Monday with Events

It is Tuesday morning, and I am in the ER with a friend who was in a car accident. Many readers would know this person, but that story is for the friend to tell. Dondrea called me Monday night, and I stayed up and online with her while she helped in the ER. I put on my PJs at 2ish and slept for a few hours. At 5, I rose as Dondrea needed me to take over, staying with our friend until 6. I drove in after making liberal coffee, had a few sips, took my meds, and found where I was going on Nav. I was across Beaverton and climbed the hills in Air Volvo to OHSU emergency. I was there about 6 and took over from Dondrea helping out.

I’m sorry, there were no pictures on Monday; I forgot. Also, it took all day to get this out, as I was busy. 

With apologies for being so late…Monday follows.

Going backward, I watched another season, season two, of Slow Horses on Apple+ while waiting to see if I needed to help. Dondrea texted me with updates while I enjoyed season two. I finished the season and thought it better, in some ways, than the first season. Recommended!

Before that, I had a Zoom call with the Hillsboro Python Machine Learning group on Meetup. Today, we continued our study of biomedical Python and the use of DNA data to train and build models. Ernest ran the meeting and the presentation. He wrote a lot of code and ran most of it for us. The first was “classical,” which produced good results with my favorite AI classifier, Random Forest of Binary Trees. Ernest followed this with a neural network solution, Long Short-Term Memory, which trained quickly and produced good results, but not materially better than the “classic.” The newest method was slow and needed more work to understand. It claims to work for very large data sets, possibly identifying subtleties missed by “classic” and other familiar methods like neural networks. We need more work/information on this one. Ernest’s point was never to give up a classic for the newest trend in AI. FOMO should be ignored!

Ernest let me demo my Cloud9 setup for Python Chess development. I wanted to check and recommend the Python version it used (3.9.16). This version seems stable and well-supported. I suspect 3.10 may be good, but AWS picked this, and I saw it as a version often required as the minimum. Thus, Developers are building for it. In one of these meetings, I will do a full demo and how-to document for AWS Python Unix development.

Before the meeting, I made a BT sandwich. I am still out of lettuce, but I have bread from the freezer (toast it to defrost) and yesterday’s leftover sliced tomato and bacon. Excellent! While eating my sandwich (with organic mayo), I wrote more Python and added a few extra functions. I also discovered that the chess piece characters are supported in the editor for Cloud9, so I can put them in the code to print. I would like that better than the letters displayed in the default board print.

Going back towards noon, I met Steve in Hillsboro, running late as I rose late and wrote the blog for a while. We had lunch and drinks at Amelia’s with José as our waiter. We had smaller margaritas as it was lunch, and we both had things to get done. There was some hesitancy in that decision as partying in Hillsboro had some appeal. We caught up, and Steve listed his responses to various blog items over the past months. Sort of strange, we both thought, to do this asynchronously. We vowed to meet more often here and on the Oregon Coast, where Steve and his spouse, AJ, reside, thus avoiding asynchronistic issues (you know, dear reader, I wrote that to impress Grammarly and see if it would mess with it, nope). As the British would say, “That was over-egging the pudding.”

Before this, I rose late and wrote Sunday’s blog post. I also wrote a note to the mail folks to halt the mail while I was on my trip and then to deliver it all on my return. I did this as a memo to my local mail carrier and put it in the mailbox. I did this in my robe and got whistled at by my neighbor. I yelled back, “This is what retired looks like!” I finished the blog and posted it.

I also read all the church Staff-Parish Relations Committee (think church HR) notes sent to me. I have two presentations to do for the church on two Sundays, and these emails came all day.

I rose late, around 8. I found the kitchen (it is still in the same place), made liberal coffee, and witnessed the orchids look unharmed by the lack of cold nights. To complete my breakfast, I added a slice of Celtic black gingerbread and a banana. I read emails; many were useless, updated my Quicken transactions, and read the news.

And that brings me full circle.

Thanks for reading!