Mercury is out of retrograde. It’s my last day of classes in my first week of classes. I’m feeling pretty good even though it’s cold and raining. I get in my car at 7:20 am to head to Service Design class. I put the key into the ignition and turn it. Nothing. A few more times. The car turns on, sort of, but the lights are flickering and the engine just won’t turn over. Shit. 30 minutes to class.
I don’t bother to check Uber because there are fewer cars here, it’s 7:30 in the morning, and it’s raining to boot. There’s a bus stop across the street. According to Google, there’s a bus coming that will get me to campus in 20 minutes. Awesome. It arrives and I get on it. 10 minutes into the ride, I realize it was not the same bus or route that is listed on Google maps. I’m headed toward campus, sure, but in the most roundabout way.
tl;dr I get there 15 minutes late.
This sets the tenor of the day. I go out with friends to a special secret bar they know about and we arrive and the bar is closed for a special event. Sigh. But at least I know how to ride the bus now. And, if nothing else, I finished my first week of classes.
On Wednesday, I taught the first of the other class I’m teaching, Design of AI Products and Services. If Service Design is a warm bath of familiarity, DAIPS is a cold shower of new ideas. I’ve worked on AI products and services professionally for the last, oh, 10 years, but understanding how to teach it and what the state of computer science is around it is still foreign to me. Unlike Service Design, the class readings are mostly new to me. Luckily my co-teachers are experts so I’ll be learning a ton as I learn to teach the class. It’s one of the most popular classes on campus, with over a hundred people on the waitlist. The students aren’t just HCII students either but come from all over CMU to take this class.
I just hope my car gets fixed soon because I need groceries. And a mattress.