15 November 2015

On NaBloPoMo Failure and Caldo Verde

dear lord this is an ugly picture
I have unsurprisingly failed in my NaBloPoMo quest. This has happened a lot more now than it did before. I think some of it was the encouragement I had when I actually knew other bloggers in Austin. A lot of it is because the seasons in my life have changed and my energy is directed elsewhere. I've been going to data science and machine learning meet ups whenever I can. I've been trying to attend community-building events to learn more about creating a diverse and inclusive culture both at my company and in tech in general. These do not leave much time for blogging, or cooking for that matter. Colby bears the brunt of the domestic responsibilities and I am very glad that he can cook.

I've been thinking about priorities a lot lately. I spend 2-4 nights per week doing after-work extracurricular activities. It's meant that I've been spending a lot of my mental capital on that and not on other things that I used to do (hello, paper crafting). It's also meant that I don't sleep and haven't been to my insanely expensive exercise place in 2 weeks (hello, Crossfit). This results in very quiet weekends. This isn't a bad thing, except that my weekends used to be the most interesting part of my week. Instead, I've been spending a lot of time snuggling with Ramona, watching Bob Ross, and catching up on my sleep.

The best part about quiet weekends has been that it's gotten much colder. This means that snuggling under piles of blankets is not uncomfortable and that soup for dinner is totally legit. This weekend, PBS Create had a soup-centric theme and that was awesome. America's Test Kitchen highlighted a recipe for caldo verde and it was amazing with nothing more than a side of crusty San Francisco sourdough.

03 November 2015

Data Science Meet Up Recap

nice picture of the back of someone's head. :) 

My favorite way to interact at conferences is twitter. It's easy to follow hashtags and use @messaging to connect with people. As a result, I often "meet" people on twitter and never really meet them in real life. Today I went to a data science meet up and got to actually meet someone I've been interacting with on twitter since SciPy.

The meet up was basically an intro to data science. We talked about why data science is having a moment, what the data science work flow looks like, and what skills are crucial in being an effective data scientist. We then went through a tutorial using a Jupyter notebook, scikit-learn, and the iris data set. I've actually given a tutorial in a research seminar using that data set, so I didn't really gain much technical insight out of this; however, I did come to this realization:
I also got to hang out with Sonya, Michelle and Michael, and some Hackbright grads, while meeting other people who are interested both in data science and building a culture of inclusion in the tech industry. Quality way to spend an evening.

01 November 2015

NaBloPoMo 2k15 Meal Plan #1

Can I actually just eat bacon all week instead?


It's November, which means that i get that itch to do something writing-related. i'm not saying that I'll success with NaBloPoMo, but whatever. Made this earlier today because we need to start eating better/cheaper:

Monday - rotisserie chicken, arugula
Tuesday - slow cooker pork, butternut squash in a brown butter and pine nut sauce, swiss chard
Wednesday - mac and cheese, leftover pork
Thursday - pan-fried chicken breast, roasted okra, swiss chard + lentil soup
Friday - chicken + vegetable pasta toss

I'll actually be out of the apartment for Monday and Wednesday to attend various events, so those are actually just for Colby to do while I'm gone.