Tim.McGuinn.es/s

Just spell it out

Giant Lake Waves

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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

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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.

#NoFilter Needed

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John Daly with a filter, even though the pants really didn’t need any enhancement.

It has been years since we saw John Daly play in his prime, but he is still bringing the goods on the Champions Tour. The quick-to-grow-on-you Loudmouth pants and the big swing make you stop to watch whenever you get the chance. In this case, I was by myself cutting across the back fairways when I had this chance, and when you get this chance you take it.

After the Fear, You Get Back in Line

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Rock 'n' Roller Coaster Starring Aerosmith

Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster Starring Aerosmith

We did it!! We made it to Disney World, and it was a great all around week. We spent five very full days at WDW. We also added a trip to the Clearwater Marina so Col could see Winter and Hope in person.

As soon as Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster Starring Aerosmith was over, I asked if I could go again. I had to. I also learned on this trip that a rollercoaster is even better than coffee for getting your day started. As for the early returns based on our talks on the plane ride home, it sounds like there will be another trip, since all the conversations started “Next time we come to Disney…”

Need more pictures?
There’s a running set of posts at our 7thtee Tumblr site.
And the growing monster set at the family gallery on Flickr.

Strat-o-matic Updated for a Digital World

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Big data updates Strat-o-matic

Big data updates Strat-o-matic

According to the NY Times, Strat-o-matic is rolling out a new digital version called Strat-O-Matic Baseball Daily. Players stats and team information will be updated daily. If this idea existed back in my day, I would know far less about Harmon Killebrew’s new Minnesota Twins franchise. Those were well-worn cards that had been passed though most of my father’s family until I was able to get my hands on them.

Last thing I need to add to my summer fantasy baseball / MLB.TV habit is playing daily Strat-o-matic, so right now I’m, hoping that it costs too much.

Later for Now, NYC

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NYC Skyline

Taken from the ramp after leaving the Lincoln Tunnel in October. Like many times before, on this last time out of the city I had fallen asleep in the tunnel.

The great blog secret has now come to end; my project in NYC that started in mid-May is now over. It made for a complicated 7+ months where I would usually leave home on a 6am bus early Monday and the get back on Friday evening. It included becoming an AirBNB power user — if only they had a loyalty program, or even gave a crap about their customers (probably more on them in a later post).

Sometime next spring and summer and fall and Christmas, I’ll probably think back and wonder what I did last year, and it will hit me that I was somewhere else. The toughest stretch for us was back in June/July when we left for a family trip to Maine on June 23. My next time home was for 2 days over the weekend of July 11, and then I left Monday July 14 to return back 3 weeks later on Aug 1. That’s 2 days home over 6 weeks.

After leaving the family in Maine, where they stayed for a couple more weeks, we all met again at a friend’s in Connecticut on July 18. After a weekend there, we all drove into Brooklyn where I had rented an apartment for the week, again via AirBNB.

What was I doing in NY? Building data platforms at a media buying agency. It was a great getting back to a agency environment where the clients had real budgets to spend; it was a big jump from the last local web agency I worked at where we held photo shoots in a storage container. Why in sexy storage containers? Because it was a storage container company.

Holding the Trophy High (while Wearing Gloves)

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Dick's Open Trophy Champions Tour Sr PGA

Walking off the 18th green with the winner’s trophy at the Dick’s Sporting Goods Open — in this case the winner was Bernhard Langer.

I came through on my prediction from earlier this week — when the week is over I will be holding the winner’s trophy for the 2014 Dick’s Sporting Goods Open.  Players on the Champions Tour usually are not so brash, but I’m no player — just they guy that carries the trophy from the ceremony on the green back to the press room.

Big Tableau Show

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Tableau 8.2 release

Just wanted to show guys in suits with large displays to prove that I was there.

I had a chance to attend the Tableau 8.2 Roadshow today at The Westin New York at Times Square. Even in the sub-releases of tableau there is always something interesting. As I’ve learned in working with it recently, it is easy to make a case study about how much time Tableau saves you in an on-going production environment. However, the learning curve is big as I try to ramp up on it.

Some of the features that they were presenting were: Easier Data Connections, Mapping Changes, Visual Data Window, Story Points, Tableau for Mac.

Overall the Story Points feature is by far the biggest bang for Release 8, so seeing demos and getting some best practice tips are a benefit. Right now it’s still a much talked about benefit, but we have not been able to easily integrate across our users.

Personally, the Mac demo hit home directly, since I do all my outside work on a Mac so this would make life easier, but the coolest was the mapping updates. Along with the new, more detailed maps, I sat in a break-out presentation where they showed how to connect our data maps to outside map feeds, like weather information, that could overlay our maps. This is one of those situations about ramp-up time, since we were looking at a new pitch for a sunglasses company and figured that it would be great to show results or make predictions based on the weather, assuming that more sunglasses are sold around sunny days, but learning how to make it useful will have to wait to a rainy day (see what I did there) where a deadline is not looming and we have some time to learn.

New York for New Technology

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Save Zac

Call the Emergency Zack Morris Hotline

It’s well after midnight, and I’m on a quiet bus driving across western New Jersey.

Why? I had a chance to attend two tech conferences today in NYC.  In the afternoon it was the ClickZ Conference which focuses on the search industry, mostly on SEO tools and SEM advertising.  Back when I last attended the show, it was known as Search Engine Strategies and it covered 3 expo floors at the NY Hilton.  This event, held at the Marriot Marquis in Times Square, covered 3 ROWS!  I know it’s not because the business is not generating the same revenues, but there certainly has been a pull back.

Later, I caught the subway to NYU for the monthly NY Tech Meet-up.   It’s been almost 5 years since I attended my first NYT Meetup — which I was also a presenter for Hakia.  It’s bigger than ever and there is always a sense of excitement since you never know if the demo that you are seeing could be the next big thing.  In the past, I’ve seen the first demos from Foursquare and MakerBot and each time you sensed that you just saw something that was going to be big.  But note that they’re not all that special — you can call Zack Morris at (718) 395-5255.  You can watch the rest of the April event here.

 

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