A most cordial greeting to each and every one of you! It feels like I’ve been neglecting my duties a bit as chief writer, editor, and overlord of XFA, so it’s high time I scratched away at this metaphorical parchment with my metaphorical quill. For those of you who are curious, it’s currently raining in Colorado Springs, and gracious me, it appears the rain is freezing into gigantic snowflakes. I’m sitting in my bed watching this, and let me tell you, meteorologically-inclined readers, it’s truly divine. It even smells strongly of Colorado rain, which, remarkably enough, is a different rain-smell than Berkeley rain, and I must say I have a strong preference for the former.
So I believe because I’m part sheep I ought to address the elephant in the room, or more specifically the microscopic crown-shaped boi that I certainly hope is not in my room, coronavirus. It turns out we’ve had a fair number of cases in Colorado Springs, and there was at least one death in my county. We have yet to put on “Shelter in Place,” however, unlike my college hometown of Berkeley. I must say that I am remarkably happy to not be in California, and specifically the Bay Area at this moment. For those of you reading who are still in Berkeley, I wish you Godspeed in all your endeavors, and I dearly hope you make it through this unscathed.
Now then, in keeping with the thinly-veiled egotistical themes of this blog, I feel inclined to turn the conversation back to myself. I am actually remarkably happy to be back home in Colorado Springs. I hadn’t fully noticed it until I arrived back here, but I was getting increasingly tired of Berkeley throughout this semester. This was, certainly, in large part my own fault, as I had been socially distancing myself even before the reign of COVID-19. It turns out that if you don’t consciously make time for spending time with people, you generally don’t spend time with people. It also didn’t particularly help that I had made a good deal of my friends during my first year though the Christian organization Cru, which, btw, is the Christian organization to join if you’re looking for one. While my Cru friends are generally wonderful people with whom I have very much enjoyed spending time throughout college, I have been very actively not going to Cru meetings during this semester due to my spiritual situation, so I really haven’t seen them nearly enough.
Who am I kidding. It’s not like you care about my social situation. Let’s get onto some projects. While I haven’t put this post under Super Secret App Project, let’s talk about Super Secret App Project. So remember during my post about entering into the code haze I said programming in JavaScript is an anarchical pursuit because it’s unclear when anything is happening? I have since learned that that is literally just the truth. Unlike the other languages with which I have experience, JavaScript is an intrinsically asynchronous language, which generally means in real-person-talk that it executes your code whenever it possibly can, and it doesn’t necessarily wait for certain commands to finish before it moves on to the next one. Anarchy, my friends, anarchy. While all the Promises and Awaits are a bit of a headache, my node.js server is wicked fast. And let me tell you, I’m a big fan of wicked fast servers.
I can see the glazed-over look in some of your eyes, so let me move onto one final topic. Obviously all the school closures and online classes are a big deal. What I’m interested in, however, is how people are going to respond to this epidemic several months from now when we’re able to lead normal lives again. One particularly interesting thing that people are already talking about is the fact that all around the nation, people are paying college tuition for online classes. Why is this interesting? Because literally every YouTuber and his/her/their pet goat have made online courses in pursuit of their “Passive Income” dreams, and they’re a heck of a lot cheaper than college tuition. Now, obviously there’s a large difference between a college course and some schmeagy thackwat that some YouTuber has put together, but both are doing the same thing, in principle. The fact of the matter is that, unlike twenty years ago, all information is basically online. And to all my fellow students out there, we both know that neither of us have been going to all of our Zoom lectures in favor of simply watching lectures later/never.
I feel myself beating around the bush, so let me get directly to the point. For a very time, it has seemed to me that College is far too expensive. Shockingly original, I know. Let me attempt to dissect the various aspects of the College experience.
Now then, let me attempt to Warren Buffet this and see where I can cut costs. First and foremost, lectures should be recorded. Instead of having to deal with bad professors, we should just get some super good professors to record the lectures for a class once. Secondly, I strongly feel as though in-person discussions can be far more virtual than they have been to date. What I’m picturing here is a sort of Uber-like situation, where you have a bunch of people who have somehow proven their expertise in a particular course making some extra money on the side providing on-the-spot tutoring sessions to anyone who may need it.
Actually, never mind. I clearly haven’t fully fleshed out this line of thinking, so I won’t subject you to the loose ideas floating around my brain matter. If you, however, are interested in revamping the education system, give me a yodel.
Heavens, I really petered out there at the end. Well whatever. Bye.