I start Tuesday with a decent mountain bicycle ride. During the ride I catch up to another rider who looks like he's bicycle commuting since he has the panniers on the bicycle. Sure enough he's doing about a ten mile bivyvle commute to work. He works for FileMaker and is surprised that I know the company. We talk a bit until he has to turn up Pine avenue to go to work and I contrinue on to the Los Angeles river to go home. I do some work on the mining/cement mill simulation and wash all of the hardwood floors and the kitchen floor.
I go walking for 75 minutes on Wednesday morning and then do some web scraping and revising of the voting strategy algorithm. The voting strategy algorithm is ready to be written up - I just need to find my writing ambition. In the afternoon I visit my dentist and she decides that the white spot on my gums that we've been watching and "probing" for a few years is a combined candida infection and something else going on. So after the cleaning I get a prescription rinse to deal with the candida and see what happens. Back at home I de-weed the roses and sideyard and call it a day with some news watching and some Netflix.
Thursday is a productive day. It starts with a good mountain bicycle ride to the old yacht club and back to home. I take some time to read the news and markets and eat spicy Thai curry. Early in the afternoon I pull out the garden equipment and edge, mow, and trim the lawn. It had grown long with recent rains and now is starting to look good. After a shower I make a quick trip to the pharmacy for a nasty-tasting mouth rinse for the candida infection. And then I find the correct front derailleur for the mountain bicycle by being a "pain in the rear" over the telephone to the manufacturer of the old derailleur. And finally I insatll a new cable modem and WiFi router which gives me much faster speeds (since the olde cable modem was old) and slightly better range. This weekend I'll hack the old WiFi outer and turn it into a WiFi repeate to extend my range farther into the backyard to allow me to spend summer evenings working away outdoors.
Friday is a planned day off from cycling to rest the legs and because it rains a bit. Instead I make a lot of progress writing up the mining/cement mill simulation and the voting strategy algoithm. There is still more writing to be done, but its a good start. A bit after noon I have a good session with the weights and no joint pain. So time to increase the weights for the next workout. I spend a lot of Friday watching the Netflix documentary series about the Cecil Hotel. I used to spend time near the Cecil Hotel in downtown Los Angeles in skid row. It's fun to bring back memories and it makes me want to get on the motorcycle or the train and go walk around the area again. Maybe after I'm vaccinated.
I start Saturday with a very good road bicycle ride. I feel strong throughout and probably need to ride longer again occasionally. During the afternoon I spend time trying to set up the old WiFi router as a bridge to extend the range of my WiFi signal. Unfortunately the old WiFi router is too old and canot be used a bridge (or extender). And more time picking out new books from the library and viewing weird movies and he start of a Philippino series in Tagalog (with Englsih subtitles). But I do learn a few more Tagalog words.
On Sunday there are very strong winds and gusts so I do not go cycling. Instead I go walk for an hour and then do some coding. Near noon I start watching the ice hockey game and the golf tournament from northern California. I long to take a trip to northern California and hang out along the rugged coastline. At mid afternoon I've lost Internet - probably due to the high winds. So I hem and haw and decide to lift weights. I can feel that I haven't fully recovered from Friday's workout, but I do the best that I can. After another shower the Internet is back up and I finish off the geocoding algorithm part of the matching.
When I wake up on President's Day I wonder why the house is so cold - it's down to 61 degrees F inside. And I realize I forgot to turn the heater on before bed last night. Nonetheless I stay in bed until 7:05 am. And then I'm out the door for a good, strong mountain bicycle ride to the old yacht club and back home again. It's still a bit breezy, but nothing like yesterday and nothing to significantly affect cycling. After a shower I read the news and make a medical appointment and then run errands - dropping two books off at the library and picking up supplies at the grocery store. Back at home I continue the momentum by doing some small motorcycle maintenance, cutting my own hair, and spot-deweeding in the driveway and surrounding areas with a chemical deweeder. I get some writng done on the voting strategy algorithm and spend a day relaxing. I haven't had a day off fom working out (i.e., cycling, lifting weights, run/walks) this year, so I'll take today as a semi-rest day in the afternoon (after the good mountain bicycle ride in the morning).
I'm out of bed on Tuesday and on a mission. I work continuously throughout the morning on a new website, scraping assets from another site that I like the look of, income taxes, and the voting strategy algorithms. By noon I've made great progress on all four fronts though only the income taxes are pretty much done. I take a break to ride the motorcycle and stop in at an ATM. And it's back to work for an hour until I go out and lift weights. It feels good today to lift and I have a good pump. After a shower I take a break with some food and then go back to my multi-pronged efforts in the evening.
On Wednesday the house is down to 60F in the morning since I left the heater off. I get out for a good mountain bicycle ride and crank along nicely with a bit of guty wind. After a shower I return the old Internet modem to the provider and pick up a few things from the grocery store that I forgot on Monday. In the early afternoon I go get a blood test and it returns negative results (which is good). For the rest of the day I try to do some writing and coding but the spark has burnt out after yesterday's productive day. I spend a bit of time installing a WiFi extender where the instructions seem very clear but are wrong. Only by playing with various sequences of events do I get the extender to work. I walk way to the back fence with my mobile phone and still have a good extended signal. So I'm ready to spend warmer months coding out in the backyard with the squirrels and birds.
On Thursday the house is down to 59F when I get out of bed at 6:30 am. I'm out the door for a mountain bicycle ride at 7:05 and though I'm tired I have a decent ride. After a shower I start in on my Oxathon. In the interest of finishing a few projects off, I've announced that today is my first ever Oxathon - A hackathon of demographics, algorithms, and optimization. I have a list of six projects that I want to advance to finished or final stages and so I've got Red Bull and EDM music to keep me energized as I code and write away. It's like a hackathon except taking place in my own house. Though I intended on staying up all night on Thursday night into Friday morning in the hackathon tradition, I get to bed at a reasonable hour since there has been significant progress made on the Oxathon projects.
I start Friday very early and walk to the grocery store for supplies. I tease my favorite cashier as I sometimes do by yelling, "Lupe to checkstand five
because you have a customer". (Since she was over at the internal Starbucks getting a coffee.) I even try to persuade some other grocery store workers to let me
make the announcement over the intercom, but they don't let me. But I get my supplies and continue on the Oxathon. I finish a fifth project off near 11:30am for a
CSULA Zoom meeting and I'm not going to finish the last project. The results of the Oxathon are:
1) Modeling demographics and perturbations with neural networks - Finished with great results
2) Cost minimization voting strategy - Finished with great results
3) Crime modeling and prediction - Finished with great results
4) Voting trend derivation - Finished with great results
5) Cement mill simulation and model correlation - Started with a basic framework but no completed
6) Demographic clustering to minimize different campaign strategies - Barely started
I have the 11:30 am CSULA Zoom meeting and have lost interest in a workout or a walk so I go mow the lawn and grab a shower. I'm mentally tired from the timespan of the
Oxathon and am pretty useless for the rest of the day. Though I do mow the lawn in place of a workout with the weights or a walk/run that just isn't in my
motivation or energy stores today. A Powerpoint summary of the Oxathon efforts, best viewed in full slide show mode for the animations, is available
here.
I start Saturday, after a night of less than average quality sleep, with a 72 minute walk/run since I'm not mentally ready to go for a long bicycle ride. After a shower I finally finish writing up the latest voting strategy algorithm and publish it on Medium. After some relaxing I go run some errands and pick up two new books from the library. One of the incomplete efforts from the latest Oxathon is bugging me, so I spend some time getting back to basics to make progress on the basic cement and mining mill simulation (to be followed with correlation with actual measured data). The early afternoon sees some strong wind so I turn on the television to the golf Genesis Open in Los Angeles to see how the professional golfers are dealing with the gusty and strong winds.
On Sunday my house ist at 61F inside but I don't care because I get out the door to go cycling. I start strong and then lose energy on the way back home as I fight a moderate headwind the whole way back. Afer a shower I'm just mentally worn out from the Oxathon and physically worn out from workouts, so its a slow day. I run a couple of errands and then switch back and forth between the ice hockey game and the golf torunament. But I'll be watching and say, "The kitchen sink needs to be cleaned" so I clean the kitchen sink. Or "the driveway needs to be swept" and I'll go sweep the driaveway. This continues for a while until I'm really burnt out and tired and can only sit in front of the television with some microwaved popcorn.
I start Monday trying to finish off the last two efforts that Idid not finish from last week's Oxathon. I finish one effort related to the clustering of demographics but don't finish the cement mill simulation and correlation. That will have to wait.