Mark Richard
This past week I was lucky to head out to Washington state with some friends. We had all gotten vaccinated (and had mainly been working from home), so it was a nice opportunity to just spend time together and go exploring.
We went to various beaches, went on a whale-watching excursion, checked out the Hoh Rain Forest, and got up early to see a meteor shower (my first ever).
Most importantly, I discovered my phone could take a timelapse. So, I made this nifty video.
With a vaccine in my veins and a cautious reopening of Oracle Park in San Francisco, I was able to attend my first baseball game of 2021, and my first MLB game in nearly 2 years. It was an absolute privilege and joy to do something that has always meant so much to me over the years. I’m incredibly lucky to live just a short walk from this absolutely fantastic stadium.
The setup at Oracle is actually quite nice. They’re open for 22% capacity, but so far they’ve only achieved about 10% capacity after opening day. I’d say there were no more than 3 people within 10-15 feet of me throughout the game, with everyone else more than 20 feet away. Masks were required unless actively eating, and luckily everyone around me followed those rules. You’re required to have a negative COVID test or proof of full vaccination prior to entering a game, so I felt very safe throughout.
It gave me the ability to appreciate seeing the stadium for the first time. I love when the concourse doesn’t allow a full view of the field, so as you walk through the breezeway, the shade recedes and the incomparable atmosphere of a baseball game hits full force. I’m looking forward to spending any spare evening (and the occasional afternoon) at games this year.
As part of a new role at work, I’ve been researching aspects of funding for education in the United States. A recurring phrase is evidence-based interactions. I’m going to explore some of the facets of this idea, from its definitions and origins, to potential ramifications of its increasing usage in education.
This post is a placeholder for those future investigations. The educational landscape is of interest to many people, and learning about some of the guiding tenets can help explain a lot of the situations states are finding themselves in. I’m excited to be diving in.
I was messing around with animation this past week. It’s always been an interesting process to me, and I’ve messed with a few hand-drawn animation apps on the iPad in the past. However, any small skill in drawing left me a long time ago. I also had a particular goal that amounted to animating with a vector image I had built using Inkscape.
Lo and behold, I discovered the concept of vector tweening. It’s essentially an interpolative animation process that takes advantage of the mathematical niceties of vector images. Instead of needing to draw every individual frame, you can “skip” frames. You tell your animation software that at frame 6 your vector assets should look this way, and at frame 12 they should look that way. A little voodoo occurs (which I assume could be tweaked depending on the software), and you get all the frames between 6 and 12 automatically generated.
This was an amazing find. After a bit of searching, I installed Synfig. A few minutes later, I found the ability to save an Inkscape project as a Synfig animation project. In other words, the image I’d created became vector assets that could be animated using this new tool. Within twenty minutes I learned enough basics to make my little animation, and the rest was tediously adjusting points.1You can see the number of control points that get created when you convert text to a vector image in Inkscape. Luckily, I didn’t have to touch those, but moving an object with that many control points does make for a bit of a slow process.
This was a really interesting process. I love getting new tiny tools under my belt, and this is just another I might be able to bank on in the future. Regardless, I had a good time and learned something new about the world.
Footnotes
There are some excellent tools for organizing all aspects of an entity, whether it’s a single person, a hobby project, or an entire business. Services like Notion have come into vogue as trendy startups available to the masses, with a promise for greater expansion. I got into the world of Notion last year when I accepted a new role at work, which required greater coordination of people and projects. While my resulting setup was vital to my success, it’s put me in a bummer of a position nearly a year later.
Continue reading “Organization in Organizations”A couple years ago, I made a concerted effort to get back into reading. I’ve started tracking the books I’ve read since college, and have a goal of reading at least 24 books each year, or about 2 per month. While I do enjoy buying books, and I have several shelves of books still to read, I’ve discovered a few other sources for those who don’t want to buy individual books or want potentially more convenient ways of finding new books. Since I do most of my reading on my phone or Kindle, I’ll focus on eBook sources.
Continue reading “Tips for Getting eBooks”Admittedly, this post is ripping off a conversation that happened on a work Slack channel the other week. Here’s the general idea: If you count in a particular way, there are 12 options for how to put on your underwear, and 12 (ordered) options for putting on socks and shoes. Since there are the same number of options, we can create a bijection between the two scenarios. In other words, each choice of underwear arrangement will correspond to exactly one choice for socks and shoes.
The question is what bijection is “natural”, for whatever definition of natural you choose to have in this strange scenario. Let’s explore it a bit.
Continue reading “Socks and Underwear”I’ve been revisiting A Complete Beginner’s Guide to Django, which goes through the Django library, a Python tool for developing websites. I had tried it a year or two ago, but it just didn’t click. This time around I’ve found greater success precisely because many of the code examples are outdated and will not run without modification. While I may have more to say about using Django some other time, this experience has instead made me consider the efficacy of teaching using poor or broken examples.
Continue reading “Outdated Tutorials”