What did you do today?

Skripka

Cat-Dog Perch Manager
May 18, 2020
443
543
Spent the whole workday doing a theory of science course on Zoom. Very interesting stuff, but full-day video conferencing is exhausting, and I'm a bit disappointed in the others in the course not being more active in discussions (I'd expect that for BA or MA students, but not on the ph.d. level). As if that wasn't punishing enough, I've been struggling with motivation for exercise lately, so to change things up I decided to do a 5x1 minute interval run. Now I just hate myself. The potential upside is that my regular 6km runs might not seem as boring and/or unrewarding after this. But judging by the feeling of my lungs, thighs and body overall, I might just not move at all for a few days.

Yea during my grad school work that kind of thing ticked me off...at least it was rare. OTOH I had one notable course for my terminal degree where the prof literally showed up and read PhD/masters students the book verbatim from the front of the class. Knowing our department administrator, alias;The Dark Lord', personally read every single written comment for faculty evals--all the grad students in that course teamed up and reamed that prof as they deserved for literally doing less than the minimum.
 
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Valantar

Shrink Ray Wielder
Jan 20, 2018
2,201
2,225
Yea during my grad school work that kind of thing ticked me off...at least it was rare. OTOH I had one notable course for my terminal degree where the prof literally showed up and read PhD/masters students the book verbatim from the front of the class. Knowing our department administrator, alias;The Dark Lord', personally read every single written comment for faculty evals--all the grad students in that course teamed up and reamed that prof as they deserved for literally doing less than the minimum.
Wow, that's pretty terrible. I'm glad I've never seen anything like that! Most professors at my university seem remarkably nice, interested, generous with their time towards students, and overall like surprisingly great people, but I also know that they're nowhere near getting the recognition (=pay, mainly, but also just recognition of time spent) for all that extra work. Funnily enough, a significant portion of this course centered on the historical development of Western universities and how they have changed under neoliberalism and new public management, which can at least partly serve to explain both how the ones with too much of a concsience are overworked and underpaid, while others start gaming the system in order to be able to do the work they actually get paid to do - like the one you described. I mean, I've stepped in to teach classes where I'm given two hours of paid prep time for a two-hour lecture, which .... uh, that might be enough if you've taught the course for five years running and all you need to do is do a cursory search for new relevant literature and update the dates on your powerpoint, but when you're not familiar with the syllabus and haven't really touched that particular subject since you were a student yourself, it just means a day or so of unpaid work. That's no excuse for being a terrible teacher, of course. But it's as much of an expression of a deeply broken system as it is a personal failing.

In good news, today the rest of the group was much more active, and we had some really rewarding discussions. Guess they needed a warm-up after the month-long break since we last "met".
 
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Skripka

Cat-Dog Perch Manager
May 18, 2020
443
543
Wow, that's pretty terrible. I'm glad I've never seen anything like that! Most professors at my university seem remarkably nice, interested, generous with their time towards students, and overall like surprisingly great people, but I also know that they're nowhere near getting the recognition (=pay, mainly, but also just recognition of time spent) for all that extra work. Funnily enough, a significant portion of this course centered on the historical development of Western universities and how they have changed under neoliberalism and new public management, which can at least partly serve to explain both how the ones with too much of a concsience are overworked and underpaid, while others start gaming the system in order to be able to do the work they actually get paid to do - like the one you described. I mean, I've stepped in to teach classes where I'm given two hours of paid prep time for a two-hour lecture, which .... uh, that might be enough if you've taught the course for five years running and all you need to do is do a cursory search for new relevant literature and update the dates on your powerpoint, but when you're not familiar with the syllabus and haven't really touched that particular subject since you were a student yourself, it just means a day or so of unpaid work. That's no excuse for being a terrible teacher, of course. But it's as much of an expression of a deeply broken system as it is a personal failing.

In good news, today the rest of the group was much more active, and we had some really rewarding discussions. Guess they needed a warm-up after the month-long break since we last "met".

Eeek. Yea I'm very glad I got done and out before COVID struck. Talk about an effing headache of logistics and grading and motivation.

Ofc, the job market in my field was shit before COVID and still is. My interim employment field was killed by COVID and probably won't recover for at least another year easily even if I wanted it back (I don't)...so I took the year 'off' on unemployment to respecialize and learn completely new things. After a full calendar year--finally landed a career, and start on Monday....As a rookie I'll be earning only slightly less in raw income than my faculty advisor who'd been in his office for 20 years. I'll also be working less.
 
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Spotswood

Average Stuffer
Spotswood Cases
Jul 18, 2015
68
84
spotswoodcomputercases.com
I finished a bare AL case for a client. This one was designed to house an air cooled rig (5x 140mm fans). The motherboard tray is from MountainMods.









Three SSDs will mount to the two flat bar posts. The final position can be adjusted (left-to-right).





 
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CC Ricers

Shrink Ray Wielder
Bronze Supporter
Nov 1, 2015
2,233
2,556
I finished a bare AL case for a client. This one was designed to house an air cooled rig (5x 140mm fans). The motherboard tray is from MountainMods.

Three SSDs will mount to the two flat bar posts. The final position can be adjusted (left-to-right).

Digging it. The spacious room combined with the vents is giving me CaseLabs vibes :eek:
 

Valantar

Shrink Ray Wielder
Jan 20, 2018
2,201
2,225
I finished a bare AL case for a client. This one was designed to house an air cooled rig (5x 140mm fans). The motherboard tray is from MountainMods.









Three SSDs will mount to the two flat bar posts. The final position can be adjusted (left-to-right).





Wow, that is BIG. What is that giant void/built-in wind tunnel at the top for?
 

Revenant

Christopher Moine - Senior Editor SFF.N
Revenant Tech
SFFn Staff
Apr 21, 2017
1,670
2,698
Not everyone reads the MI-6 thread so I thought I might repost this here.

Well, it's upgrade time for my CCD MI-6. It will once again become my main Adobe editing computer thanks to Adobe's recent switch to GPU based compression and decompression for h264 and h265. I'm no longer tied to Quicksync or the I7-8700 (non-k) that has required substantial undervolting to keep cool. So I will be switching to Ryzen 5000 series, and cooling it with a Noctua L12S

Now the natural choice of the Ryzen 5000 series for this case is the 5600X. While it has the same core count and threads as the outgoing 8700, it actually performs about even the 9900K in the workload I'm using, and certainly punches above it's weight class.

So I, of course, rejected the 5600X and WILL BE SMASHING A 5950X 16 CORE MONSTER INTO MY MI-6! YEAHHHHHHHHHH! Cores baby! Gimme them cores!!!!

...ahem...updates to follow.
 

Revenant

Christopher Moine - Senior Editor SFF.N
Revenant Tech
SFFn Staff
Apr 21, 2017
1,670
2,698
Well, my father needed to upgrade his Adobe rig. Not SFF in anyway though as it uses an NZXT H710, 2X 1080S in SLI, 360mm radiator etc etc etc.

The one really nice thing about X299 was that while his system started as a 7820X 8-Core, I can just drop in a 10980XE 18-core.

I'm taking the "old" 7820X and building a Cerberus X system out of it.
 

Revenant

Christopher Moine - Senior Editor SFF.N
Revenant Tech
SFFn Staff
Apr 21, 2017
1,670
2,698
....and Amazon lost my B550 mainboard and SSD. Luckily they're sending another.

I went with the MSI B550. I put the Asus X570 in the wife's rig, but the little fans are audible and annoying. The B550 fan can be disabled. Also, it has good compatibility with the Noctua L12-S
 

tinyitx

Shrink Ray Wielder
Jan 25, 2018
2,279
2,338
Today, I bited the bullet and upgraded my main rig from Win10 v1909 to 20H2.
So far (12 hours later), no apparent problem (yet).