Hectic Weeks

Things have been a little crazy around here recently and what time I have has been devoted to several projects, so I haven’t written in a while. I want to get back to it and it seems like a summary is the best way to get writing again, so here goes.

I am back to the job search after the part time job I was at ended up not being the fit for me, but it’s been tough to get it going. I’m certainly waiting a little bit on a potential opportunity to work again for my manager from Scoop, but I was also feeling under the weather for a couple weeks and did not want to be interviewing with a cough and sore throat. Fortunately I am almost entirely over that and have now received both doses of the COVID-19 vaccine! The first one was very easy and just resulted in a small bruise and some soreness. I was anxious about the second because it coincided with my cough, but the side effects for it were rather mild, too, as I was lethargic and sore the next day until the early afternoon.

Besides that it’s been a lot of planning trips to Mendocino, Seattle, and Hawaii, watching the wild men’s NCAA Tournament, reading Gormenghast, taking care of our pup Jasper, and working on personal projects. Gormenghast has been a weird read because I’ve really enjoyed Peake’s writing style with flowing prose and goofy names, but it’s also felt like a bit of a slog. I’m reading it on my Kindle and maybe it’s just the small pages obscuring my progress emotionally even though I know there is a progress percentage. Another contributing factor is likely that I have all three books in one Kindle book, which takes it to over 1000 pages. However, the book has really hit a stride and I’ve been able to breeze through a decent chunk of it over the past few days. Hopefully I’ll finish the entire trilogy soon.

I also got a VPN and opted for ProtonVPN over OpenVPN, which I had actually used before with Tunnelblick. ProtonVPN seemed to have a simpler setup and it was easy to download and get going immediately. It’s the first time I’ve used a VPN for myself and not for business, so I went for the free version and so far it seems to work well and fits my needs.

What I’m Doing

• MIT’s Missing Semester of CS: I’ve gotten blocked on doing the Vim exercises for lecture 3 just with other stuff coming up, but it’s been really great so far. It’s well structured and the instructors are great. Hopefully I’ll get back on track soon since the rest of the lectures seem really awesome.
• Learning JavaScript by using the new sportsdataverse package in an attempt to build a KenPom / barttorvik / herhoopstats style page for D3 hoops. I have never used JS before this, so it’s certainly a steep learning curve.
• Contributing to pybaseball through adding Statcast leaderboard functions where possible
• Making an Ottoneu Auctions tool that is currently blocked by a bug in pybaseball, which is a little funny.
• G League DRE Shiny app: Basically just putting previous work into a Shiny app. I had never used Shiny before this and was pleasantly surprised that everyone who always says it’s super easy to use weren’t lying!

What I’m Reading

• Clay Shirky’s A Group is Its Own Worst Enemy
• Consider the Quasi-Commune by Anne Helen - this blog links to several other pieces that I really enjoyed, so highly recommend it!
• PD Web’s Patreon