Greg and Kat's blog

I haven’t blogged for a while. Being really busy has caused me to have little time to blog, and little to talk about if I did.

The new semester started. I’m teaching CMPT 120 (intro programming, etc) and CMPT 470 (web-fu). I’m also supervising CMPT 165 (web-fu-lite) distance ed. And, I’m supervising Angelina in a directed studies course. And I’m undergrad director. Yeah, it’s going to be a big bag of crazy all semester.

Angelina’s project is quite cool: She Builds Robots. The finished product will be a series of video tutorials (with some other stuff in the mix) on building and programming autonomous robots. I’ve signed on because of the outreachy part of the whole thing. The fact that I don’t know crap about robots bothers me a little, but Angelina seems to be doing okay on that front, so I think we’re good.

On the admin side, it’s still pretty much all restructuring all the time. The smart money is on Computing Science and Engineering forming a new faculty together. I’m campaigning for the “Faculty of Engineering and Computing Science” because it has a pronounceable acronym: FECS. I still have a side bet that we will end up in the Faculty of Science (with the other end of that bet being the status quo).

Honestly, I pretty much stopped caring what happens when I couldn’t think of anything that would be better or worse depending on the outcome. I might like my dean more… or less. Anything other than the status quo would be more coherent for recruiting, so that would be good.

Teaching-wise, all is well. I could do 470 in my sleep at this point and 120 is chugging along too. My 120 students seem to have some reading comprehension problems (e.g. being unable to determine what room their labs are in, after I email with the room numbers), but that’s annoyingly normal for first year.