cassie ink

I'm annoying but I plan to change that (WN30)

Doing

I taught my first college class! It went far better than I anticipated; by about half an hour in, I fell into my natural teacher mode and it was smooth sailing from there. I’m excited to work with the kids1 and see how I do throughout the semester. I still have deep-seated imposter syndrome about teaching (adjunct lecturing) the course on a macro-level, but the day-by-day is at least seeming more feasible.

You wouldn't let it eat you wholе (WN29)

week-notes/029

Doing

I’m backporting a bunch of content from my old blogs so I can finally stop maintaining WordPress blogs. Here are the posts that I’ve moved over:

Sorry for unintentional pings on my rss feed; also, be aware that a lot of these are very old (like, ten years) and don’t necessarily reflect who I am as a person today! I’m trying to be better about preserving and sharing my writing, so I suppose that means I must submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known. Some of these pieces, while flawed, I am still fond of — particularly the Life is Strange one. I’m planning to do more and eventually close down the blog where they originally appeared (so I can stop maintaining a WordPress install).

Reduced to tongue eardrum thumb pencil and price (WN28)

week-notes/028

Doing

My desk upgrade journey hasn’t gone as planned. The monitor mount I bought has a really small clamp, which I should have checked before buying it, but I was so excited about a good deal. It fits on the desk and looks great, but I’m not able to spread the weight with the steel plates I bought, and I don’t trust a particleboard desktop to stand the test of time with a clamp. I spent a long time trying to brainstorm solutions (modify the clamp? build a wooden desk top?), and I had a sleepless night stressed about it. Eventually I decided to just order a different mount and I’ll try to sell this one locally to get my money back. It’s a bummer because the arm is really nice, but I wanted the piece of mind of using something that isn’t jerry-rigged. Normally I’m down for a stupid solution, but not when it’s holding up several hundreds of dollars of tech.

Using Hugo to generate a podcast feed

hugo-podcast

I’ve been podcasting on and off for over ten years now — all shows that I’ve since abandoned1, either intentionally or due to time — but I’ve kept websites for them up and running for archival purposes. Originally, the sites were powered by WordPress and podcasting plugins (PowerPress and then Podlove). I didn’t want to continue paying to host the sites nor maintain a WordPress install2. I could, of course, use one of the many podcast hosting services out there — but just like I believe in owning your own space on the internet, I believe you should own and control your podcast feed (and not have to pay a company $15/mo in perpetuity). I use Hugo (which I then deploy with Cloudflare Pages) to generate the sites and feeds; I chose Hugo because I understand how to use it. I’m sure you could make this work with other static site generators. There’s an 11ty plugin out there, for example, which is far more advanced than what I’ve set up. But I built this myself. It works. It does not require me to endlessly fiddle or update (unless I want to).

I want to fuck my computer (week notes 027)

week-notes/027

Doing

I’m still working on planning for the college class I’m teaching in a few weeks. I need to have my basic syllabus done within the next week or two, but I don’t really plan that way, so I’m going week by week and outlining the entire lesson. It’s a lot of work, but I’m feeling a lot better than I was last week. I was previously trying to reverse engineer the previous professor’s syllabus while bringing in some of my own resources, but I gave myself permission to do my own thing and only consult her work when I felt I needed something more for a lesson or a text. I’m moving much faster and things feel easier now, so it’s just a matter of doing the work.

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