My friend Sam DuBois has enlisted my help in building Pumpkin Man for Halloween 2020. Pumpkin Man is set to be a larger-than-life being with a 🎃 for a head who interacts with passersby. The project is reuniting Sam, Kai, and me, the team behind 2019’s Avenue Adventure. My primary focus is on developing the computer control systems to bring Pumpkin Man to life.
Today at my internship I merged a PR that broke the master branch. Surprisingly, it wasn’t a big deal. As soon as the issue was reported to my team, I knew which commit was to blame. I pushed up a branch that reverted that commit and waited for it to pass CI. On the recommendation of my mentor, I sent a Slack message to the whole engineering group letting them know that someone had broken master and a fix was incoming.
My internship wasn’t originally supposed to be remote. But I’m enjoying many aspects of working from home. For one, my work environment is mostly under my control. In an open office floor plan (which seems to be popular), I would be subject to ambient noise and visual distractions. Besides that, I have a variety of locations available to work from — my desk, the couch, or even out in the backyard in the sun (highly recommended!
I came up with this set of ten cards from the game Dominion. It is centered around the Tournament card from the expansion Cournucopia, and tries to allow the players to accumulate plenty of money. This makes it a game show of sorts — players compete for earnings while pitting themselves against the other players.
Oberlin College announced a plan for the 2020–2021 school year that, in my view, has some major problems. This post contains the email response I sent to President Carmen Twillie Ambar.
Dear President Ambar,
Just for fun, I signed up for the DEF CON CTF 2020 Qualifiers this weekend. I didn’t successfully solve any challenges besides the (deliberately easy) welcome challenges. But I spent a while working on “uploooadit,” a web challenge focusing on a Flask app. This post is a write-up of my unsuccessful attempts at solving the challenge. The Challenge The challenge links to a simple website and provides the source code, written in Python with the web framework Flask:
I don’t have much to add to my reflection on week 2 of online classes. I’ve continued weekdaily naps, as well as walks and runs. My attention and promptness to my schoolwork was not as good this week as it was in week 2; in general, I was more distracted from work, so I started it later in the day. One welcome improvement is that my politics professor has shortened class slightly by removing the full-class discussion that would follow the small group discussions.
Last week I wrote a reflection on my first week of online classes in which I described some of the good and bad changes caused by the move online. Now that another week has passed, I want to revisit that topic.
Colleges (and high schools) across the world have switched to teaching classes online due to the current COVID–19 outbreak. I just finished my first week of taking classes entirely online. This post is a brief reflection on my experience of the sudden adjustment: what went well, and what didn’t? The format All of my classes are meeting via video chat at the regular time. In two of them it is more or less expected that students will enable their cameras, and in the other two only a few students do.
Kishi Bashi’s 2016 album Sonderlust is a marked departure from the style of his previous two albums, and no track exemplifies this better than “Say Yeah.” In contrast to his established style of mostly solo creations constructed from voice and violin loops, the track features a distinctly synth-pop sound characteristic of the 1970s that incorporates quite a few other musicians. “Say Yeah” opens with a chiptune-style melody that sounds like something from an early videogame.