Timed exposure

Welcome to this week's Reno News & Review.

I'm going with Einstein this week. He had that whole bit about time being relative down to a science. I say this because I had one of those great weekends that seemed over before it began.

I made apps Friday night. I'm learning the new version of App Inventor on a monitored MOOC [massive open online course]from MIT, which I take at Truckee Meadows Community College. It's frustrating because the new version of the language is only a couple of months old, and a lot of the old materials haven't caught up yet. I think I learn better when I have to figure out all the workarounds. It does show, as I've occasionally seen in the past, academia doesn't keep up with the real world.

Saturday I continued with the apps, and then headed up to TMCC where I spoke to the Writer's Conference attendees. From there, over to Carla and Remi's for the lovely Carla's 40th anniversary of hatching day. I must have eaten three pounds of crawfish. The fortune teller told me that I take a lot of work on, and there's a lot of chaos around me, but all that is good because that's the way I want to live, and things are only getting better. Afterward, I went over to the Reno Hackathon, where I designed an app to help people who have room in their recycling bins get together with apartment or dorm dwellers who don't have single-stream recycling. If you're on Android, you can download the app at bit.ly/1m2CyfW, but remember, it's totally beta, and I'm giving it to the Graduate Student Association. (I'm on the service committee.) Unfortunately, since the rules for the hackathon weren't posted anywhere, and the website was down, I didn't know it was only for Microsoft app development, so I couldn't be in the raffle drawings or considered for the prizes. I didn't even get a T-shirt. I did however, get three Dr. Peppers, four cookies and two slices of pizza, so it wasn't a total loss.

Sunday, reading for my other classes and more app design, and for entertainment, a trip to Costco. I didn't stop for one second this weekend. And that always makes me feel relatively good on Monday.