243: Unbridled Chaos

Today was more than a little insane. Lots and lots of stuff happening.

To start, 307 was actually a pretty decent class, and our final is a take-home!! Those classes aren't even real at this point, both professors are doing take-home finals, so none of us are going to have to study for them at all (CLUTCH). I had an hour to throw together the 302 homework, because for the 2nd week in a row I've forgotten that it's due at noon, but I got it done this week! It wasn't pretty, and it was almost just a friend's work copied down (Shoutout Nitya for that), but I did get it done in that hour! After that I volunteered at BAE day, which I think I mentioned in the last post or two, but is a really fun SWE (Society of Women Engineers) event where 8th graders from the area come to cal poly and different engineering clubs put together little events and challenges for them. We had ours making turbine blades, which we then tested on a little turbine we have for this purpose. The kids loved it, there's a good reason we were requested as members of the event, and it was a lot of fun. I love doing events like that.

I think in a different life (and maybe even in my future) I would be a teacher, it's just so fun to teach people stuff and watch as they start to understand what you're telling them, everything from how to work on a bike to how to solve complex circuit equations.

302 was after that, and it was good, but I really need to figure out a long-term solution for staying awake in classes like that. The notes are just marking down slides, so there isn't much for me to do with my hands or my brain, it's just listening, and it's interesting stuff, but I find myself falling asleep in that class way more than any of my others, and even today, where I didn't feel tired in any other class, I was actively nodding off in 302.

I didn't have any caffeine today, which could be part of the problem/solution, but I dunno.

After 302 I went back to the library and worked on Stats for a little while before it was time to work on bike! I met Chip at Foothill Cyclery and we picked up all of the parts he needed (seat clamp, new tubes, chain lube, bolts for his hubs, etc) and then headed back to mine to put it all together. It didn't take us too long, but he learned a lot about how to service a bike, and now has a functional one, which is awesome.

I walked out with Chip to grab food, and then after eating I played some Marathon and burned some time.

My laptop is acting up with the eGPU, but the behavior is super inconsistent, so it's really hard to diagnose. It does crash almost every time it goes to sleep, which is awesome, but it also just freezes kinda at random, it's really annoying. It happened a couple times this evening, and I don't know what to change to get it to not do that. It's also decided that only one of my USB ports is valid, the one in the back-left no longer works for the dock at all, even though that's the one I used on Tuesday and Wednesday. Technology is so fickle sometimes.

One of my residents wanted to try out Marathon, so I had him watch a game of mine and then try a couple himself, and he got murdered repeatedly, but that's just kinda how the start of this game goes, honestly, and he said he'll probably buy it, which would be awesome.

I don't think I can rely on Seth for company in Marathon, which is too bad. Brother hasn't responded to my texts in like a week, so I'm trying to outsource the people I can play with, because it's a fun game alone, but it's a way better game in a squad with friends, both in terms of enjoyment and in terms of performance. The PVP scales when solo, but the robots don't get any less scary, arguably they get more scary IMO.

The squad of residents that watches movies got together at like 10:30 to ask me to watch something, and we don't really have another show to watch rn, so I pulled up my server to see what I have access to, and none of them had seen Scott Pilgrim vs The World, a movie that is so totally up their alley, so we watched that. I adore that movie, and it was a great watch with that crew.

That's how I got here though, at 1:30AM. So it goes.