What You've Done Today...or yesterday...or what you are doing RIGHT THIS MINUTE!!!

[Gfted1]

11 minutes ago, Hurlshort said:

You didn't have a brunch or recess growing up?

No, like Shady, it was classes-lunch-classes-go home.

I think we used to call recess by the name "PE" (physical education), but it was a dedicated class where we did sporty activities. It wasnt a break.

[ShadySands]

Same for us regarding PE, just a class, though if you were on a sports team, you usually had a special class that was just extra practice/weight room/gym time.

Lunch was our only free time but I guess the 5 minutes between classes could count if your classes were close enough together that you had time to do anything besides maybe go to the bathroom.

[Malcador]

Elementary had 2 recesses, 10ish and 2ish. 1 hour for lunch, pretty easy.  High school was one lunch period, 50 mins. 

 

[Hurlshort]

50 minutes for lunch!?! That's luxurious. I've had 30 minutes for lunch for my entire career.

[LadyCrimson]

---my memory says my (public) schools had a short morning recess up to 8th grade. Highschool it became only lunch plus the time allowed between classes for locker-grabs and walking to next class. Classes were not a full hour, with 8am 1st class but other classes would end up with odd start times like 1:20. Can't recall if they were 40 or 50 minutes long tho. I think (highschool) my last class would end at 2:20 or 2:40 (I was home by 3).
---I don't recall ever having a school provided lunch, ever, let alone brunch. I always had a bag lunch mom made, or I just didn't eat (wasn't a big morning eater anyway), or during lunch kids would walk to 7-11 for a snack, that sort of thing. There might've been a few grades where they had a tiny cafeteria and offered milk for a quarter and a few other things but hardly anyone cared/used it if so. Just wasn't a serious thing/focus where I lived I guess.
---the only thing I remember from 1 year of Spanish is zapatos=shoes. Don't ask me why I remember that one thing, no idea. And I would agree US higchsool language classes are terrible. Only my sister can speak Spanish fluently, and a smattering of others, and from her own extra effort because she was medical and knew she needed/wanted it for patient communication.

Edited April 11 by LadyCrimson

[Malcador]

26 minutes ago, Hurlshort said:

50 minutes for lunch!?! That's luxurious. I've had 30 minutes for lunch for my entire career.

High school I said. Since I've been working, I usually take an hour and no manager has given me grief for it. 

[LadyCrimson]

^ School lunch periods in highschool for me was around 30 minutes. Again, don't recall exactly.  Wasn't more than 40 max tho.

[Gfted1]

My high school offered Spanish and German, and I squeaked by the latter by the hair on my chinny chin chin. My 9-5 requires that I communicate with a lot of different European languages, and thanks unto the FSM, they all speak English. But when they dont I swear if I stare at German long enough it almost reveals itself in a way that I can understand it. Its beautiful to me in its mechanical nature.  

[majestic]

Oh, trips down memory lane, and about schools, yay, I love those. Let's see.

High school, or at least the sort-of equivalent that I signed up for (grades 8 to 13, 5 year course), had 50 minute teaching units. Five minute breaks between each unit, with a a 50 minute break (for lunch) after four or five classes. Most of the days started at 08:15 and ended 16:25. We had some school days ending at 17:20, and some started at 07:20. With my commute times being what they were, I left home at 06:35 (5:35 at the insane days that started earlier than normal) and was at home ~18:15 at the earliest, shortly before 20:00 at the worst. Homework and assignments usually took another hour, longer on days with accounting and maths, as those had teachers who delighted in giving out a lot of assignments. Right, in between we were supposed to study too, I guess. During 2nd and 4th grades we had to apply for a summer internship. Students were not allowed to proceed to the next grade without them.

The busiest schedule we had in 11th grade, clocking in at 14 or 15 separate classes, including "voluntary" extracurricular activities. Least busy was the final grade with 8 classes, but we had a year long project for the finals and a paper* to write. By least busy I mean we "only" had 30 units per week in the final grade, as opposed to 36 + ECs. Projects were picked or assigned from a pool of projects submitted by companies, government agencies and NGOs. Most students wanted company projects because they were an easy way to find a job (and the companies had free talent to check out for a year) - plenty of us who had a company project actually worked part time for those companies during the final year, so the ones from the agencies and NGOs ended up being assigned. My group got their project from the school board: digitising administrative processes at schools. Pretty neat topic that no one else took seriously, although I suppose the idea came a bit too early (talking late 1990ies/early 00s here).

For the paper we were provided a massive set of anonymized data from our school: students' grades in each class and the amount of classes they missed each year. The basic idea was pretty simple, we were to find a correlation between the grades and missed classes. It seems logical enough, I suppose, students who miss a lot of classes should generally have worse grades than those who don't, except try as we might, we could not find any meaningful correlation, it was near zero. One of our teachers was so baffled by the results that she went over our calculations. Three times, in as many weeks.

The only thing we could show was that there were certain classes and teachers where lower attendence in genereal tended to lead to worse grades, but that is logical, we had classes where the grade directly depended on attendence, like PE, or teachers that factored attendence into their grades. Needless to say, the presentation of our results did not go over too well. The obvious problem is the small sample size, and that one needed to pass an SAT to even get into the school in the first place, and even then, the dropout rate in the first year is above 50%, and of everyone who started the same year as I did, less than 15% actually graduated. Once past the first grade you're left with students easily capable of making up any missed time, and missing classes is not the leading cause of the high dropout rate in the first year.

*Not to scientific writing standards, but it did include research pertaining (at least superficially) to the project for the final exams.

1 hour ago, Gfted1 said:

My high school offered Spanish and German, and I squeaked by the latter by the hair on my chinny chin chin. My 9-5 requires that I communicate with a lot of different European languages, and thanks unto the FSM, they all speak English. But when they dont I swear if I stare at German long enough it almost reveals itself in a way that I can understand it. Its beautiful to me in its mechanical nature.  

Im dichten Fichtendickicht sind dicke Fichten wichtig. *scnr*

[LadyCrimson]

Hubby had to go down to the Bay Area overnight re: work, for the first time in ages. Annnnnd - his car apparently broke again. Maybe the starter this time (not the same thing as previous). His sister can drive him around there if needed but re: coming home. It's a pickle. Shop is supposed to be open but y'know how often they want/need to take 2-3 days to get around to you.

Maybe he'll get lucky. Either that or he'll be down there for a few days, or I'm driving down there for a 6hr round trip pick up and then again to get his car, or ....

Edit: I'm not impressed with this moderately expensive used Lexus. Hahaaa, pfft.

Edited April 12 by LadyCrimson

[LadyCrimson]

Hubby got lucky. They picked up his car and gave him a loaner, with a large enough mile radius condition where he just drove the 3 hrs home with it. Still had to drive back pick up his sometime this week ofc.

Apparently his sister is alsorecently suffering from a very similar lowest back vertebrae condition and is looking into surgery options. And after talking to one of his brothers, he revealed he had it too - they did some kind of "scrape away stuff from the collapsed discs" and he says he's better/fine now.  AND their father (hubby has nothing to do/never talks with their father) had something similar happen. So maybe something running in the father-side family for some genetic-whatever reason? Anyway, the Kaiser docs never mentioned any "scraping" surgery option, only the spinal fusion. We'll have to look into this now.

Edited April 13 by LadyCrimson

[Malcador]

Rather impressed a client spent 16 minutes on a call trying to find where they downloaded our .msi .  Only to find out the dude running it can't execute it due to security.  They ended off by asking "I see an error message that JAVA_HOME isn't set, should we have installed Java?"

 

[Gorth]

1 hour ago, Malcador said:

Rather impressed a client spent 16 minutes on a call trying to find where they downloaded our .msi .  Only to find out the dude running it can't execute it due to security.  They ended off by asking "I see an error message that JAVA_HOME isn't set, should we have installed Java?"

 

Java isn't the worst place to call home...

 

 

[Malcador]

43 minutes ago, Gorth said:

Java isn't the worst place to call home...

 

 

Lot of sediment in that pond. 

[ShadySands]

Fill it in and put up a parking lot. 

-----

I've mostly lost my sense of smell recently which means I can't taste things very well either and it's really put me off food. On the plus side, I've lost 10 pounds in a week because I get no pleasure out of it. Or I could be dying, I am the same age as my mom was when she got cancer and unpeacefully peaced out.

 

Edited April 16 by ShadySands

[Malcador]

Hopefully not imminent death, shame that your mom died young. 

I long for death on this call, though. Seems everyone owns macaws or something based on background noise 

[majestic]

29 minutes ago, ShadySands said:

Fill it in and put up a parking lot. 

-----

I've mostly lost my sense of smell recently which means I can't taste things very well either and it's really put me off food. On the plus side, I've lost 10 pounds in a week because I get no pleasure out of it. Or I could be dying, I am the same age as my mom was when she got cancer and unpeacefully peaced out.

 

Common symptom of the big C even if you have no others. Hit me as well, the first time I got it (but not the second and third time). Ended up eating ham already gone bad because I couldn't smell it, which was pretty "fun" for two days afterwards.

Edited April 16 by majestic

[Malcador]

Apparently people are cheating in remote interviews by using chat gpt or something to give the answers, kind of funny.

[Sarex]

3 hours ago, Malcador said:

Apparently people are cheating in remote interviews by using chat gpt or something to give the answers, kind of funny.

It's very obvious with the camera on and the way they answer.

[Hurlshort]

Yeah, I've been trying to explain to my students how important it is going to be to develop a voice as a writer. All of this AI generated stuff is going to mean it will actually be easier to stand out from the crowd if you avoid using it. Imagine how many AI generated essays schools are being forced to read through right now?

[Malcador]

7 hours ago, Sarex said:

It's very obvious with the camera on and the way they answer.

Haven't had that so far, but manager was telling me that.  Shouldn't matter too much, seems they let any monkey in that knows "select * from .."

Edited April 18 by Malcador

[pmp10]

12 hours ago, Malcador said:

Apparently people are cheating in remote interviews by using chat gpt or something to give the answers, kind of funny.

Wait until you've worked under enterprise architect hired that way. 
 

[Malcador]

3 hours ago, pmp10 said:

Wait until you've worked under enterprise architect hired that way. 
 

Well they made me a manager here, so that tells you everything you need to know.

At least did my good deed for the month, helped a blind lady make her way to the bus stop on way back from voting. She was amused by my saying "30 degrees to your right", but understood it.

[Malcador]

Happy Easter

[majestic]

Yeah, happy Easter guys.