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New adventures

It was a busy week for me, starting off with a birthday celebration, culminating with Star Wars Day, and it happened to be my last week of teaching at Chicago State.

I have a fake facebook account floating around on the interweb. My original intention was to use it to snoop into other people’s lives and maybe take advantage of a special offer or two. Since the birthday I entered on that account is false, the few real friends of mine who found the account typically wish me a happy birthday some time in the fall. Fortunately, my wife doesn’t do facebook either, so she isn’t fooled by the alternative facts found on-line and knows when to really celebrate my birthday, and she did so this year with a pyramid of lava cakes.

Full disclosure, this picture does not have enough calories in it, so coffee ice cream and freshly made maple-syrup flavored whipped cream were added post production.

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Predicting elemental properties for #RealTimeChem Week

Happy #RealTimeChem week everybody.  What, you don’t know what it is?  Neither did I, untill I happened to read about it over at Compound Interest . (You guessed it, I’ve got lots of grading to do so I’m procrastinating again.) Since the theme this year centers on the four new elements that have been added to the periodic table, and I have an affinity for the table and all its secrets, I thought it might be fun to take advantage of the periodic properties of the table and predict some of the characteristics of the new elements.

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Bake my Pi and eat it too?

Do you ever wake up too early and can’t get back to sleep, so you decide to mess around with your Raspberry Pi, only to find out that the SD card has been baked and the operating system doesn’t load? This seems to happen to me more often than I’d like (both the waking up early and the baked RPi). There must have been something in that instant coffee (didn’t want to wake my wife with the noise of the coffee machine) and Italian Sweet Creme flavored creamer (instant coffee tastes awful without it) because I was able to come up with a reasonably clever solution to my problem this time.

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C2E2 – Working on my Chicago bucket list

One of the things I absolutely had to do before leaving Chicago is to attend C2E2 – the Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo.  Every year I’ve been here, I’ve remembered I needed to get tickets a week after the event ended!  This time, with Chicago State cancelling spring break and me having to forfeit my trip to New Mexico, I was determined not to miss the event.

Turns out I don’t know much about popular culture.

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