This was hilarious. The makeup department nailed it.

Beavis and Butt-Head - SNL
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86qKgK0asGo

I also am avoiding grading.

This year is the science department's turn to order curriculum materials. We asked if we could buy equipment instead of textbooks and our wonderful admin said that was fine. So I'm getting many, many upgrades and additions to my toolset.

Today, my first new purchase came in.

#chemistry #teaching

This is one of the simplest and at the same time smartest things I've ever printed: a tweezer for multimeter probes so you can use them one-handed. Kudos 👌

https://www.printables.com/model/1208377-multimeter-dmm-probe-tweezer

(P.S. I should clarify that this is not my own design, just found it really clever and worth sharing.)

#3dprinting #electronics

All that said, I'm not really feeling it today. I'm having a hard time snapping out of break and feeling distracted in class.

This is one of the hard things about teaching - when I'm here, I'm _here_. I need to carry those emotions and be human (I don't subscribe to "check yourself at the door" mentality) but model resilience and persistence in work when I don't feel like I have the energy to do the work.

#teaching

Today, first year chemistry is continuing to work on dilution calculations with some practice problems and finishing a lab analysis. Then, we're doing an acid/base properties card sort before jotting some general principles down.

Advanced chemistry is weird because half the class is out taking the ACT, so it'll be a day of review and catch up for whoever is here.

Wed development is writing a proposal to update a school website based on an audit completed earlier.

#teaching
:cupofcoffee:

Gonna try a thing.

https://blog.ohheybrian.com/2025/04/revisiting-anchorcms/

#blogging

I feel so helpless wading into a new codebase in a language I'm not familiar with.

I finally have my PHP tooling set up, now it's learning syntax and how files work together to make some progress. Currently figuring out how to just print information into either stdout or the page when an error is thrown.

State testing this week in school, so students are all out of whack.

Advanced chem is going to design a microscale titration for first year chemistry students to do next week. It just needs to show acid/base neutralization, but using pipets rather than the whole buret mess. I'm looking forward to having them work that out.

First year chemistry is practicing dilutions and finishing up odds and ends. We'll do acids and bases next week.

#teaching :cupofcoffee:

I have had terrible sleep the last couple of days and it's really starting to wear on my attitude.

Most of what I've run into so far is outdated packages and deprecated functions from newer versions of PHP.

This feels promising...

#AnchorCMS

How many hours of sleep do you get a night on average? Excluding naps.

#askfedi

Ok, I'm going down this road.

Without using Docker, what's the recommended way to get set up for local PHP development these days for a LAMP app? I used to use Vagrant/MAMP, but I'm sure there are new ways.

#askfedi #webdev

It's also so lightweight that I think my little Linode box can handle it without upgrading to a higher RAM tier. I found that Wordpress regularly crashed the machine because php-fpm was so greedy for resources.

I'm _really_ thinking about finding a fork of Anchor CMS and using that for the blog moving forward. I miss the flexibility of being able to log into a site from anywhere and post.

I started reading Parable of the Sower this week and I was not prepared for how dark it is.

I'm trying to get back into creating regular artwork. I wrote a blog post and included many pictures.

https://blog.ohheybrian.com/2025/04/getting-back-into-art/

#blogging #mastoart #watercolor #beginner

Artists, how do you get over the fear of potentially muddying something up? I have some rough sketches to help plan out painting. I'm very happy with the plans but I'm not confident in the painting I've learned so far. I feel like I'm just ruining things 😅

#mastoart #watercolor