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What You Want to Catch
If there has been one saving grace during this virus lockdown is that the weather around here has cooperated and given us the opportunity to get outside.
Now with softball canceled (they said thru April 7, but who knows), the new project is catching and hitting. If my daughter’s reading this, I should say improving at catching. With the extra time, it started by trying to break in her glove better since it may be slightly big for her (but there really aren’t smaller choices). I followed some Youtube thing for steaming her glove, but there’s no video available since it’s just me cussing as the boiling water splatters on my hands.
Then we took it outside. There is a definite improvement since we started, but check back in a month and I’ll have a catching update and some hitting stick pictures.
Who Knew – Knoebels
Thanks to a special work celebration we had a free day at Knobels in Elysburg, PA. I had always heard of Knobels since it was a very doable day trip, but this was our first trip.
We had a really great time and credit to the park that it still has the old-school option of using tickets per ride, which has gotten so out of control. For $20 of tickets each, we had full day of rides.
Also, a special note for our ride was a stop at Breaker Brewing Company in Wilkes Barre. Just a little off the highway but very cool. Built into an old catholic school with really good food and beer.
Game Day, but first…
Building a Computer Game
But first … we had to build the game.
We went to a game building class held at the local science museum over the weekend. My daughter wanted nothing … NOTHING … to do with this, but my wife had a thing, so it was daddy/daughter day at the class.
When we arrived, I talked to the museum and the teacher, and before I was able to sit down she had my laptop powered up and had it positioned right in front of her seat. She had also met out tablemate, a very nice 12 year old boy, who had no idea how many questions this old guy was going ask him. He had already taken one of these so he had a game programmed was happy to help.
Oh boy did we struggle. We never actually got anything built which was frustrating to her, but at least I know that we have the Unity 3D platform set-up correctly so we can get back to it soon.
Our Rod Serling Film Festival Winner
Winner Rod Serling Film Festival
There’s no doubt in my mind that my daughter’s decision to enter the filmmaking category in her school’s art festival was that last year only 1 person entered in her age group — so scoring at least a certificate was within reach.
However, the rules are very strict about parental involvement and if my kid is anything it’s that she’s afraid to break rules. So we had to draw a line regarding where I could help and where she was responsible.
I decided she could use an old MacBook (“the white one”) since it had iMovie. I had no idea how iMovie worked, but I threw together some random film clips and photos and then added some transitions. Boom! A movie.
I showed it to her, and said gave her some advice how to move around clips. She went out and shot the clips on an old Nikon point and shoot, and I uploaded them – then it was all her.
One day I heard her talking into the screen mic, and after I asked what she was doing – a voiceover. Yes, she was dubbing out some dialogue. I had no idea that was possible.
In the end she did get her award from the local and then later the regional PTA. We then found that the local PBS station was having a Rod Serling Film Festival, as Mr. Serling is a Binghamton hometown hero, so we entered it there since it had a Twilight type of intro.
About the film — I saved this for last — I don’t claim to get it or even know if there was something to get, but when we went to the awards people we didn’t know ran up to her to tell her how much they enjoyed it, and she beamed. So that’s better than any certificate.
Giant Lake Waves
The view west from Sandy Pond State Park on the eastern edge of Lake Ontario, near Pulaski, NY.
A quick getaway to the Sandy Pond area near Pulaski, NY and on the eastern shore of Lake Ontario. Oddly, back in the old Green Nova days, I drove through here on the way to Clarkson maybe 100 times. I had no idea this was here.
My brother’s family recently got a place here, and they invited us to come up for the weekend. The weather was as close to miserable as can be. The picture looks sunny, but it’s about 50 degrees with a stiff wind coming off the lake, but we had a great time anyway.
The surprise was the rough waves during the day. They were as big and strong, especially the undertow pull, that we really had to keep an eye on each other. It was odd having never experienced this is fresh water, but a great time. The downside was that the area has been suffering from flooding and beach erosion and these waves and winds only made it worse. You can see some baseball-sized rocks on the beach. By morning, these were piled high as they continued being pushed up all night.
Math Quiz — Big Data Smokehouse Version
These are metal rods used to string herring and are then hung in the smokehouse rafters. How many are there?
This is my daughter’s favorite place in the world, The McCurdy Smokehouse one the eastern edge of the U.S in Lubec, Maine. We really can’t explain why she loves this place, but the people that work there are really very nice to her and remember her each year, so it’s always the first place she wants to go once we get into town. It works with me too since there’s a brewery directly across the street.
The McCurdy Smokehouse when the fog rolled in – Lubec, ME. Otherwise, you would see the channel and Campobello Island, New Brunswick, Canada.
Math Quiz – This year I asked my daughter how many metal rods were stacked against this wall. So she started counting…….I stopped her. Then we started to create slices and ultimately squares. Got a guess?
Using the picture below, each cube was roughly 20×20, and we rounded the total number of cubes to 22 since it was not a full 5×5 wall. So the final math: 20 x 20 x 22 = 8,800 rods against this wall. Are we right? I’ll go with close enough because — remember — there’s a brewery across the sstreet that I need to get to.
Easiest extra credit ever? – There were 3 walls like this. How many total rods?
Using a grid to help calculate the total number of herring rods in the smokehouse.
MIT CIO 2017 from the Inside
Kresge Hall at the start of the MIT CIO Symposium.
I signed up to offer my assistance for the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium in social media, primarily in managing the Symposium’s @MITCIO Twitter account. In the end, I got much more than I expected, between the planning meetings with genuinely smart people and seeing how a conference of this magnitude comes together.
Another benefit was getting to work with some new content and social media tools, primarily the paid versions of Feed.ly and HootSuite (Yea! for people with budgets).
They worked well together. HootSuite was great for planning and scheduling mass uploads so I could schedule out a week of panel members links or scheduled events, including the day of event posts as each new panel was scheduled to start.
Feed.ly’s advantages were in curating CIO-related news. Every few nights, I would go in and schedule 2-3 daily tweets around news updates, so I could keep a good balance of posts between event updates and CIO knowledge sharing.
The highlight of the day was actually seeing the #MITCIO hashtag appear in the trending column when the conference was spread across five panels after lunch.
In the end, I was able to capture of my earlier photos from day to get Lindsey Anderson, MIT Sloan CIO Symposium, Chair, as he signed off and announced the date for 2018.
This is the last image I used for the close of the MIT CIO Symposium to announce the 2018 event.
Open Data Boston – Getting Hands On
From Tom Davenport’s presentation about the evolution of data skills and requirements
Just back after a few days at the Open Data Science Conference at the Hynes Center in Boston’s Back Bay. This is the second year that I attended as it fits in nicely since it offers many hands-on seminars using easily accessible tools (many free for downloads like MapR and RapidMiner) and overall the event costs are kept low. It does lead to very crowded rooms and occasionally getting shut out, but once I got the flow, then I was able to get in my seminars.
The above graphic is from Tom Davenport’s opening keynote. To a room of data science people, he was a folk hero joking that his most memorable contribution to the field was naming data the job of Data Scientist as the “The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century.” He was good at presenting the high-level overview, and I’m now also excited to see him talk again at the CIO Symposium at MIT in 3 weeks.
The three hands-on seminars that I’m looking to jump into asap were for text analytics and using R to run sentiment analysis, using census data to create visualizations, and predicting subscription churn.
NYC Show Time
Scary. American Girl store in NYC.
Family trip into NYC via bus this weekend to take advantage of the Broadway Week which makes available 2-for-1 tickets to some leading shows. Back in the summer, my daughter had to pass on her summer theater club’s trip to see School of Rock, which was also the show her local kid troupe was putting on.
So I have had my eye out for when tickets would be available and was there in early December to get tickets to Waitress and School of Rock. Ironically, I had to pass on School of Rock since we are a 2-for-1 does not apply evenly for a 3 person family and $129 to sit in the last row seemed excessive. I sent the Sunday matinee time, eating cookies and cakes in various locations.
Check this movie that I filmed following the SoR:Stage Door School of Rock. After we met in front of the theater, we wandered around the back just as the show’s star, Will Blum, had come out and started talking to finds. Next, everything happened real fast which I ironically filmed in slow motion, but the kid was ecstatic.
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