Co-op and snow day [bicycling]

I took 5 of my Bicycling students on a field trip last night to the Albany Bike Rescue, our local bike co-op. This was the first time I have ever been able to make it over there; their usual hours are Tuesday and Thursday evenings from 6-8 pm, and it's just too hard for me to make it there after work.

I think the students appreciated the expedition. This co-op is supremely well-organized compared to other bike co-ops I've visited or been a part of. There seem to be two main reasons: they had a volunteer at one point who set up and organized an amazing bin system for parts sorting, and they have a scrapper who lives down the street who will readily accept all of the material they get in that can't be easily refurbished or repaired.

At this point, they don't have the space or resources to set up individual repair stations for teaching people how to fix their own bikes, but there's only so much any volunteer-run organization can do. The person in charge also noted that they'd love to relocate to a better space, but that landlords in downtown Albany seem to prefer to leave storefronts vacant over offering space to small nonprofits. The rowing club has noticed this. I wonder if there are any example programs or resources to change this, but on the other hand I need to make thoughtful decisions about where I put my energies.

I'm glad the snow didn't start up until after midnight, so we didn't have to contend with it during our field trip. This time, the snow is 100 times easier to shovel than that last sleet/snow-fest. And I don't need to hustle in to campus to try and catch any live animal shipments, either. So instead I'll wrestle with my home lecture recording setup. Wish me luck.

Happiness is a horrible myth [links]

If you substitute in something slightly different for the word and concept of "happiness," this interview still has some great points to make: https://web.archive.org/web/20220221231131/https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/02/21/magazine/laurie-santos-interview.html

For instance, I've been getting increasingly annoyed at myself for my levels of doomscrolling, so I'm going to try and adopt at least some of that "WWW" concept.

Related, but maybe somewhat less insightful, an interview with the author of a new book about the ability to sustain attention and focus: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/16/well/mind/focus-johann-hari.html

I always have mixed feelings about this sort of book. These books do seem to be helpful to a lot of people, but I have to wonder how much of the book will consist of a churn of prior ideas and insights versus actually new and different information. I'd think back to that book on sleep as a contrasting example: by the time Why We Sleep was written, there had been major changes to our understanding of sleep physiology, so there was actually something to learn.

Meanwhile, a friend posted this 2015 article on social media: https://hbr.org/2015/08/the-research-is-clear-long-hours-backfire-for-people-and-for-companies

Apropos to what I wrote above, this is far from a new concept, but it does seem like a good idea to occasionally remind ourselves of this point.

This article made me feel somewhat vindicated about my personal financial musings: https://www.npr.org/2022/02/18/1081751190/first-time-homebuyers-are-getting-squeezed-out-by-investors

THAT took way too long

So. Recording lecture videos from home on the Ubuntu-machine today because classes were canceled. When using Fruit Computers, I wound up paying for Movavi as my video editor, and got the Movavi screen recording software as well, which collectively allowed me to record a patch of my desk with a piece of paper on it that I could write on, my lecture slides, and a wee thumbnail video of myself (because studies show it's easier to follow along if there's a person in frame).

When getting the Ubuntu-machine set up, I found a forum that suggested vokoscreen for recording my computer screen. One can use cheese to fire up one's webcam that one has pointed at the desk, but to my dismay today I discovered that when you press 'record' in vokoscreen it causes cheese to freeze. It also looks like guvcview will only allow one to produce a thumbnail from a built-in webcam, not a thumbnail from a plugged-in one, so that didn't help.

Eventually after a bunch of casting about, I discovered that there's vokoscreenNG, the next-generation version of vokoscreen, which mercifully does NOT cause one's cheese to freeze. Whew.

But then, what about the video editing step? S had recommended avidemux, but when I last looked I'd settled on trying OpenShot.

I eventually got OpenShot to work well enough for now, but ugh. Movavi has better built-in sound-editing capabilities, as best I can tell.

At this stage I feel like it would be helpful to go through some video tutorials on the basics for using Gimp, Inkscape, and OpenShot. Trying to learn how to use all these new tools while having certain looming deadlines has been stressful.

And don't even get me started on .rtf files right now. I have a lot of them from my Fruit Company days, now that I've learned more about the format I'm mad about them, and I want a piece of software that's in-between Notepad and LibreOffice but not sold by Microsoft.