If you are doing coding or other non-design work, I would highly recommend learning how to do everything on your computer without touching your mouse. It's a whole new world when your fingers never leave the keyboard and you can still do anything you want.
But if you really want a trackpad, yep, nothing beats an Apple Touchpad. (or at least what I have used / seen)
Learning to Cook - Alton Brown started me down the path of learning cooking from a science/chemistry point of view. After a year of on and off research I've been able to make meals from just things I find on sale over the weekend. It's almost like a puzzle. The pieces are all the food on sale (potatoes for $0.49 sign me up!) and the final product is full meals that I cook. (Plus always good way to impress another by cooking for them).
Monogatari (Anime Series) - It is a jumbled mess that is a jumpy as it is deep. If you don't want to see any fan service at all in your anime I would skip over this. If you don't mind that (or enjoy it) this is a great anime. It doesn't knock my favorite anime (Cowboy Bebop) off of my Number one slot, but this one is a great that I would wager will stand for the future. (Bakemonogatari is the first season).
Don't Panic - There's a reason it is written in big bold red letters on the universe's best selling book.
My biggest inspiration (other than taking a perfect shot at a whitetail deer and him just dropping dead) was a good PDF about shotGroups over on the CRAN[1]. It is a little dry and statistically heavy (meaning you need to have some statistical background to make sense of it), but well enough detailed for the info that triggered me to pursue this pet project.
I would love to write it at a level where if a person with no statistical background would be able to read through it and be able to understand it "enough". (Which requires a lot of rewriting on my part to make sure I'm also not boring a person with statistics background to death too explaining what Standard Deviation is :P)
I came here to say that, but in a slightly different way:
True:
> no discussion of how one might interpret this model, what its assumptions are, and how to assess validity or fit?
Quoting OP from the comments in his blog:
> Hey Victor, thanks for reading! You’re absolutely right, I should have taken some time to talk about the assumptions of linear regression. I tried to mention them in passing, but I’ll try to be more explicit next time. I should have brought up the pearson correlation coefficient. I tried to write this from a more machine learning point of view, not as much statistics.
Either way it was a decently written post and would read more in the future (though I would like to see more statistics side of things rather than just me thinking Alex here is waving his hands saying 'you see nothing!' when we look at the mathematical assumptions / 'pure' statistics).
In other thoughts:
I'm currently in the process of writing a blog series on the analytics of Firearm projectiles (What ammo is most accurate from a Ruger American 308 Win.). Seeing other statistical posts like this help me figure out how to make mine better. So thanks Alex!
I put things out there on it and I have had success leading to interviews at companies. I had a Google Recruiter reach out to me via LinkedIn two years ago while I was still in college, and ended up going deep into their interview process. Never applied to Google, they just reached out.
I also keep up with friends/acquaintances (typically people on the 'business' side of things). Though most of my software/programming buds and gals we connect elsewhere (typically through Steam).
There are many different styles and paths to learning 'Computer Science'.
But if what you are after is insight into how a computer works I found that I had my 'ah-ha' moment while learning C, Assembly (intel), and writing a compiler. I did have to have a slight basis in computer architecture, but that compiler project I worked on made everything click.
(side note on writing a compiler. Read, Decode, Execute. There are no short cuts around those series of steps).
If you are looking for a book I would recommend the 'Dragon Book'
I run Ubuntu on my 'not doing much other than youtube and paying my bills' computer. (I also choose to reinstall the whole OS every major release (+ 1 month for those 'day 0' issues to be fixed)).
I have debian on my NAS and 'stable' backup box. I keep this thing rock solid.
If I actually want to do anything crazy, I'll either whip up a VM or I have a clunker of a laptop I keep around for experimenting and other things (along with other single board computers).
My two cents in keeping something stable is don't do anything to it. Keep it as vanilla as possible unless you are 100% sure what you are doing.
We have thought about that. We have a sledge hammer and a maul, and it seems to be the most 'tame' idea while also being fun for everyone. Plus we wouldn't need to travel anywhere special. Some of our coworkers would even try to make a small parody of the original Office Space scene.
> You have access to planes that have returned from military missions and the distribution of the bullet “wounds” on the planes. Which areas should you recommend to have extra armor?
I feel like this is more obvious in software. Errors are handled and reported in the logs, but it still works. Sure they, the errors, need to be fixed. But problems that cause things to crash (contextual pun) need to be fixed first.
> COBOL programming language is no longer taught in schools
I took a COBOL course just two years ago in a Texas Public University. It was considered the 'I didn't get any offers anywhere else' or 'I am too lazy to apply' if you were picked up by IBM as a COBOL engineer. I was trying to pull up the online syllabus. Seems like they have finally gotten rid of that course (or maybe the professor who taught it finally passed away).
As annoying as COBOL was, it was unique and interesting in the way it handled IO processing. From what I understood from talking with those who had gone the COBOl engineer route from my school, was that it was never quite learning COBOL, but rather all the jank years of programmers added into the codebase. COBOL is annoying, but when you have the equivalent of jank similar to badly designed #define 's all over the place that makes you want to thrash out at everything and anything when you realize what is happening ... that is, from what I have been told, a major reason COBOL sucks.
It wasn't my cup of tea, thus I didn't pursue it, but to fellow classmates, they quite enjoyed it as one would when you program in C. It had a certain elegance to it.
> This way, you’d get all the smart kids in the same place, just like in any other competitive 4-year program.
I found this statement rather interesting. I had an internship at Garmin where they provided housing to all the interns via dorms at a nearby university. It was rather refreshing to be near students whom where, for the lack of better words, smart. They had received an internship. There was some bar that people had to pass higher than just SAT/ACT and what your grades were in High School. People had drones, RC cars, Raspberry Pis (and others), every weekend was something different and new. (Not to mention how engineers can go from drinking, to science, and back in seconds).
It was a better time than I ever had in University Housing at my actual college (but then again my college wasn't exactly a Tech/Engineering college (we just had a decent program that wasn't $250K)). Even when I made my stunt to stay in the Honors Dorm at my University, there's quite a divide of personality when you get students from all majors. It was rather segregated internal communities of STEM, Arts, and Not STEM/Arts. It was never quite as amazing to live in a group like that was provided at that Internship.
Yes it can, If you are thinking about getting into it, go around to different shops if you have some local and see if they have a stained glass class or something where they provide the tools, glass, and (most likely) copper foil / (least likely) lead for all one price.
That way you aren't stuck with specialty tools if you don't like it. Also stay away from nicer glass. Don't get kokomo glass if you don't need/want it. I always just see what's in the scrap bin and then design based from what's in there.
Stained Glass Making (if you find a good shop) can be a close knit group of people and help you get good. I found it very easy to pick up it just requires a steady hand, and a good eye to figure out what piece to cut form where in the glass.
Gardening is also something I enjoy. Learning about plants and keeping them healthy year round. It is very satisfying to have a harvest of your own plant (I grow a decent sized Tabasco pepper plant.) Though this turns into a more solo task unless you do it in a community garden or something like that.
> I wonder if the people who initially started the open source project had to go through some sort of approval process by management and whether that was facilitated by a tool?
VERY much so. So, imagine yourself as some old bank executive. Sure you work at a more progressive (tech and policy wise) bank than others, but still at the end of the day we're a bank. Why would we give free things away? That was the main reaction before our current CIO, Rob Alexandar, got into the mix of things. He has slowly been pushing to become more and more forward thinking about tech from the top down. Which is a hard thing in such a regulated environment like a bank. There are so many internal power struggles on old systems that all new tech hires (new meaning last 5 years and younger) with getting rid of older things. We have begun to rewrite major systems. Keeping good documentation. Transitioning everything to git rather than SVN. Updating our AppSec ability to audit things quickly such that we can actually get something to production in a week if we really want to.
I too was reached out like for for their Software Engineer and Software Engineer in Test roles. Honestly it was an experience both good and bad. Plus, I enjoy flying so I got a free trip out of it.
Also for me, every interview I had after my Google one felt like a cake walk.
Whatever you do with it, congrats for being reached out to. You don't know what you did but you were doing it right ;)
The general take of college, yes, is a joke. But for me I was able to find some diamonds in the rough at the University I went to. Sure there were pointless classes I had to take, professors whom I would learn what they liked/disliked and regurgitated it back to them, but all of it was worth it for just one professor and the affect he had upon me (and all his other students for that matter).
He was the 'Hard' Professor of our CS program. The one where if you could walk out of a test with a 50/100 you felt like you just won the lottery. He was ruthless, iron clad, and never made a mistake with his grading. He would never assign a textbook in which he wouldn't use every chapter to lecture from. He would run through a red pen for each class writing notes back to us and giving us different ways of studying and writing down exercises from the book or his mind to help us understand. We would learn the material. Getting out of his class with a 'B' or even rarer an 'A' was considered a very high honor (and jokingly, the stuff of legend) at our University.
But when he recently announce his retirement, students from years gone by came back, almost like a pilgrimage, to reach back out to him in some way. His ruthless tests, his wise teaching, his fatherly advice for all things in our initial careers in whichever direction we went with them, that is a reason I was glad I went to college and had the honor and privilege to learn from him. Jokes of how many people had to extend their stays at university because he 'failed' them, but then again each person whom hated him at that point, still made the trek back and regarded him one of their lives best mentors.
Are there crappy people in college (students, instructors, professors, admins, etc.) ... heck yeah. But then again there are those who instill values and education in their peers. You just need to find them.