2021 Week 7

⚙️ Work

Participating in the campus “congress” engagement sessions. Interesting…

I’m still trying to track down the cause of Zoom screensharing sometimes just being black boxes on my macbook pro. Zoom support thinks it might have to do with UDP vs. TCP connections, so I’ve switched to the TCP screensharing for now. The problem has been intermittent, so maybe it worked? Who knows. I’d bet that the issue isn’t related to TCP/UDP, but has something to do with the dual GPUs in this laptop and automatic switching freaking Zoom out somehow.

I’m starting to think this whole COVID thing might not blow over right away. Maybe I should do something about the home office - I’ve been staring at a wall for almost a year now…

🤔 PhD

Gah. So far, I’ve had approximately zero productive hours this week… I’m debating pulling the plug on the paper I’m working on for submission, and just using it in my dissertation instead. It’s a sole-author paper (so far), so no issues there…

I really really need to get back into a cadence of writing, rather than this burst/pause pattern I’m in now. Maybe a first draft in five minutes a day? | patter

PhD Friday™ this week turned into mostly a work day. Trying to get some writing done over the weekend as well. update: I managed to write 4 pages (so far) on saturday. Progress!

📚 Reading

• All of the corona virus on earth would fit inside a coke can. That’s just mind-boggling.
• I have no mind’s eye: let me try to describe it for you | Psyche Ideas (via Stephen Downes). I had no idea that aphantasia was a thing. I mean. People can literally see things? That sounds exhausting.
• MetaHuman Creator - digital human actors in Unreal Engine (via BoingBoing). Amazing.
• Pandemic privatization and digitalization in higher education | code acts in education
• The Benefits of Captured Lectures and Lessons in Traditional Classrooms - YuJa Official Home Page - they pull out the “your brain processes visual information 60,000 times faster than text!” bullshit. I mean. Text is visual information. And [citation (still) needed]. Alan’s still looking for the origins of that one…