Back again, Year 11 time

Sorry about the lack of posting. I have no excuse; I just forgot.

I started the Preliminary course this year; and several things have changed:

• Weird periods
  • Frees
  • Period 0s (ugh)
• Workload increase
• Formality

Then there’s benefits:

• Our own canteen line 😀
• Quiet study areas
• Power over juniors >:)
• Power over the computer room

I’m liking it so far. It’s a lot of fun, aside from the workload, because all the subjects we do are ones we’ve chosen ourselves.

The only subject I am disliking at the moment is English; I’m not good at it because there are vague questions and silly things. 😛

Hopefully I’ll start posting again. It helps me organize my mind.

I’m back! and PyCharm

For the past week I have been at Work Experience at CSIRO’s Astronomy and Space Sciences (CASS) Marsfield base. I was “working” with the IT guys, and I basically sat at my desk and programmed in Python the entire day.

I’m entitled to an opinion!

So. The above statement is true, very true, everyone has (or should have) the right to their own opinion.
However, it is ALSO my right to have the opinion that your opinion is absolute crap.
Some people use that phrase when they’re in an argument:
“The basic rule for trigonometry is sohcahtoa,” I said to someone a couple of days ago. They responded by saying, “No, it’s cohsahtoa!” rather indignantly.
The basic trig functions are s=o/h, c=a/h, t=o/a. You may look it up if you wish. I was completely prepared to forgive this person and teach then the proper order. But it went into a fairly lengthy argument, which I refused to continue when the other person said this:

It’s my opinion and I am entitled to it!

I just stopped and walked away.
Just because you have an opinion, it does not mean that that should be everyone else’s opinion. Just because you have the right to an individual opinion, that does not mean that it is the perfectly correct one.

Be nice!

I believe that you should be accepting and generally nice to everyone. This was not true about six months ago; I have matured, I guess.
When somebody you don’t like comes up to you and tries to socialize, join in. If you don’t like them for something they do, they may still be a good person in a social circumstance.
My next point is those so-called ‘social outcasts’. The ones who sit by themselves at lunch. Firstly, there is nothing wrong with sitting by yourself. Secondly, I know from experience that a lot of the time, these ‘social outcasts’ have groups of close friends. Even if they’re a little strange, you need to accept them and just be nice to them.
My last point goes to people with mental problems, people who identify as LGBTQ, people of a particular religion, race etc.
It is not OK to not accept someone who is different to you like that.
On the other side, we have people who you actively dislike. Those people you may not want to talk to. Just be nice!
That’s my rant. Thankyou

Influence and Lying

A while ago, when I was in Wales, I was thinking about lying, and different types of knowledge. I decided to classify the things we know into groups, each harder to manipulate or influence than the last.

Stop Calling It My Maiden Name

Agreed.

The Belle Jar

In my former life, back before I had a kid and became a yoga teacher and started a cuss-filled feminist blog, I worked in the financing department of a large international bank. A few months after I started working there (and, coincidentally, a few months after I got married), one of the higher-ups was chatting me and my coworkers up when, out of nowhere, he said:

“Anne, is Thériault your married name or your maiden name?”

Flustered, I replied, “It’s just my regular name.”

“What do you mean by that?” he asked, totally nonplussed.

“I mean… it’s the name I was born with? I didn’t change my name when I got married, if that’s what you want to know.”

“So it’s your maiden name,” he said, his tone landing somewhere between condescending and wink-wink-I-get-it-you’re-making-a-joke.

But I wasn’t making a joke – I actually do really hate the term “maiden name”…

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Googling

As a so-called ‘tech person’ I sometimes get a bit frustrated when people can’t do a simple task using a computer. (This is, of course, excluding the elderly and those who have had little to no connection to computers.) When working in class, I quite frequently hear the desperate plea of ‘Luuuuuke, fix my Internet!’ or ‘Luuuuuke, fix my [other computer related problem]!’. This does tend to become a little annoying.

I don’t know everything about computers. Quite a lot of the time I’m just following this flowchart. Which brings me to my point: People should learn how to concisely use Google to find an answer to their problem; so, what follows is a quick guide to using Google to fix problems.

Method 1:

1. Simply ask Google. For example, if I wanted to know how to replace the screws in my laptop battery compartment, I might Google this: ‘How do I replace the battery screws in my Lenovo laptop’, or ‘does Python have a switch/case statement?’
2. Hold down control (for Windows) and click the results to open them in new tabs.
3. Sites like Ask.com, Computerhope, and other help sites are useful.

Method 2:

1. Type in keywords; to use the previous example: ‘Lenovo replace battery screws’
2. The keywords could follow this pattern: [subject] [verb] [noun], or in the context of a program [program name] [action you want to perform], like ‘Photoshop crop and image’ or ‘HTML add a link’.
3. Continue from step 2 in method 1

If you want to learn about a topic, you might type [subject] [topic], like ‘python lists‘.

I move that instead of Health classes, we should have an Internet class.