 2021.
Okay. I did some writing for the ctrl-c.club Webpage Jam too. ↩︎
Parenting is such a core part of my life. My daughters, Mira and Mabel, are endlessly fascinating3. However, I hesitate to write about them because I feel like being online requires some form of consent. I’m so torn about posting about the kids online that I’ve thought of making an anonymous blog, just to write about parenting. ↩︎
I could rant about the subtle semantic shift that happened in Mabel’s use of the phrase “ouchie poo” this weekend, but I don’t want it to haunt her in years to come. ↩︎
Published: Aug 22, 2025 @ 11:00.
Last Modified: Aug 23, 2025 @ 23:16.
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