Tim.McGuinn.es/s

Just spell it out

What You Want to Catch

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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.

Game Day, but first…

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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.

MIT CIO 2017 from the Inside

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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.

 

Starting off with MIT Big Data Certificate

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MIT Big Data Certificate

Making the Grade: Tackling the Challenges of Big Data from MIT Professional Educational

My plan for 2016 focuses on moving my career by building out my skills. My experience working with large media properties, like AOL, IMG, Lycos and SuperBowl.com, has provided me the foundation of leading the product development team, but now I want to veer back to those days where I got my hands dirty and then built solutions on top of that.

The first step on the path toward moving into the data storytelling world is locking down the big picture. As of this week, I have completed Tackling the Challenges of Big Data, an MIT Professional Educational course. And for this I received a certificate. 🙂

It was a great combination of topics, some that I could get thru easily thanks to past work experience, like visualization (Maxus) and machine learning (AOL / Hakia), and then the more technical aspects which made me buckle down to learn, like database architecture and cryptology. I never had to deal with these directly, but now feel more comfortable knowing how they all fit together.

I’ll add updated posts here as I move more toward this goal where I can work side-by-side with the advanced data scientists and turn their findings into new products and user experiences. This does not have to be on-line, as it would be great to expand opportunities by using data to uncover and predict more everyday activities. We are doing this somewhat at VitalBriefing today; however, the scale is much smaller than the 20 million page views from the AOL days, which even at 20M can still seem small to some of the IoT projects going on today.

Up next: I’ve had a good start with the data architect project at Maxus, but next up is to learn more about the tools, including visualization tools like Tableau which I used at Maxus, but it evolves so fast that you have to stay ahead, and Python which I want to use to crunch my own numbers.

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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My Daily Telecommute

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telecommuteI hesitate to write this because it goes against everything I wake up for each day, but I’ve get to stick with the truth when it’s . . . the truth. Even when it hurts, but I wish it never came up.

This week Yahoo’s new CEO came out against her Yahoo people telecommuting and started to initiate steps to bring them back to the office or find somewhere else to work. This is the part that hurts, I think she is right. Mostly. The mostly part is the equivalent to the classic non-committal: “It depends.”

In this case it depends on the job role. Even the biggest cave-dwelling introvert should know that spending time around people in order to hear their daily issues or to have someone to bounce ideas off of will lead to more “aha!” moments, either for you or for someone else that may be on the brink of a big breakthrough. If you haven’t experienced this, then I would argue that you are missing your big moment

Now, here is where I need to drop in a counter-argument, but like most discussions I have – a conversation in my head, because no one else is around — Survey Says: Telecommuters Happier, Healthier, Better Balanced.

Honestly, I think this survey is all well and good, but if I were the Big Company then I would have to say: I’m glad you’re happier, healthier and better balanced, but where’s my game-changing idea.

One of my telecommuting benefits that I have been able to work into roles is that I have give my employers proximity to New York City conferences and clients that would not have been possible. This should also apply to working on projects with companies in NYC, but so far none have seen the benefit of farming out a project and letting me split time between the main office to research and collaberate and my cave where I can bear down and generate results without the daily commute and office interruptions.

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Bing It On – Working With No Budget

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Hakia Challenge

Hakia Challenge

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve seen a re-hash of Bing’s Bing It On challenge where they show side-by-side results with Google and give you one search box. They then ask you to vote on which is best.

Seems similar. Yes, back when I was at Hakia we tried a similar “Challenge” in 2007 as shown in this blog post from Profy. It appears that the Challenge page is down now.

The biggest differences in Bing’s campaign vs Hakia’s is not the search technology; in fact, the inclusion of Powerset’s semantic search technology from their acquisition in 2008 probably makes the technologies very similar. The big difference is ca$h money. Hakia never would have had the budget to promote this type of program.

The other interesting thing I saw in researching this is that there really is no best search results when you get to this level. Results are too subjective and how the user interprets them is really determined by how they search (vague vs detail) and whether they have sense of what they are searching for.

Recently in trying to set-up a WordPress test blog on my lap-top, I found myself using Google frequently for getting help with each next step. What I learned was to start extremely detailed by constructing queries that included all the key differentiators. For instance, this would be my starting point: “upload wordpress photo xampp OSX” (Google | Bing) Grade the results: Maybe even, but it is tough to answer until I read each page to see if it answers my next step.

However, if you keep is simple, like “Red Sox” (Google | Bing) then it comes down to why you searched: news, score, general website, etc. They seem about the same.

All In

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If it seems that my responses are faster, more thoughtful, and with some extra snark — it’s because I have a new MacBook Pro.  Fully loaded with Photoshop and new video tools that will keep me wishing everything could be done in one take.

Apple MacBook 2,4 GHz

Realize that I’m going all in, since I am was always a IBM/Windows user probably based on my former job with Big Blue.  Since getting my iPhone 4 years ago, we have added newer iPhones and an iPad, so it only seems natural to take the path of least resistance and to make them all work together.  This means that since I have also been looking to expand my central storage, a new Apple Time Capsule is also on order.

I’ll keep you updated.

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NYC Start-Up Scene is Hot Like the Armory

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It was a great, eye-opening, day at the Silicon Alley Talent Fair.  My orginal list of companies printed from the event’s website on Tuesday had about 125 company names listed.  In itself that would be impressive, but the reality was that there were at least 150 after you included late additions and sponsors.  It was a great representation of the start-up activity happening in the NYC area.

Even with some major heat inside the 69th Regiment Armory, the event seemed like a big success.  I was lucky to meet with some good people from groups like Proclivity Systems, Figment.com, 33across, and EveryDay Health, and hope to have some future follow-up.

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