musings on life as a university professor
I ve not blogged recently, so I ll try to bring people up to date on what I ve done since my last posts in January 2026. I did the 6 performances for The Best of the Rest, Fri,Sat,Sun 27 Feb–8 Mar 2026. The plays went well and I got to do full clown makeup (our staged reading [ ]
I ve not blogged about my acting lately, so I ll try to bring people up to date on what I ve done since my last posts in March and May 2025) For actual theater, I ve been involved in several projects: I did the 9 performances of Fortinbras as Claudius. I thought that the production was a very successful one, [ ]
I m still catching up on my posts about my pottery. Here are more pots that were made and glazed in Fall 2024. All of them were made with Bravo Buff clay, as I did not use any other clay until the Fall 2025 class. There were 4 pots glazed on 30 Oct 2024, two of [ ]
My Halloween costume for 2025 was as Jack Frost. I had originally bought the costume (suit, tie, and socks) for a role as Jack Frost in Electra, Daughter of Claus, a play written and planned for the 2024 Christmas season by the Cabrillo Performing Arts Collective, but that show was cancelled, because the organizers did not [ ]
For the Cabrillo College Fall play (Metamorphoses) I was asked to 3D-print the Corinthian capitals for the tops of two columns on the set. The capitals needed to be fairly large (sitting on top of a 9.5 diameter column), and even my new QIDI Plus-4 printer is not big enough to print them in one [ ]
I know that it is 2025 and I am in a Fall 2025 pottery class, but I never got around to blogging about the pots I made last year, so I figured I should catch up on those in a couple of posts before blogging about this Fall s pots. All the pots from last year [ ]
I wanted to try printing a new Shakespeare cookie cutter with my new 3D printer, to see if the better print quality would result in a better cutter. The CAD tool I use, OpenSCAD with the BOSL2 library, has been updated since I designed the cookie cutter, and the old code no longer ran, due [ ]
My wife accidentally left a silicone basting brush too close to a burner on our gas stove and melted the ABS handle: She was OK with using the basting brush with the bent handle, but I thought that this would be a good opportunity for me to try modeling something to match an existing object. [ ]
My family and I went to Ashland, Oregon July 15–20 to see 7 plays in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. There were 9 plays in this year s season, but seven was as many as anyone could see on one visit: Fat Ham closed on June 27, but Quixote Nuevo didn t open until July 9 ; and [ ]
I ve done yet more printing on my new 3D printer—a variant of the stand that I posted in More 3D prints on QIDI Plus4 and another mask The stand I printed this time was not for a roll of new plastic produce bags, but a new base for the old bag-dryer that we ve had for [ ]
I ve done some more printing on my new 3D printer. The grocery stores near us have switched to using compostable bags, which are not washable or reusable, and I like having bags around for leftovers, for ripening fruit, and for disposing of scoopings from the cat-litter box. So I bought a roll of produce bags [ ]
I ve recently bought myself a new 3D printer: a QIDI Plus4. I bought this one primarily to be able to print larger objects—in particular, I wanted to be able to print masks this Fall when I m taking the Makeup and Masks class at Cabrillo. This particular model, in addition to the size is much faster [ ]
As I promised in Acting Update: Fortinbras, this post is about building Claudius s prayer bench (my work for TA 27 Theatre Production Workshop). The design is not mine, but Skip Epperson s, but I did all the construction on the bench. First, the photos: Building the prayer bench got me a chance to work with a [ ]
This post is yet another weight progress report, continuing the previous one, part of a long series since I started in January 2015. I had a body-fat measurement done at Stanford as part of a medical research project. I now supposedly have 19.2% body fat (down from 21.2% a year ago), and my skeletal muscle mass has [ ]
I’d like to invite everyone to see Cabrillo’s Spring play Fortinbras at the Black Box theater inside Crocker Theater on Cabrillo’s Aptos campus. The play by Lee Blessing is a very silly, very funny comedic sequel to Shakespeare’s Hamlet that starts where Hamlet ends. Many of the characters are now ghosts—I’m playing the ghost of Claudius [ ]
I ve not been blogging lately, for two reasons: I ve been wasting a lot of time on Reddit (particularly on r/Theatre and r/acting), and I ve been spending a lot of time on actual theater. I won t blog about the time wasted on Reddit—if you are interested, you can search for me there, as I tend to [ ]
On Monday 2025 Jan 20, I had a rehearsal down in Soquel for NextStage Readers Theater (this will be my third year doing staged readings of short plays with them). I decided to leave early, so that I could stop for lunch at Asian Express at Capitola Mall, since I had seen people commenting on [ ]
On 2025 Jan 15, I had another stress echocardiogram. I felt in better shape this year than I have in a while, after all the moderate-intensity exercise I d done commuting to Cabrillo College 4 times a week all Fall semester. In order not to lose that fitness over Winter break, I started doing some high-intensity [ ]
Today I recorded two monologues and added them to my playlist: https://tinyurl.com/Kevin-Karplus-monologues. Both were monologues that I learned for the Shakespeare course from Bill Peters at the Actors Theatre that just ended last week, though only one is from Shakespeare. One is the first sentence of Chaucer s Canterbury Tales, which I provided as an example of [ ]
I tried Chatbot Arena (https://lmarena.ai/) with some simple electronics problems today. The large language models have gotten much better and can do simple problems of calculating complex impedance, but they still can t do simple designs like this exercise from my book: Design a passive band-pass filter with a peak gain around 0.5, a low [ ]
This post is yet another weight progress report, continuing the previous one, part of a long series since I started in January 2015. As I predicted in my last weight report, my exercise levels did drop down over the summer, despite taking acting classes twice a week in UCSC s summer session. The classes ended up being one [ ]
In Auditioning for 8 tens @8 I mentioned that I d be auditioning for the short-play festival 8 tens @8. On Sunday Sept 29, I did a monologue from Last of the Red Hot Lovers by Neil Simon, and I got two callbacks based on it. On Monday, just before I went into my Voice and Diction [ ]
I ll be auditioning for the short-play festival 8 tens @8 this weekend. The festival has been running for a while (the first one was in January 1996), and they claim to be The longest running short play festival in the world! , though I don t know what evidence they have for the claim (other than that [ ]
Santa Cruz Shakespeare finishes their summer season tonight (they still have Glass Menagerie in the fall and Christmas Carol in December), so I ll post my reviews now. Let s start with the Fringe productions: two staged readings and the intern s play. The first staged reading was Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike by Christopher Durang. They selected the play to commemorate [ ]
Because LeanPub has recently eased off on their $7.99 minimum price, I decided to lower the minimum price for the PDF of Applied Analog Electronics from $7.99 to $4.99. This reduces my royalties per book a lot (from $6.39 to $3.49), but sales are slow enough that increasing the number sold is more valuable than [ ]
My family (that is, my wife, our son, and I) went to Ashland to see Oregon Shakespeare Festival this week, for the third year in a row. We chose the end of July to be able to see as many plays as possible, but trying to avoid fire season. Unfortunately fire season was early this [ ]
I missed a lot of my Spring pottery classes due to conflicts with acting that I had not anticipated when I signed up for the classes. I felt a bit guilty about having taken up one of the slots and then only being able to attend half of them. I posted earlier about my early [ ]
Well, it finally happened. After over 4 years of avoiding COVID, my wife and I both finally caught it—probably during our trip to Rhode Island for a family wedding. I had a cold during the trip, but tested negative for COVID on June 14 and June 24, but then tested positive on June 27. My [ ]
I ve had trigger finger (the medical term is stenosing tenosynovitis) in the middle finger of my left hand for about a year. What that means is that one of the tendons that flexes the middle finger has a nodule—a bump that widens the tendon—right near the pulley that the tendon passes through at the base of [ ]
As you may know from Colonoscopy prep 2024, I was scheduled for a colonoscopy today. I stopped nuts and whole grains a week ago, solid food on Sunday, and started the mega-laxatives on Monday. After two nights and two days of having to visit the toilet about hourly, I got a call Wednesday night telling [ ]
I am scheduled for a colonoscopy next week. Here is the protocol I plan to use this time, modified a little from the one I used last time: Day –7: Discontinue nuts, whole grains, popcorn, aspirin, any NSAIDs.Continue multivitamins, rosuvastatin, ezetimibe, and calcium carbonate. Day -4: 12:00 Discontinue solid food, especially dried fruit, oranges, apples, [ ]
Continuing my updates from Acting update for May 2024, I m now finished with Spring Semester at Cabrillo College. Here are the things new since the last update: I did the staged reading of a small skit (Water Conversations) for a fellow student s environmental studies class at Cabrillo. We had an even smaller audience than expected, [ ]
This post is yet another weight progress report, continuing the previous one, part of a long series since I started in January 2015. As I predicted in my last weight report, I did take the bus a few times to Cabrillo College, though not as often as I expected, and I went to Cabrillo more often than [ ]
Continuing my updates from Acting update for January 2024, I ll try to bring people up to date on what I ve been doing in my new acting hobby. I finished the run of 12 performances of The Artist. I got a video recording of one performance, but I don t know whether I m allowed to share it. [ ]
I have been using an old M7803 Pro keyboard on my iMacs for quite some time—it has ©2000 on the label. I liked it much better than the newer keyboards. Unfortunately during the table read for As You Like It on 2024 March 13, as I was reading for First Lord, I spilled some port [ ]
Long-time readers may remember that I had to fix my bike seat due to metal fatigue at the clamp that holds it back in 2016 (see Bike seat fixed, Broken bike seat and Flexible adhesives). I wrote then I was going to sand the rust spots, prime with metal primer, and repaint the spots, but my [ ]
World Scientific Publishing is marketing my book. They have put out a flyer for several of their electronics books (https://www.worldscientific.com/pb-assets/wspc-site/catalogue-pdf/Electrical-Electronics-Engineering2024-25-1705395593457.pdf), and my book is the first one on the flyer! Of course, they don t mention that the PDF for the book is also available on LeanPub for only $7.99…
Our second costume-design assignment was to design costumes for the 3 characters in Chekhov s The Bear (МЕДВЕДЬ). We were to do it as a historical-dress piece, to be compatible with the box set that we designed in a previous assignment (see Maquette for theater-design class for pictures of that design). Our designs were to be presented [ ]
In Fantasy costume renderings, I showed my first assignment in costume design. I tried this week (during our Spring break) improving the renditions by running them through an AI program—specifically Freepik Sketch. The AI drawing program mangled the annotation, so I removed the writing and did a little cleanup and resizing in Photoshop Elements. Here [ ]
I m in the intermediate class this semester—because the beginning class conflicts with my theater-tech class at Cabrillo. Unfortunately, even the Wednesday ceramics class conflicts with theater events (like the Undiscovered Shakespeare Zoom performance/lectures on Henry VIII and the As You Like It table reads with Santa Cruz Shakespeare), so I m missing a lot of the classes. Here [ ]