Got to spend yesterday afternoon welcoming Stanley to the world
Category: Life 🎉
-
-
After 13 hours the party is done and this boy is well celebrated.
-
If you can get out and donate some blood!
-
end of a big beach adventure
-
extra-life 2015
last Saturday, November 7 was game day for extra life 2015. across North America gamers gathered together to raise over $6.7 million.
this Saturday, November 14 my friends and I will embark on a 24 hour marathon to raise money for the IWK. we will be collaboratively playing a number of classic video games on the PlayStation 2 and the Nintendo 64. we will be broadcasting our progress and general shenanigans to the internet for the enjoyment of the masses.
last year we extra lifers in the Maritimes raised over $50 thousand for the IWK and we are looking to try and surpass that this year. If you are interested in supporting the IWK click here to donate
-
when having a 30th birthday in 2015 it is essential to have a few things.
– a poster of mayor goldie wilson
– and a drink called the “1.21 Gigawatt” with small beakers to drink it from
– it’s also important to have your own enchantment under the sea dance
-
so long and thanks for all the fish
There was a point to this story, but it has temporarily escaped the chronicler’s mind
– Douglas Adams
by now some of you may have noticed that you haven’t seen much of me lately. some others of you may have noticed that you have seen much more of me lately. finally others still will be surprised that they had forgotten about me completely but are happy that they find themselves reading my post so they can catch up on what I am doing.
two weeks ago I was offered a full time position as a developer with Ping Identity. I started less than a week later and have been tackling interesting challenges pertaining to online identity management since (also attending a lot of training).
the last two weeks have also seen me move to the Halifax area because I am working in the downtown core. so if you have found yourself wondering why you haven’t seen me around, this is likely because I no long live in the valley. alternatively the reason you are seeing more of me may simply be because I am living closer to you.
so here is to the next chapter, a fresh canvas, a new adventure. to those who were integral in the last chapter, thank you for your efforts. to those of you who want to remain crucial supporting characters, the best of luck. finally, to those of you who will be participating in this new adventure, brace yourselves and god speed.
Anything that happens, happens.
Anything that, in happening, causes something else to happen, causes something else to happen.
Anything that, in happening, causes itself to happen again, happens again.
It doesn’t necessarily do it in chronological order, though.– Douglas Adams
-
the people’s radio
starting this week I am part of a podcast. every episode will be a little different, with topics being whatever catches our attention that week.click here to go to iTunes and subscribe.
(alternatively subscribe to this link in non-iTunes podcast clients)
-
a pretty big deal
several months ago I shared that my brother won a Canadian Architect Award of Excellence on twitter and facebook.
today dalhousie university took the time to feature his work on their website and I realized that I should do likewise.my brother, matthew, is a pretty big deal and you should all know it.
-
uncertainty
as I work to complete my thesis there is one question that I often hear a variation of when experimental results are discussed.
“are you certain you understand what the results mean?”
this leads to discussions of confidence, comprehension, and control with respect to research. as I spend more time in academia I have begun to consider how these discussions apply to life in general.
people at large generally struggle with uncertainty. manifesting itself as anxiety in people, pushing them to try and tighten their plans to maintain control, or learn every detail about all possible outcomes to worry about which is least unfavourable. the old saying “knowledge is power” is twisted and taken to heart as people seek to ineffectively overcome uncertainty.
as I inch ever closer to the completion of my masters degree I have felt uncertainty manifest in my life as people asking what I am going to do next, where I am going to live, and even if I am done my thesis yet. this uncertainty is pushing to create worry or anxiety in me and the urge to control situations is reflexive. neither of these responses seem terribly productive though.
instead of letting anxiety and worry develop I have been working to channel the energy from general uncertainty into constructive places. a large part of this process has been learning to separate the present from the future.
in academia I have found certainty of a result in the future comes not from controlling everyone else around me or by worrying about how people might possibly question it, but instead by completely understanding the environment that the experiment took place in. armed with the knowledge of the moment that produced the results equips me for future situations.
extending this process beyond academia is a little trickier. in practice it means that the moments when I feel most burdened by uncertainty are the ones where I stop everything, even for a moment, and force myself to be present in whatever activity I am doing. the only impact I can have on the future is to be the best version of myself right now.
tomorrow is coming whether you want it to or not.
embrace today while it is here.
-
in a turn that will annoy @grantisagrant, I just received word that friends are snowshoeing to the same Starbucks I’m at with board games.
-
current status seen below. dear Halifax, what should I seek out next.
-
just snowshoed to a Starbucks in a snow storm. Halifax is kind of a mess. people get a kick out of someone in snowshoes though!
-
family
in my last post I reflected on the absence of a family member.
to end the year I thought I would reflect on the holiday season and the presence of family.
I spent the last week travelling between my mother’s home and my grandmother’s home. I eaten more christmas dinners that I can count and played host and guest to parties full of family in both locations.
happy new year! -
my grandfather and I found the sleepy corner of the room
-
Today I took my hockey team to the rink I learned the game in.
-
two years
time is a funny thing.
two years disappeared in the blink of an eye.
two years seems like a lifetime ago.~~~
the one thing I have learned in the past two years is that no matter what happens you just keep living.
my father taught me that the best way to be alive is when you are helping other people grow.
this is why I teach. this is why I coach.~~~
when I was seven I wanted to play hockey. this was a surprise to no one in my family. my mother grew up playing and eventually coaching hockey. my father volunteered with the local can skate program. playing hockey was the natural progression for me.
unfortunately there was a small “situation” at the beginning of the season. when it was time to purchase my hockey gear mom was away and so the task fell to my father. full credit to him though, he didn’t have any experience with hockey gear but I was fully equipped for my first ice time. he stepped up to the challenge because making sure I had a great experience was the important thing.
this story doesn’t end at that first ice time. buying all my equipment came right down to the last minute and resulted in the purchase of a pair of hockey pants that could be described as “large”. they were the only pair available so dad bought them. they were so large on me that I pulled them up to my armpits and they still went almost to my ankles.
I wore those same hockey pants until I was a teenager in bantam.
I still laugh about it every time this story comes to mind.
making sure this hockey player had fun meant my dad was willing to appear a bit foolish
~~~
my father was a silly man.
we loved laughing at him, he loved hearing us laugh.
I miss you dad.
-
the ghost in the machine
as I moved my old posts to the new site I was struck by just how long it has been since I posted anything at all. if you knew where to look online you could confirm that I continued to exist, but it wasn’t readily apparent. I have had a number of interactions in public recently that have followed a simple script
<them>Woah! I haven’t seen you in years
<me> Yeah… I exist now and then
… spend an hour catching up …
<them> I hope to see you again soon
<me> hopefully it won’t be so long this time.
given that I am not actually a ghost, what has happened in my life that makes it appear that I only exist now and then? the short answer, I am doing a master’s degree in computer science full time and am completely wrapped up in my school work.
the longer answer makes up the bulk of this post. when I applied to do my masters I had every intention of working in the human/computer interaction field, but instead I have found myself pursuing machine learning. during the winter semester last year I took a course about machine learning and discovered that it is a field that connected well with my experiences teaching and working in online education.
so what is machine learning? often I will describe computer related work as “black magic” rather than trying to communicate the details of the work to people that don’t understand it. machine learning is a process where, even knowing all the details of the implementation, I am left believing it is some form of magic. in practice machine learning is the process of solving classification, categorization, or identification problems by training a system with some example data, and then introducing an unknown dataset you want to work with.
you might think to yourself, that seems kind of boring or pointless. trust me, it isn’t. everywhere I look in the media I see mentions of “big data” and “cloud solutions”. these are leveraging machine learning techniques to identify potential customers, treads you might be interested in, or how you will spend your money.
for the final project of the course I took we were presented with a dataset of short camera reviews collected from the web. of the ~45000 reviews in the dataset 2000 of them were labelled as “Pro” for a positive review and “Con” for a negative review. the remaining ~43000 reviews had no label at all. the goal was teach a machine learner from the small set of labelled reviews and have it identify the rest.
some of the training reviews
Pro “Very versatile”
Pro “great picture quality”
Pro “small, simple, cheap”
Pro “Compact, Lightweight, Easy to use, Good for use with little kids, No wasted film, Preview pictures and delete ones you don’t like”
Con “Battery hog, missing ac adapter and charger”
Con “Close-up capability”
Con “Menus are small.”
Con “Technology is still expensive, disks can be filled fast too, user needs a computer to get all the benefits”
as you can see there is a lot of variety in the training examples. some are lists of words, some are full sentences, some are short, and some are long. for the project I created a neural network and trained it using a technique called backpropagation. coming into the problem it seems like it would be quite difficult to determine intentionality from text alone, especially when the samples are all over the place.
instead I was shocked at how well my software could learn to identify intentionality in simple sentences. below I have included some examples from the unlabelled set along with the classification my learner gave them
Pro “Great resolution, versatile, zoom capability”
Con “It is just a bit noisy”
Con “battery usage high, availability of accessories low”
Pro “Portable size and great picture quality!”
Pro “reasonable price; user friendly camera”
Pro “The price!”
Con “CAN’T HEAR ON THE EARPIECE”
skimming through the ~43000 there are definitely some that it classifies incorrectly, but generally I found myself agreeing with the conclusions the software came to. it is truly a strange experience to write a piece of software from scratch and have it accomplish a task like this. everything that happens is something that I explicitly told the program to do, and yet the output is more than the sum of what I put into it.
after completing the project I couldn’t stop thinking about communication mediums and human ability to determine intentionality. the idea that humans communicate more non-verbally than verbally is an old one that is often dragged out to admonish the future generations for too much texting and technology. in my experience it is largely true that people have a hard time determining intent in text only mediums and from this I suspected a machine learner would struggle even more. instead I found that the necessary information is contained in text alone, but we likely haven’t learned to identify it.
I think there are a lot of interesting lessons to be learned about people in the process of teaching learning to computers.
-
to be known
to feel love, you must be known
– Donald Miller
I have spent so many years avoiding being known. there is a classical idea that the oldest type of magic is naming magic. that if can name something then you control it. I have devoted a lot of energy towards the pursuit of loving people I meet in a way that is new or unprecedented for them. without realizing it, this process has been largely about getting to know people, learning to walk through walls and armour they have. learning to see and understand the baggage they carry.
During this time I was learning to construct my own defences. I guess it was with a motivation that if people couldn’t get in then I couldn’t be hurt. who knows, the subconscious is a strange, strange place. consciously I have always been a chameleon, joking that I want to be a myth. it comes at no surprise that few people actually know me.
My greatest fear for a long time has been that I would never meet someone who loves me like I could love them. whenever I express this fear friends are quick to jump in and say that I will be surprised, that I just haven’t met them yet. this was an idea that I could get behind. the unpredictable nature of the future is my favourite property of time.
then, a week or so ago, Donald Miller tweeted the leading quote. no context. no commentary. seven words that would upset everything I know and dominate my mind ever since.my greatest fear is a situation of my own creation. to avoid being named, to avoid being vulnerable or weak, I have prevented myself from being loved.
what does this look like going forward? I’ll likely be just as mysterious as ever. fundamentally changing the person that I am seems unlikely. however when people get past my defences I won’t run away. when someone genuinely knows me I will embrace the inherent vulnerability of the situation.
when someone uses my name and it stops me so completely that I feel it physically I will no longer feel it as whiplash. instead I will recognize it instead as a side effect of being known.
then the love can come. -
calm before the storm
