Diaper changing sucks

It does suck. But not for the normal reasons that you're thinking; you're probably thinking, "Oh, just some guy, bitching about having to clean up his own kid's shit. If you don't like it, don't have kids."

Fair enough. I'm just complaining about the myriad modern 'conveniences' that end up taking a huge extra portion of time.

Take the diaper genie. The problem with this miracle device is that way in which diapers are actually disposed. This thing has a trap door through which you push the used diaper, and then the diaper is hygienically housed in an elongated blue trash bag (blue, presumably, so that hazmat teams know to avoid it). But here's the thing-- that trap door is incredibly strong. So you have to push a soaking wet diaper through this very strong trapdoor. And if the kid has diarrhea? Then guess what you're getting all over your hands! In the fight between trapdoor and diaper, the diaper usually loses.

"But that just means you haven't sealed the diaper properly!" I hear you cry. Maybe your baby is less prolific than mine, but he seems to be like the rest of us-- some days, he's like a little cow, turning everything that went in into very stinky fertilizer. And on those days, those size 4 diapers just aren't enough.

The wipes used to clean everything up? What the hell? Why, when I try to pull out one, do I get five? I only have one hand free, not two-- the other one is trying to keep the baby from getting up and jumping off the changing table to go off onto another adventure. Sometimes, these wipes are even glued together, so I'm forced to use two instead of one. These are Whole Foods wipes. For all the save-the-planet rhetoric, they could at least spend some time making sure that I get one wipe when I want one wipe.

To add injury to insult, the diaper genie blue hazmat bags have a little raised plastic ring around the inside. I see no point for this raised ring; however, if you scrape your hand along said ring, you'll cut yourself. So it's a good morning when your hand gets covered in piss, shit, and blood as you try to keep up with a toddler.

Time to drop off at daycare, with bandages...

Class idea

I've been mulling this over the last few days.

I want to teach a class, but a very specific class. I want to teach a class that would train students to be engineers that I would hire and expect, right out of the gate, that they knew how to do the work required, or at least how to work with a team. A lot of my work in graduate school was isolated from the nine-tenths of work necessary to make a product commercial. For instance, I learned how to make a gaussian blur filter, and even learned how to make equivalent versions as a PDE, using the FFT, and as a straight-up filter, but I never learned how to wrap that knowledge into something that could be presented to the end user.

The thing is, in order to teach at a university in the US (and maybe in other parts of the world, I haven't checked), you have to publish papers on the field. Publication has nothing to do with industry success; in fact, I'd argue that they are inversely indicative of commercial success. Academic code only has to work on a small subset of data, and may not have been thoroughly tested and almost certainly hasn't been looked at in detail by anyone other than the author. That makes for very non-robust code, not code you can just roll out into the world. I want to teach students how to make production-level code, and that means looking at things like source control, software engineering, bug tracking, and so forth. Now, how to get a university to bite, when I don't want to publish? That's the question...

Graduated!

I don't really update this much, but maybe I should?

Anyway, I'm all graduated now! Up next: What next?