Today 10Feb2023: Friday

The day started with me being allowed to sleep in until 7ish. It was Friday, a work-from-home day, and usually when I did all the stretching and exercises recommended by my physical therapy people. Unfortunately, my legs were stiff to the point of wondering if I should use a cane–I skipped today. I found myself able to make coffee, a liberal-style Equal Trade brand, and located and selected a banana for breakfast.

I then spent hours in my office, the back bedroom, and formally Corwin’s room, and used my excellent 1G connection to attend hours of Zoom status and to work from home on various items. Sadly, the shoe company experienced an outage mid-morning that appeared to be a problem in the cloud and was likely present on the Internet. This slowed the work and communication. I tested my connection and was still at near 1G, but all the Intenet-based tools at Nike were unreachable. This reminds us how much we rely on fast and easy Internet in a modern business setting in the USA (and the rest of the world).

Aside: Artificial Intelligence (AI) could be described as our phone and Internet making us more than we are in our physical selves. A library then could be considered AI, a very slow AI. While these tools make us more interconnected and have more information, they do not guarantee truth (less like a sound library). Instead, they can become an echo chamber reinforcing incorrect information and increasing emotional attachment to a questionable source. Furthermore, as a coder for machine learning, training AI structures to find value is quite tricky. Our new AI needs some work.

I made lunch of the leftovers from the tacos from the previous dinner. I warmed up the meat and tacos, added lettuce, olives, and salad dressing, and enjoyed a homemade taco salad.

I was working on a leftover and now critical-path (ugh) crisis. I had tried some folks that no longer work in certain areas, and they were able to help me find some old information (details cannot be put here), and I was able at 4:45 on Friday (so classic) to provide the results for the critical-path issue. I was busy the whole day. I did follow along into the late evening on the project and was happy that no crises of the moment came to me last night.

I slipped out to see Susie on the cold, damp day (back to our usual weather) around 2PM, and the Friday traffic was light and well-behaved. I did see the off-ramps (Highway 217 is built in a cut that is sometimes quite deep), more like up-ramps, were filled with cars and slow and backing up onto 217. Hall Boulevard, my exit, is not a ramp, so it worked well. It appears that the up-ramps are being rebuilt, and there is much reconstruction going on now for 217–it does not improve the experience so far.

Susie was waiting for me in the shared living room space in her recliner. She had nodded off, and I had to wake her. Everyone else was sleeping. Blue Bloods, one of her favorite re-runs, was playing on the TV. She was delighted to see me and had put-off lunch until after I appeared.

Susie was happy to call her mother, Leta, on my iPhone and see each other on FaceTime. They talked about the usual things, and I let the call go on for a while. But, after thirty minutes, I had to head out. Susie was sad as I had to leave after a short visit (my phone sounded with Slack messages and emails the whole stay), and she thought it was her fault, “I am sorry.” I tried to reassure her that it was just the need for me to work and had nothing to do with her and being at the hummingbird house.

Susie swings from the hummingbird house as her home, and her thinking it is an expensive hotel, and expects to go home. She loves all the attention at hummingbird house and that she is never alone (she was lonely when I worked), but she misses the familiarity of the Volvo Cave and Air Volvo. Susie also misses all the trips to NYC, Europe, North Carolina, and Michigan. Today, Susie was comfy but concerned about the bill (as if it was a hotel) and me having to rush off. Yet, she feels safe and loved there. I reassured her and Jennifer, the live-in nursing aide, then distracted Susie with questions about lunch as I left.

The traffic, as usual, was slower on the way back from Beaverton, and those soccer moms and dads were out getting the kids causing the close-of-school traffic jam in Beaverton. I accepted the slow driving and waiting twice for many traffic lights. The sun appeared, and the skies showed some blue. It is hard not to be a fan of global warming in Oregon (sorry, California)!

I reached the house, took off my shoes (deciding to stay in tonight), and got some offers to Portland (beer and pizza), but settled to make dinner. I sliced up some of the ham from our local Olympic Provisions (recommending the ham to our local readers who can order it delivered in the Greater Portland area), microwaved two potatoes to 80% cook time, sliced (hot!), and added. I a few slices of cheese (I am out of shredded) and stirred them into the hot ham and potatoes. Not waiting for the potatoes to crisp, I added Egg Beaters (my new choice for egg cooking) and made a breakfast scramble. I used a non-stick pan (from Steve W) and skipped spices. The plain food was excellent. I like Egg Beaters for this use, and even when the chicken plague ends, I think I will stick to this for breakfast (or dinner).

Forgoing writing the blog Friday night, drinking beer at various taphouses, and having dinner in Portland, I started on my Python coding (Python is an oldish programming language named for Monty Python, and I used it in the 1990s). Python runs more like the old BASIC interpreter-based language than unforgiving compiled languages like C (and all its versions) and has found its place as the best AI tool available.

Very Aside: Python coding has developed a culture. Some of the cultural norms would be good in any work:

• Beautiful is better than ugly.
• Explicit is better than implicit.
• Simple is better than complex.
• Complex is better than complicated.
• Readability counts

I continued working on the Kaggle website until I could not see straight (a new problem limiting me to four hours of coding) and managed to create a program to extract five points for each data set (an event in the data set for ICE) and even got the 3D line approximated using SVD. But, Eigen matrix manipulation and calculus (usually called calc III in the USA college courses) were last done by me in the 1980s at Central Michigan University. So, while I did graduate in the honors club for math (my only claim to fame), I am struggling with the process.

Thus I turned back to my AI engine, Google, and soon found good how-to articles that were light on the math and heavy on execution. I was able to create, shocking me that this worked in less than ten lines of code, two points on the 3D fit line using Python and numpy (an open-source math library that makes Python extremely useful). Wow!

As I often do, I fought with Python syntax, getting data frames to work as I wanted and making everything work. I use the trick of having a Verbose variable and creating a print statement controlled by (uses the code ‘If verbose == True:’) to trace as I run. I often love how data frames let me search but then fight to get the results set into a processing loop (switching to Pythonic dictionary processing). I am always impressed by how much you can get done in a few lines of Python.

I spent the evening working on code, and finally, my brain burned, and unable to see straight, I went to bed. I stopped drinking tea (I made a pot for the coding adventure) at 7PM to allow for sleep. I managed to get a good rest.

Thanks for reading.