Happy kickoff eve (hence the kickoff gif from the American sport hand egg) - Because I’m sure many of us are anxiously anticipating the game release tomorrow I’ll keep it short.
Wins. Go!
I got stuck in my head sometime over the last week or so that I should do a talk on “Maybe You Should Be Fired For Using React” (a reference to “nobody gets fired for buying IBM”) to encourage my peers to consider the complexity they are adding with their perceived defaults. The early reviews of the slides have been very positive and I’m working on scheduling the talk at work.
(TLDR - be careful about assumptions for solutions you have, maybe you don’t really need what they add and complexity is expensive)
Necessary but not super exciting: We just had two very productive cleanup / prep afternoons to get ready for the new season. And then we celebrated with root beer floats and candy canes.
Came back from Christmas/New year at my parents’ place ~10 hrs away. My cat was very happy to see me back (don’t worry, he was very well taken care of while I was gone, despite the sad song he tried to tell)
Overall had a productive week, addressing some dissertation proposal stuff (long story there) - Spent a lot of hours in a coffee shop, nice space.
Got chatting with one of the barista and besides being an awesome human, she made me realize that I have inadvertently been around way too many career-first-smell-the-flowers-later people. Not that it’s anyone’s fault, just a realization.
Having arrived at this nugget of information I have been having an absolutely stellar week and am in a great mood.
I bought some random kids STEAM books at a local store that sells overstock, clearance, etc type items. I found the ‘Robot Encyclopedia’ and ‘My First STEAM+ Words’ (8 book set) for $3 each. Online I found the same STEAM words book set for $20+. The Encyclopedia is coming with me to Kickoff tomorrow!
The STEAM words is meant for really little kids and has for example an Engineering Book which has 100 words. Each page is a different branch of Engineering (Chemical, Electrical, Civil, etc) and then 8 or so terms with a little doodle next to each.
I was gonna use it as a team outreach tool, but when I took it to work we decided to make a YOLO AI powered game/demo using them. So this week I was spending some time training an AI to detect Engineering terms at the level of a toddler… This is my day job. I love it.
Other win, I found my Lego technic random parts collection and plan to bin it up and bring for prototyping/brainstorming this season. The students are gonna love it I hope.
I’m celebrating 30 years as a professional meteorologist on this very day. And I’ve been fortunate to work at a national laboratory that entire time (plus a few years during ungergrad/grad school). National labs are coolest places to work. I’m really lucky.
Also, 10 year anniversary of being an FRC mentor (remember, kids, to celebrate Recycle Rush’s 10th birthday tomorrow!)
Early detection and warnings of tornados/hail/damaging wind. Blending weather radar / satellite data / numerical weather prediction / lighting observations and other remote sensing platforms and providing those data to weather forecasters so they can make informed decisions.
That’s awesome. Professionally I have gone the “opposite” direction towards climo, however the data fusion stuff is always a lot of fun (and frustrating to be fair). I barley got to scratch the surface with that over a summer in Huntsville AL at MSFC NSSTC.
Always more to do, thanks for the passion, always a good time to run into other earth science folks on occasion.
Went over to my cousin’s for a bit on new years to play board games and learned I am very good at Monikers (it’s a very fun game I recommend) And my Young cousin didn’t cry at the sight of my hair this year, so that’s a win! (For some reason he didn’t like my blue hair last time… Oh well lol)
Went back to work for a few days and got some fun stuff done there. I now only work weekends because I’m headed back to college on Sunday.
Made lots of baked goods this week, some cookies for a friend and for my old workplace at the tech office, as well as some cupcakes for Kickoff.
My little brother is starting skateboarding lessons, and seeing as his birthday is on Sunday (what a coincidence) I bought him a skateboard as a gift, and I’m really excited to see his reaction. It was also nice to reconnect with the owner of the shop who I used to take lessons from as well.
Also started up a new Minecraft server with some online friends and have been putting a lot of hours into that, as I am the local resource gatherer of the group.
And of course, hanging out with the cat I was cat sitting, as well as my own two babies (even if they bite my ankles sometimes)
Kickoff is officially today! (at least in my time zone) I think that in-itself is a win!… or maybe a loss for time management.
Well, anyway, I just released the first episode of our podcast which is intended to accompany our OA posts, but in a more long-form, conversational manner. I’m really excited to experiment with this concept, and I’m hoping we can get it to work and be a useful and entertaining resource for teams.
We’ll see if it pans out. I’m already thinking of things to improve quality-wise for our post-kickoff episode.
Edit: Bonus Win: The 2nd Annual Gearheads Laser Tag get-together this past weekend was a lot of fun.
Finishing the team management game. Tasks took awhile to input and I’m not great at balancing the points/rewards system so I’m probably over self-testing it.
I have one more part to finish and plan to publish online before I go to bed. Might make the CD post after I wake up and go to bed again. Upside is with the broadcast at noon I can sleep in a little bit.
I just had to replace a smoke alarm battery here at 3:20am. Woo. But yay, kickoff is almost here, and deliveries of motors and swerve modules should be coming shortly.
