There is something odd about this journal. And that is, who the fuck reads this? I don't write it for anybody but myself to read, years down the line. And I have become an increasingly reclusive, privacy-seeking individual. So why not just make this private, or write it in a Google Doc? I guess because something gets lost in the story telling if I don't at least pretend I'm writing it for a broader audience. So I guess, read this. Comment. Like and subscribe. I don't care, I don't read your comments anyway. On with the show...

As the title says, my journal is going to be old enough to drink this year. June 20th is its birthday, predated only by my Gmail account (by 2 days) as my oldest internet presence. Pretty wild. Looking back, I don't think any of us thought about online endurance and duration of the accounts we were creating. It was a fever dream of brand new high speed internet. Create ALL the accounts! There was obviously some regrets along the way. But this Journal endures. And if it doesn't, I also backup all of these entries to my Drive and Calendar. And if Google ever shuts down, I guess I will just download them all.

Ha, looking back, I guess I am repeating what I wrote in 2023. Ok ok, let's move on.

Here's what's been going on.

I'm making that sweet finance money at the new job. I can't believe I wasted so much time in other industries. I've been there a year and a half now, but I still feel like a n00b. 2025 is going to be a year of high focus for me. I'm going to ace my big projects and supplement these wins with smaller wins on Operation: Hades' Veil.

I started Hades' Veil in August of 2024. I made some initial progress, but then got bogged down by real project work. I'm still in the real project work and haven't had much time to do anything else, but let's do a quick checkup.

Operation: Hades' Veil
Mission Statement: To impose my way of working on a team resistant to change.

This was naively slated to be complete in October of 2024. Given the shifting priorities of my work, I will now be slating this to be complete by mid-November 2025. I will now break down the sub-ops.

Operation: Inbox Zero
How I will complete this: I order to make progress here, I need to put focus on it. Every Friday, I need to pick one unnecessary email and target it for removal. Theoretically, excluding vacation and holidays, that should be about 50 or so spam emails removed.

Operation: Atlas Unchained
How I will complete this: This is one of my 3 major projects. It is making progress, but I continually run into issues. This is my current top priority, and I am expecting to be completed by the end of January. It is currently Jan 11th. I am giving myself 7 days to get this done. I am on call next week and I have Jury Duty, but that can't be an excuse.

Operation: TamperGorilla
How I will complete this: It's hard to mark this as complete, since it could always be improved upon. Here's what I've completed so far:

• 
     
• Okta login
     
• Main application login
     
• TeamCity login
     
• AWS click through
     
• MW selected login
     
• KX cache application overhaul

TODO:

• 
     
• Bridge Application enhancements
     
• TIDAL Login

Operation: Aeolus' Harmony
COMPLETED: Just need to merge my PR and this will be a perfect flow from develop -> master.

Operation: Hestia's Hearth
How I will complete this: This is currently on hold behind Atlas Unchained. I am to complete that first, and then I can come back to this. I will schedule this for May, 2025.

Operation: Apollo's Vision
COMPLETED

Operation Sisyphus' Stone
How I will complete this: This has taken a back seat, but after speaking with the QA guy, he thinks that there was benefit to waiting as he has more experience with other projects now. Target: Summer, 2025.

Operation: Cerberus' Doggy Treats
How I will complete this: I have compiled a small Wiki page on this. I will continue to update it as I learn more.

Operation: Lookout
How I will complete this: This is a long term project that will take more effort than a weekend. I want to design this as a plugin architecture that would allow teams to create their own functionality. Timeline: December, 2025.

Operation: Plugged-In
An IntelliJ plugin to run various configurations of our Micro Service.

Operation: Where's Waldo
Search for any ID. This is difficult, as I would need like an Elastic Search or MongoDB instance. On hold. Will revisit in 2026, perhaps as a larger analytical project.

Operation: Sea To Air
Move Tidal to Airflow and completely revamp the CSV report creator app. Tentatively scheduled for end of 2025.

Great At Work
I'm also reading Great At Work by Morten Hansen. So far, the principles I've learned are:

• Do Less, then Obsess
• Implement a learning loop, which could be thought of as continuous improvement of the self
• Focus on finding contributions that add value
• Need Purpose and Passion (p-squared) to be fully effective
• Hours worked is not as important as the effectiveness of each hour worked
• Benefit to putting in extra hours maxes out at 50 hours per week

It's taken me some time to adjust to the new digs, but I'm starting to get a feel for things. And that means I'm getting a little more serious about the change I want to bring to the org. Historically, when I get serious about something, I give it an operational name. This puts me in a tactical mindset. So now that we're over halfway through the year and bonus time will be coming up before we know it, I need to have something to show for myself.

INTRODUCING...

Operation: Hades' Veil
The overall operation is aimed at bringing change to the team and trying to shoehorn in the way I think things should be done. It is the overall operation that will oversee several sub-operations and aims to be complete by the end of October 2024.

Sub-operations
As I have had several ideas kicking around in my head since I started, they have only really solidified as feasible ideas recently. Some of these are sanctioned by tasks I have been assigned, and some are Skunkworx projects I am developing in the dark (hence, Hades' Veil).

Operation: Inbox Zero
For some insanity-inducing reason, we receive thousands of emails a day, mostly from app servers. Everybody filters these. Which is fucking stupid. Why not cut it off at the source? So I am gathering one week of unfiltered emails. I will then export these to CSV and read them into RStudio and create a presentation. How can we eliminate 80-90% of the emails we receive? I will categorize them and track them down to the source and determine alternatives (logging to file, monitoring, sending to an alternative group email that can be easily filtered, etc).

Operation: Atlas Unchained
One of our primary applications uses Octopus to deploy, whereas everything else uses Jenkins. When asked about the why of this, I was told "it was a decision made before my time". I was tasked with securing new virtuals with RHEL 8.8. So if I am tasked with setting up entirely new boxes, why not move the whole deploy process to Jenkins. This will be a pain, but I think it will be extremely valuable to not have to deal with the DevOps team every time we want to make a change.

Operation: TamperGorilla
A small but annoyance-reducing task to add Tamper Monkey scripts to make our internal websites more usable.

Operation: Aeolus' Harmony
We currently deploy to AWS S3 by, get this, manually copying files. WTF. Is this 1995? So I am working to setup a sync script that will automatically deploy to dev when code is committed to the develop branch, and allow the user to deploy to prod through Jenkins.

Operation: Hestia's Hearth
We have some critical yet seemingly forgotten about scripts that are manually deployed. I will be adding this to the build.gradle and to the new Jenkins jobs.

Operation: Apollo's Vision
This is a reference data recommender service. A machine learning recommender that will use a graph to recommend target variables given input parameters. This is part of a larger AI push, but is due by the end of September.

Operation Sisyphus' Stone
Bring automated integration testing to the team. Working with the new QA appointee, we are already getting started on setting up scenarios for automation testing. I will be saving hours of manpower.

Operation: Cerberus' Doggy Treats
More of a documentation effort. The single most painful thing I have found is getting access and privileges to do ANYTHING. It has been extremely frustrating. I want a one-stop-shop to go to when someone gets stuck with a certificate error, or a firewall issue or a password prompt.

I'm very excited about this. This will be a data-driven approach and I will be able to showcase how many man hours I've saved the team by the time I'm done. This should justify my bonus in addition to making my own life 1000x easier.

Once again, it has been way too long. I've been on Slashdot coming up on 20 years. I honestly can't believe it's still around. Which is why I export all of these journals to Google Docs and Calendar. Of course, who knows how long that'll last. When that time comes though, I'll just do a data export. Anyway.

I fucked up my desktop trying to do a dist upgrade. Not enough space in /boot, so I tried moving the one of the kernel images to /tmp, but inadvertently deleted the one that was actually being used and then rebooted. Bam. Couldn't find /boot/vmlinuz-5.4.0-155-generic. Well shit.

To my knowledge, I had no bootable media lying around. I did try some thumbdrives, and one actually had an old Ubuntu on it, but it spazzed out when trying to mount. So, what did I do? I pulled out my nearly 15 year old laptop running Ubuntu 4. It's got just enough steam to get onto wifi and download some things and dd them onto some thumbdrives. So I got System Rescue Linux. Plugged in the thumbdrive and unmounted it after it was automounted.

$ sudo umount /media/thumbdrive
$ dd if=systemrescue.iso of=/dev/sdc bs=4M

Downloaded the 5.4.0-155-generic AMD64 kernel DEB and unpackaged it.

$ ar -x ./kernelimage.deb
$ tar -xvf data.tar.xf

Found my compressed kernel image and copied it over to the other thumbdrive.

Then booted up with System Rescue, which gives a root shell. Mounted the /boot partition and the other thumbdrive and copied the file over to where it should be.
Rebooted (a couple times, because I had messed with the boot order and it wasn't looking in the UEFI bootloader. A few reboots and messing around got it to pick ubuntu and finally everything booted up.

I am still in a bad state with kind of a half dist upgrade right now. But at least I have a system that's up and running.

Haven't hacked like this in years. Feels good. Especially since I just started a new job working for a hedge fund. I'm making crazy good money and finally feel like things are going my way. At 40. But still. Better late than never.

I decided to Google my name. I mean, I've done it many times before, and I know what's out there. But after leaving most social media a few years ago, and really enjoying the new found privacy, I decided to do a complete privacy audit and see what someone, anyone out in the world could find about me if they so desired.

And I wasn't really happy with what I found. Much of the stuff I have thrown out onto the internet is from a version of me in the past that doesn't even exist anymore. Modern day me favors privacy over vanity and silence over blaring opinions and comments. So I'm documenting the steps I took here needed to remove my identifiable self from Google and other search results.

Step 1: Google your name in quotes along with your city.

Step 2: Follow up on image results first. These are the easiest way for people to identify you. If they have a face and a name, Google image results are an easy confirmation that they're on the right track.

Step 3: Start removing yourself. For me, YouTube videos from the past all had to be set to private. Account profile pictures either had to be changed to something that was not a picture of me, or the account deleted entirely. Note that it may take some time for Google image cache to catch up.

Step 4: Request videos, images, etc be removed from 3rd parties. I had to contact a YouTube channel to take down a video of me from almost 10 years ago, for example.

Step 5: This is the time consuming one. Opt out of all of the 3rd party data brokers. These are the creeper sites like Radaris, and Spokeo. But there are tons of them. Below is a list of them and their Opt Out process:

Intelius - https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2FIntelius.com%2Fopt-out%2F
BeenVerified - https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.beenverified.com%2Fapp%2Foptout%2Fsearch
InstantCheckmate - https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.instantcheckmate.com%2Fopt-out
TruthFinder - https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.truthfinder.com%2Fopt-out%2F
Spokeo - https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.spokeo.com%2Foptout
Whitepages - https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.whitepages.com%2Fsuppression-requests *NOTE* They required to call your phone and have you enter a verification number. Don't send this to Google Voice, or the call interceptor will screw up the whole process, and if you fail it twice, you will have to contact their customer support, which is support@whitepages.com, or (206) 621-1375. Emailing them results in them telling you to submit a request here: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fsupport.whitepages.com%2Fhc%2Fen-us%2Frequests%2Fnew
PeekYou - https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.peekyou.com%2Fabout%2Fcontact%2Fccpa_optout%2Fright_to_know_and_delete%2F
USSearch - https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ussearch.com%2Fopt-out%2Fsubmit%2F
PeopleFinder - https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.peoplefinders.com%2Fopt-out
PeopleFinders - https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.peoplefinders.com%2Fopt-out
PeopleLookup.com - See USSearch
Familytreenow.com - https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.familytreenow.com%2Foptout
PeopleSmart.com - https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.peoplesmart.com%2Fapp%2Foptout%2Fsearch - See: BeenVerified
PeopleWise.com -
Nuwber.com - https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnuwber.com%2Fremoval%2Flink
MyRelatives.com -
ThatIsThem - https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fthatsthem.com%2Foptout
Publicrecords.directory - https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpublicrecords.directory%2Fcontact.php
Telephonedirectories.us -https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.telephonedirectories.us%2FEdit_Records
Instantpeoplefinder.com
Truepeoplesearch.com
Allareacodes.com - https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.allareacodes.com%2Fremove_name.htm
Peoplebyname.com
Radaris - https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fradaris.com%2Fcontrol%2Fprivacy
Voterrecords.com - have to click on your record and go to the bottom of the page and click the opt out link
        Ancestry.com
Peekyou.com - https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.peekyou.com%2Fabout%2Fcontact%2Fccpa_optout%2Fright_to_know_and_delete%2F
        PrivateEye.com - https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fremovaly.com%2Fprivateeye-opt-out%2F
        Zabasearch.com - See Intellius
        CheckThem.com - https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.checkthem.com%2Foptout%2F
        DOBSearch.com
        MyLife.com - Click on Do Not Sell My Information at the bottom.
        IDtrue.com - https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.idtrue.com%2Foptout%2Foptout.php
        411.com - https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2F411.info%2Fmanage%2F

spyfly.com - Email was returned - will have to call 1-800-831-9235

Other:
LexisNexis - https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Foptout.lexisnexis.com%2F
Advertising: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Foptout.aboutads.info%2F%3Fc%3D2%26amp;lang=EN
Experian: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.experian.com%2Fprivacy%2Fopting_out - There are a lot of steps here.

NOTE: Turning off comments on this because you people are fucking weird. Who honestly has time to read some random dude's journals? You should take a good long look in the mirror, much as I'll be doing in this post. If you've got time for this, you're not living up to your full potential. As I have said before, these are for me. Sure, I could do it privately, but as this is my oldest surviving journal, I like to keep it going. Read on if you want, but you really should be doing something else right now.

Whenever I have a surge of motivation to get something done, I find it helpful to call it an "Operation" and name it. Gives it more of an official feel, rather than "I'm just doing some stuff sometimes". I'm calling this one "Operation: Self Rescue" because I am indeed rescuing myself. It turns out, the thinking that I have been fine after all these years, is in fact not correct. I'm realizing that I'm pretty goddamn fucked up, not happy, and not on the trajectory I want to be. But the good news is, I have finally realized it. It should have been obvious, but when you're in it, living it day to day, it's hard to see the forest for the trees. I finally realized I'm in a fucked up forest, and the only way out is by chopping down each of these trees individually.

Really stuck that analogy. Nice.

I've always dabbled in self help, but never really thought I NEEDED it or anything. I just saw it as a way to get better at social situations and job performance. But after my most recent girlfriend left me, mostly due to my inability to be intimate and commit to anything other than casual fun, I had an immediate wakeup call. "What the fuck am I doing with my life?" I do the bare minimum work at a job that pays well but that I'm really not interested in, jerk off several times a day, run (the only positive thing I could really say I do), and then drink the night away. It's a whirlpool of shit, and it needs to be drained.

So I've decided to get a therapist after the 1st of the year.

In addition, I have several self-help books, and I think they all compliment each other. I can take a little of what I learn from each and each should compliment the other. So here are the books I'm reading and the lessons I want to apply.

• No More Mr. Nice Guy by Dr. Robert Glover
          Probably the most important book on this list. Many of the things in this book don't apply, but many do. Particularly my sexual deviancy, such as compulsive masturbation, strippers, porn, etc. I believe these are preventing me from achieving intimacy with someone real, even when it's right in front of me.
     

•    

• The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck by Marc Manson
          This is a core foundation of all of the dating and interpersonal advice. Not giving a fuck frees us up to make mistakes, get rejected, and TRY. Without mastering this, I will be frozen in fear forever and nothing will get done.

•    

• Dating Essentials for Men by Dr. Robert Glover
          I'm only a few hours into this book, but there is a lot of talk of limiting beliefs. He suggests going out and trying to get rejected 200 times in a week to get over your fear of rejection. This can be summed up as Not Giving a Fuck.
     

•    

• Models by Marc Manson
          Mostly ideas taken from No More Mr. Nice Guy and applied to dating (as Dating Essentials for Men is). This can be summarized into honesty, vulnerability, and setting boundaries. And those can be summed up further into Not Giving a Fuck. If you don't give a fuck what anyone thinks, you can be honest, vulnerable, and set boundaries because if people don't accept you for who you are, fuck 'em.
     

•    

• How to Be a 3% Man by Corey Wayne
          Haven't read this yet.
     

•    

• Atomic Habits by James Clear
          All of the actionable items here can be broken into atomic habits that can be made enjoyable, rewarding, and easier to do regularly.
     

•    

• Lifestyle Blueprint by Dave Perrotta
          Dave gives actionable steps to improving your social life, financial situation, and ability with women. It's a triangle, and should be balanced on all sides.
     

•    

• 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven Covey
          I took this class over 10 years ago, and while I have gotten away from practicing it, the principles are still important and can be applied to this process. Particularly habits 1-3, and 7. Habits 4, 5, and 6 are interpersonal, and could serve well in a relationship, but that phase is a long way off. Being proactive, beginning with the end in mind, and putting first things first should be the basis for how I approach this operation.
     

•    

• Can't Hurt Me by David Goggins
          This was mostly an amazing story, but the book contains actionable items, most notably, the Accountability Mirror.
     

•    

• The 4-Hour Body by Tim Ferriss
          Although I'm not sure the supplement cocktail that he recommends is worthwhile, there are some interesting tidbits in this book.
     

•    

• Unfuck Yourself by Gary John Bishop
          Haven't read it yet.
     
• The Mindful Athlete by George Mumford
          Basically meditation. I'm already finding it hard to even want to do it, but I know it's beneficial.

I am building the base right now, reading and rereading these books. The actual work will come after, when I've taken notes and laid out a plan to implement this advice.

Beginning with the end in mind: There really is no "End" to this, but I hope that in a year, I can open this journal up and say, yes, I've been working on these all year and I'm seeing results.

I have always used my Slashdot Journal as a log for my various IT activities over the years. It allows me to look back at how I solved a particular problem at one point in time. No surprise that I routinely look back at my Security Initiative 2008 journal entry when trying to remember how to format and encrypt a drive. But it's looking a little tired at this point. Back then we were using Blowfish and ReiserFS. And we had to manually define mounts. Things have gotten easier with Ubuntu and encryption and file systems have advanced. So this is a post simplifying and updating that process.

First, let's take a look at the dmesg output:

[1513080.659665] usb 2-1: new SuperSpeed USB device number 3 using xhci_hcd
[1513080.680271] usb 2-1: New USB device found, idVendor=1058, idProduct=25a3
[1513080.680274] usb 2-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[1513080.680275] usb 2-1: Product: Elements 25A3
[1513080.680277] usb 2-1: Manufacturer: Western Digital
[1513080.680278] usb 2-1: SerialNumber: 33574A48574B444A
[1513080.681042] usb-storage 2-1:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
[1513080.681161] scsi host8: usb-storage 2-1:1.0
[1513081.687955] scsi 8:0:0:0: Direct-Access WD Elements 25A3 1030 PQ: 0 ANSI: 6
[1513081.688180] sd 8:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg8 type 0
[1513081.688934] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdg] Spinning up disk...
[1513082.711627] .
[1513083.735608] .
[1513084.759599] .
[1513085.783591] .
[1513086.807577] .
[1513087.831568] .
[1513088.855549] .
[1513089.879541] .
[1513090.903532] .
[1513091.927481] .
[1513092.951469] .
[1513093.975492] .
[1513094.999526] .
[1513096.023435] .
[1513097.047454] .
[1513098.071413] .
[1513099.095429] .
[1513100.119418] .
[1513100.119557] ready
[1513100.119666] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdg] Very big device. Trying to use READ CAPACITY(16).
[1513100.119777] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdg] 35156590592 512-byte logical blocks: (xx.0 TB/xy.z TiB)
[1513100.119778] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdg] 4096-byte physical blocks
[1513100.119976] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdg] Write Protect is off
[1513100.119976] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdg] Mode Sense: 47 00 10 08
[1513100.120175] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdg] No Caching mode page found
[1513100.120178] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdg] Assuming drive cache: write through
[1513100.177682] sdg: sdg1
[1513100.178566] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdg] Attached SCSI disk
[1513825.458347] usb 2-5: USB disconnect, device number 2

I had tried running my old steps on this one only to encounter and error and put it aside for a few weeks. So we're basically starting from the beginning here.

First, we'll do our cryptsetup step. The default seems to be plenty secure now days, with cypher AES and mode xts-plain64, and hash spec sha256.

$ sudo cryptsetup --verbose --verify-passphrase --use-random luksFormat /dev/sdg1

WARNING!
========
This will overwrite data on /dev/sdg1 irrevocably.

Are you sure? (Type uppercase yes): YES
Enter passphrase for /dev/sdg1:
Verify passphrase:
Command successful.

Now create a mountable logical partition that we will call cryptsys

$ sudo cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sdg1 cryptsys
Enter passphrase for /dev/sdg1:

This should show as a block device in /dev/mapper

$ ls -l /dev/mapper

total 0
crw------- 1 root root 10, 236 May 8 21:53 control
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 7 May 26 10:59 cryptsys -> ../dm-3

Now we'll put a filesystem on the logical partition. We'll use EXT4. It is expected that BtrFS will be the way going forward, but this is what we have today for a stable, reliable FS.

$ sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/mapper/cryptsys
mke2fs 1.44.1 (24-Mar-2018)
Creating filesystem with 4394572800 4k blocks and 274661376 inodes
Filesystem UUID: 70fd510f-d742-40eb-9177-caf6049efeff
Superblock backups stored on blocks:
                32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632, 2654208,
                4096000, 7962624, 11239424, 20480000, 23887872, 71663616, 78675968,
                102400000, 214990848, 512000000, 550731776, 644972544, 1934917632,
                2560000000, 3855122432

Allocating group tables: done
Writing inode tables: done
Creating journal (262144 blocks): done
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done

We no longer need to create mountpoints, as Ubuntu does this for us in /media/{user}/.

Though we will need to change ownership, as it will be under root.

$ cd /media/{user}/{device}
$ sudo chown -R {user}:{user} .

Now it would be a good idea to unmount the volume and reopen it (always choose "Forget password immediately") to verify your password works and the drive mounts fine.

Bonus - when archiving files, to preserve timestamps and the like, use

$ rsync -ah --progress source/* destination/

Ahh, my Slashdot Journal. The thing I come back to every few years to look at how old I've gotten. At this point, my journal is old enough to drive a car. Gonna have to pull out some special shit on June 20th, 2024, which will mark the 20th anniversary of my first Journal entry. That's crazy. But it is a new day. A new month. A new year. And we have a new president. If I could have looked forward in time in 2016, I would have looked straight for this post. We did it! We're alive! Our democracy is still in one piece! Held together by duct tape and bubble gum maybe, but it's still together!

So it's time to revisit my first post-2016 election journal, simply titled Fuck, which generated some of the stupidest commentary on a random Slashdot journal I could never have imagined. I don't write these for the public, you fuckwits. These are for me. But if you think spending your time commenting in random corners of the internet is what's best, who am I to stop you.

Anyway, let's get right into it.

I'm going to lay down my predictions (based not off of data but purely gut, so take it for what its worth) and we'll see how I do in a few years:

1. Trump doesn't finish his presidency. Either by way of stepping down or impeachment, he doesn't make it 4 years.
2. He doesn't build a wall, doesn't scrap Obamacare, doesn't appoint a special prosecutor to jail Hillary, doesn't ban all Muslims and doesn't deport all current illegal immigrants. Also doesn't rebuild a bunch of factories and coal mines either. Mostly because none of that is really feasible.
3. He will get much tougher on immigration and make life harder for people who have moved her or want to move here.
4. He will make some economic and trade decisions that won't be felt until after his (hopefully less than 4-year) presidency.
5. He will ease regulations on the energy industry that will cause irreparable damage to our planet. But he won't be around to see the effects, as Florida, Louisiana, California, and New York are slowly submerged underwater.
6. Already happening: Racism, xenophobia, and bigotry have been given the thumbs up by putting the supreme leader of all of that into the highest office in the land.

The rest is a mystery and I don't think even the GOP knows what he's going to do. It'll be a watch and wait game, and it's a shitty game.

So how did we do?

1. So close!!! So. Freaking. Close. Without a Republican base to shield and enable the orange cunt, he would have been gone last year. And they even gave a go at invoking the 25th Amendment. But again. Spineless coward fucks. I'm gonna give this one a B+. I was right in principle, but off on one variable.

2. There are multiple claims here, so let's go through them. First, the wall. I'm giving myself a B on that. His little pathetic expanse of the wall only covered about 40 miles, and it was mostly enhancements to existing sections of wall, or on federally owned land. Which is a travesty in and of itself, given the environmental impacts of this sad little move to appease a bunch of dimwit racist fucks, some of whom went on to demonstrate themselves that walls don't work by scaling the Capitol walls. He did not scrap Obamacare, and never had a plan to replace it. His "big beautiful plan" never existed. He was the vaporware president. That's an A+. Hillary isn't in jail, so that's an A+. Despite some of the terrible things that slithered out of the brain of Stephen Miller, not all Muslims were banned and he didn't deport all illegal immigrants. However, those little concentration camps he erected to separate families were pretty awful, so I'm giving myself a C on that one. The factories and coal mines part was dead on though, A+. So that's a B, A+, A+, C, and an A+. Averages out to an A-. Not bad.

3. That one was pretty vague, but it was also accurate. Giving myself a B for lack of specifics but also accuracy.

4. I guess we can't judge this one quite yet, but he made plenty of decisions that were felt DURING his administration. Namely around COVID, and the tax cuts for the wealthy. So I'd go A for the topic, but D for the timing, so we'll take a C+.

5. A+ on the substance matter here, as they were giving permits to drill in the Arctic right up to his last days. What a piece of shit.

6. This one is the Vince McMahon enlightenment meme in the bottom panel. Wow was that accurate. A-fucking-plus.

And I think I get bonus points for that last bit about the GOP not knowing what he was going to do, because you know most of them are probably relieved he's gone, but know they still have to appeal to his stupid-as-fuck base.

After tallying up the score, I get a solid A-. Not bad. And all you spineless Anoni-cunts who pejoratively called me an SJW or whatever thinking that somehow hurts my feelers can now slink back into your little holes for another four years and whine to your few friends on Facebook about how you're so persecuted as a straight white man. Enjoy your sad self-described victimhood.

And now I'm done. Maybe my next post will be something tech related. That'd be cool. Haven't really given a shit about technology, or coding, or math, or my job even for quite a while. I should use this moment to refocus myself. Maybe I'll do that. Just maybe. Cheers all, and thanks for reading my journal that I didn't write for you. Thank YOU, 2016 self, for hanging in there. We made it. Party time!

Another year comes to a close. Maybe the weirdest year I've ever experienced, too.

We started the year with the end-term of a measured and thoughtful (and perhaps overreaching at times) president, and handed the keys over to a fucking lunatic. The results have been about what you'd expect. And it is impossible to talk about this year without mentioning this asshole. He injects himself into every arena (including actual arenas which used to be political asylums where red and blue were just the color of the jerseys) and drives wedges between everyone and everything.

I made it until about October and news fatigue finally hit me. I no longer want to know what's going on. I can't do it anymore. I'll still vote. Occasionally write or call a senator, but let's be honest. Even that's not doing anything. They didn't listen on Net Neutrality. They BARELY listened on Obamacare - just squeezed by with that McCain vote - but they're still finding loopholes to scrap it. They aren't listening on guns. They aren't listening on taxes. The country is on sale to the wealthy. The rest of us are just along for the ride as we always have been.

So I just can't anymore. For my own personal sanity and stress levels. I'm trying to focus on me. Putting myself into a better position to be successful, and therefore have more impact. Perhaps by becoming a 1%-er. Maybe with some financial clout, I'll have more of a voice since that seems to be the law of the land.

Otherwise, this year was underwhelming academically. Time Series Analysis could have been a great class, but it was taught badly. Data Visualization was also disappointing. What I did learn could have been taught in about a week. Decision Support Systems should have had "for Managers" appended to the title, because we really didn't get very deep into anything. It was all busy work and group projects. Data Quality Management was maybe the worst class I've ever taken. I learned about Control Charts, and that's about it. Such a waste of time.

At the same time, I was living my best life for a while there this summer. I took the buyout from my company and I made an extra $70k this year. Enough to pay off all my credit cards and buy a whole bunch of shit including a 2013 Mini Cooper S. Not that I wanted it, but I needed it to drive my ass to my new job. I'm making 20% more at that job too without benefits. I'm still paying off one last loan, but I think I can get that done by the end of my contract.

I made it to Deathfest again, and had an almost religious experience (Satanic obviously) in the Vader mosh pit. It was one of the few times I felt truly happy this year. Actually, let's do a recap by month:

January: I was a newly single man, as my girlfriend of 4.5 years came out as gay just after Christmas. It was a fairly ho-hum month otherwise. Began Tindering.

February: Hung with the old high school friends. Went to Mexico City to see a girl. The sex was ok and it was a fun trip. I saw the Aztec ruins and we went to a Gorguts show. It was a nice vacation. Finished up an ETID tattoo. Made friends with some girls in my math class, but the cute one wasn't interested in me. Went to Get Out, which was pretty great. Saw Against Me! and ETID.

March: Saw Lucero. Ran the Heat the Streets run in a decent time. Saw Crowbar/Havoc. Started chatting with this random chick from Snapchat (which was kind of dumb, but I wasn't getting any so I needed some kind of stimulation). Saw Portugal. The Man. Saw Fallujah. Got my other bird tattoo, and the fork bomb tattoo. Started training for a marathon. Saw Anvil.

April: Got setup with a fuckbuddy who was just fantastic in bed. We only met up twice though, so that was that. Had an actual argument with a Tinder match. Deleted Tinder for a day or two. Ran 17 miles! Participated in the March for Science. Did 300 burpees.

May: Got my 4 heads tattoo. And then the trouble started. The ex- told me how depressed she had become. For pretty much the entirety of May, I was on-call for suicide watch. I was fortunate enough to have a job that I could pretty much leave at any time to go be with her. Coupled with her being sick about every other day, it was a bad situation. I still managed to see Dillinger Escape Plan and Goatwhore, and things worked out just so I could get to MDF again and have a fantastic time, and even bang a girl off Tinder.

June: More of the same with the ex-. Fights with her girlfriend and depression led her to move back in with me but she was almost just as unhappy with that situation. I ended up finding her a pretty reasonable apartment and once I got her moved in there (and bought her a bed), she was finally able to figure her life out. My mom stayed with me for 4 days too, which was kind of rough. I met some 21 year old friends at the 10th street bars who kind of helped me through the summer, though only by way of partying (not really being friends or anything). Still, it's what I needed. I made out with some girl at the CWS, who wasn't cute, but it was still fun. Did the CWS 5k run at a 6:35 pace. And I ran 19 miles!

July: Pretty much just Lacy from Tinder. We hung out 4 times and had some fun, but there really wasn't anything there. Still, got to bang in a pool on my roof. Also went on a date with a girl in an open marriage. That went nowhere and was just kind of annoying. I did get to see Unsane though, and got my You Suffer But Why? tattoo.

August: Pretty much a dud of a month. Hung out more with the 21 year olds. Released my mobile app. Met with my Dr. friend about getting a grad project going. Worked Maha, but didn't really watch the bands. But mostly, there was just kind of a lack of a sense of being needed. Once the ex- was able to find her way on her own, I was pretty much no longer in the picture and I felt like I had no purpose. When the Solar Eclipse happened, I felt like I had turned a corner and all the sudden, I didn't recognize anything. I needed to find my own way, my own purpose. I also ran 22 miles.

September: Started this month out with a strong decision: a vasectomy. It really wasn't bad and now I have nothing to worry about as far as accidents go. I turned 35, which sucks. I saw Exodus, and there was a Nazi there so that kind of ruined the show. Finally got my layoff processed. Went to Riot Fest and had a pretty good time. Met two random girls and we had a blast (but no action). Had several interviews for jobs. Ran a fucking marathon in pretty decent time. Banged Lauryn, which was just ok.

October: Saw Menzingers. Got my Friday the 13th tattoo. Started messing around with a married girl. Bought a car. Started my new job. And then had one of the worst days of my life, the effects of which still kind of haunt me. Nevertheless, went to Atlanta for my Spartan Super and banged a stripper right there in the club. Got my Athena tattoo.

November: Finished Athena tattoo. Saw Mayhem and Black Anvil. Hung out with the married girl again. Set up two Tinder dates in one week only to have one cancel the day of, and the other ghost the day of. Banged some random kinda fat 20 year old. Began a gratitude journal.

December: The year is ending on a better note. Went to Las Vegas for Christmas with my family and spent way too much money at the strip club. I matched with a girl who actually came out when I asked her out. We had a great time, and have hung out about 6 times now in 3 weeks. She stayed the night on Christmas Eve and had some of the best sex ever. I actually really like this one and is definitely the one good thing I have going right now. Also got my squid, crystal ball, y-hat, and plague doctor tattoos.

2017 by the numbers:
11 - Tattoos
$2,500 - Estimated money spent on tattoos
$18,000 - Cost of buying my car outright
8 - Number of new girls I had sex
10 - Suit jackets purchased and tailored
3 - Hamilton watches purchased
5 - Trips taken (Mexico City, Baltimore, Chicago, Atlanta, Las Vegas)
4 - Girls slept with in different cities (although Chicago was platonic, and Vegas was surprisingly a dud)

On paper it looks like a pretty good year, but looking at the whole of it, it was not a very happy year. I blame half of that on the political climate. The other half I blame on the ex- (not her directly, but her situation), and on struggling with getting back into the dating market. It has been more difficult than I would have expected at 35. Here's hoping that I can take 2018 in a completely different direction.

Was 2016 the Worst Of All Time?

Eh, that's debatable. I like to think of it as a finale, in a trilogy. 2013 was the preview.

2013 was mired in 6 weddings I had to either be in or attend. I hate weddings like I hate country music, or having a doctor touch your balls during a physical. So that year was awful. Work wasn't particularly great, though I did get an award out of it.

2014 was a horrid year. The Lady was working a job she hated, being treated like a slave. So she transfered that energy onto me. We had the dog. That was terrible. Then the attempt at other animals. She got into CRNA school, but was diagnosed with Meniere's disease shortly thereafter, causing massive disruption for the rest of both of our lives. The sex started dying out in 2014 too.

2015 was a lot of dealing with Meniere's and the drama of school. Combining the two was a nightmare as well. More stupid animal bullshit. But she did find yoga and meditation and became a better person. Still, not much sex. And she was also diagnosed with Celiac's. This was the year I started school too, so while I gained a sense of purpose, I forfeited probably a couple years off my life too. So it goes.

2016. That brings us to this year. While we've kind of been coasting, there have been bouts of wanting to quit school. Feeling like she can't and shouldn't be a CRNA. Lot's of sick days. Presidential election all year. Football team doing good enough to get my hopes up, but no good enough to make me proud. Trump winning the election. And one of the most stressful semesters + work projects in recent memory. So that's how 2016 went.

And just recently, I decided to try and upgrade Ubuntu from 14.04 to 16.04. Well, that crashed and burned. So I was left with the option to install a new OS or throw my computer away and never look at the internet again. While the latter was tempting, I decided to try installing Arch Linux. That took longer than I wanted and I was having some trouble. I would like to try again, when I have some time. Possibly after graduation. But I gave up and went back to my long-time favorite, Debian.

I had it up and running in no time, with a few minor tweaks. For one, I didn't get the wireless card's firmware installed so my CPU was going crazy looking for it until I got it installed after the fact. Now everything's happy. Except my screen resolution on XFCE kinda looks like ass and makes my eyes hurt. I don't know what to change it to though.

So anyway, that's my year.

But everyone posting the "Me at the beginning of 2016 vs. me at the end" memes... what's their point? Like 2017 is going to be any better? If anything, I can see 2017 being way worse. I'm really not expecting much. My money is on 2018. Because that's when I graduate and become a data scientist and also will be going on another metal cruise. So that year can't be all bad.

Anyway, that's all I got. Passed Bayesian Statistics and Intro to Data Sci. About ready to start Time Series Analysis and Data Viz. Also about ready to release my mobile app. Pretty stoked for that (once I get it working ffffffuuuuuuu------!!!!!!).

Ok, I'm going to continue setting up this new OS. grumble grumble grumble.

Now that Donald Trump is our Supreme Leader, I guess I should start learning Russian.

Right now, all I know is Na Zdorovje. It's a start. On the bright side, I've always wanted to write a depressing 800 page novel. I'll find a silver lining to this election yet.

All kidding aside, that intro was just to bate the trolls into trying to bate me. Since my last journal was such a success with the anonotrolls, I figure just mentioning the DJT name will stir up a few. And notably, they don't actually read your post. They just comment, like turds. Probably because they're being paid by Russia. Anyway.

I'm currently running an MCMC for some real-world data. So that's kind of exciting, but I'm doing it on a p6-2330 dual core with 6GB RAM. It's crawling. I'm lucky I'm able to also use a browser. For this project, I've had to choose - do I want Chrome, or RStudio with my data loaded? Take your pick. Lately, I feel like I'm falling into despair. Not because of Trump (though that doesn't help), but because of this fucking hat trick I'm trying to pull off. Passing two classes (with style!) and my work project is teetering on the edge of failure for all three.

Not to mention, I feel like I'm not even myself anymore. I just stumble through the day, ticking off things that need to be done. Doing nothing I want to do, or need to do for myself, beyond drinking and eating and putting on weight.

Afer this shit is over, I'm defininitely getting back in shape. I'll do another Spartan Race. I hate being fat. Ok, I'll stop complaining. Time for the trolls to do their job. Annnnd, go. Aft

Donald Trump is President-elect of the United States. There, that explains the title.

I've been sucked into politics for the last year, mostly by design of the media machine that started this fucking godawful election back in 2015. They built this monster, but the Dems turned him lose. I really sincerely thought that Clinton was headed toward an easy victory and that Trump would tear the GOP apart. But instead, now the Dems are being torn apart and the GOP owns both houses of congress, the presidency, and at least one supreme court seat. So yeah. Fuck.

I'm going to lay down my predictions (based not off of data but purely gut, so take it for what its worth) and we'll see how I do in a few years:

1. Trump doesn't finish his presidency. Either by way of stepping down or impeachment, he doesn't make it 4 years.
2. He doesn't build a wall, doesn't scrap Obamacare, doesn't appoint a special prosecutor to jail Hillary, doesn't ban all Muslims and doesn't deport all current illegal immigrants. Also doesn't rebuild a bunch of factories and coal mines either. Mostly because none of that is really feasible.
3. He will get much tougher on immigration and make life harder for people who have moved her or want to move here.
4. He will make some economic and trade decisions that won't be felt until after his (hopefully less than 4-year) presidency.
5. He will ease regulations on the energy industry that will cause irreparable damage to our planet. But he won't be around to see the effects, as Florida, Louisiana, California, and New York are slowly submerged underwater.
6. Already happening: Racism, xenophobia, and bigotry have been given the thumbs up by putting the supreme leader of all of that into the highest office in the land.

The rest is a mystery and I don't think even the GOP knows what he's going to do. It'll be a watch and wait game, and it's a shitty game.

In tech news, I'm slogging through my project. I don't know if I'll get it done in time. I fucking hope so. I need a win. I haven't had a win in a long time.

Bayesian Statistics is a tough class, but I'm learning a ton. I feel like I still haven't quite wrapped my head around some of the foundational principles yet. I'm going to come back to this when I get more time though.

Really, that's about all I want to talk about. It's late and I need to get to bed so I can continue work on the mobile app. So much left to do.

Hope I'm not reading this from a camp in a few years!

Yes, you. I hope you're sittin' pretty high on the metaphorical (or physical, what do I care) hog. I'll keep this short, but I've noticed that in my 10+ years of Slashdot-journalling, there's one thing I can count on: I never expect this entry to last quite so long, nor do I expect myself to live quite so long. So, let's see who outlives who.

HINT: PROBABLY MY JOURNAL.

Anyway, if you can read this, 2020 karniv0re, you're in one of 3 states:

1. Super rich and totally banging models because your gf was like "Whatevs" and you have money and it's the future and WHATEVER DUDE
2. Pretty similar to now - still in school because you decided to do a PhD because you hadn't had enough of the pain, and because you think it's your one road to, er, being something.
3. In a prison somewhere. What have you done. Also, how are you reading this. Do you have internet?! WTF?! Our prison system is a joke.

I suppose there's all the other inconsequential scenarios in there too, but who has time or cares about that. Seriously, pick one or get out of the way. Preferably 1 or 2. Try to avoid 3.

Thx.

P.S. 2030 karniv0re. Dude. How gross are your balls right now? As a vestige of the past, I am holding my balls whilst typing this right now. Hopefully that lets some youth time travel.

Anyway, I'm sure you're super smart and better than me at a lot of things. I just hope I'm doing my best to get you to where you are. Time is a cruel mistress and she don't give no fucks. Let's do our best in spite of her.

I don't have anything terribly specific to write about, but lots of little things.

Looking back nearly two years ago provides a pretty good picture of where I'm at. This tidbit from November of 2014 provides some insight:

After re-reading my last journal entry, man. This year has sucked. Shit was bleak.

That was from a journal entry titled Things Are Looking Up. But things never went up. I never got that architect position, and no more than a week later, the lady fell sick with Meniere's, which has been the centerpiece of our lives ever since.

Since then, it's been a war of attrition to see whether we can outlast our problems or if our problems outlast us.

I did end up going back to school, and I'm still in school. It's been a mixed bag of good and bad. I'm glad I'm learning things, and I'm glad I'm progressing toward a degree. I hate how much stress it causes me and how much time it eats up. I'm getting super out of shape because I don't have time to workout. I haven't been to the gym in probably about a year. I still run when I can, but it's not enough to counteract the booze and comfort food. I have cut back a bit on drinking. I don't keep bourbon around anymore. My regular mix of a couple beers and a couple manhattans from 2015 was slowly killing me. So I'm down to around 2-4 beers a night. Not great, but better.
I actually don't like being drunk anymore. I associate it with bad times now. So now, I prefer to be sober but still drink beers. It's a balance I guess. I expect that as I get older, and stress goes down (hopefully!), I'll drink even less.

But 2014 - 2018 (possibly even into 2019) maybe the most stressful years of my life. I feel like I can't relax until the Lady is done with school, boards passed, job acquired, and has been working for at least a year. In a way, I'm kind of glad 2016 is nearly over. I put this year on the calendar as a year to "get through." There were no incentives this year to speak of. None to look forward to.

I moved back over the the Glass Palace, giving up my awesome old cube and nice place in the company for a more anonymous role. Although it wasn't a great role there either. But at least I could focus on school. Now I've got a project due AND two classes. It's killing me. If I make it through this semester, I'm not sure what other challenges you could throw at me that would be tougher. I mean, I shouldn't say that. I thought I was being challenged a year ago with my Probability Models class. But Bayesian Stats + Data Science + work project + girlfriend with health issues is pretty much maxing me out.

Do I even need to mention how terrible the election has been? But I can't look away. It's such a fucking trainwreck. It also makes me question if I'm really a good person. I've done plenty I'm not proud of. Who really is good anyway? We're all sacks of waste waiting to die and fertilize the soil.

Maybe I'll list some good news. I did talk with my old boss and he's interested in bringing me on his team. He runs the Data Science team here. So that would be some great experience for me, and a definite change of pace. I'm going to talk with our AVP here pretty soon about that and my final school project. I want to work on ETAs. I think that'll be a great project. And next semester I'm taking a Time Series Analysis class, which will help in that analysis.

It looks like I will be out of debt by (revision number 920442) bonus time in 2018. So a little over a year to go. We'll see what pops up along the way. Kind of annoying that I'll be 35 just getting out of debt. Ridiculous, actually. But this is where we're at.

I have been toying with the idea of getting a PhD but I really don't know. Seems like an awful lot of effort for those letters. But I know it'd be huge for me. I'll probably continue to ponder it through 2017. Leaving it on the table.

But for now, I have a mobile app to build. I have roughly two weeks to put the finishing touches on the code. Time to earn my bonus.

I'm taking two classes this semester. Stepping it up from the single-class semesters. I think it'll be ok though. I'm in Intro to Data Science and Bayesian Statistics. Man, a year ago, I was so excited to be in a DS class. And now, here I am, and it feels like bush league. It's because I've been studying this stuff so intensely for the last year, doing things the right way, no shortcuts, doing my own research, listening to DS podcasts, etc. I'm not terribly surprised when our professor is talking about reproducible research using Knitr. Got it, dude. I've been rolling with RMarkdown for at least a semester, and LaTeX even longer.

And despite how it sounds, I'm trying NOT to be a know-it-all. But it's hard. Because I've all the things we're learning in this class are things I've been doing on my own in other classes. So I'm just trying to keep my mouth shut and try to learn a thing or two. And I have! In learning R, I've skipped over a lot of the programming language aspects of it. I read somewhere, R is meant to be learned in tandem with statistics. So that's what I've been doing. And in doing so, I've skipped a lot of the fundamental programming language stuff that I would normally learn when learning any other language. So now's a good time to start picking that stuff up.

But to the title of this post, we've got a semester-long project we have to work on, and on a long run today, I was thinking about project ideas. Then I got to thinking about why it's so hard to come up with good DS projects. Here is my attempt to explain this, which can be used as a catalyst to explain why data science will never be fully automated, at least until we have artificial creativity (still a long way from reality).

1) There are two high level purposes of machine learning - classification and prediction.

So far so good. I think we can all agree on this. We're either trying to put things in buckets or guess what the next value is going to be. Of course it gets a lot more complicated when you dive in, but at the high level, that's it.

2) There are 5 types of predictions we can make (I came up with these off the top of my head while on a run, so don't take this as gospel).
2a) Natural phenomena - weather, stock market, global economies.
2b) Human phenomena - Baseball players hitting home runs, football teams winning the Super Bowl, how much I will weigh next year, will you click this ad, will you buy this product
2c) Social phenomena - Presidential elections, who you might want to follow on Twitter, Data Scientist wages
2d) Games of chance - Poker, Blackjack, dice, flipping coins
2e) Games of strategy - Literally any board game with multiple players

(There are almost certainly others, but this is seriously all I can think of and it makes sense to me)

Furthermore, there are three stages to data science (ONCE AGAIN, MAKING THIS UP AS I GO):

I) Asking questions, designing the problem
II) Modeling the problem, delivering results
III) Making decisions on those results

I am coming to the conclusion that data science doesn't spend enough time on I and III. It focuses so much on II, the technical side, that it forgets to even teach us to ask questions or tell anyone why the model is useful. And maybe in many scenarios, the business teams, managers, VPs and CEOs perform I and/or III. But I am somehow in a position where I need to prove why DS is useful. All the technical knowledge in the world ain't gonna make that happen. I need to be able to apply it. So really, I and III are about advertising ourselves, somewhat. Machine Learning without purpose is just a cool parlor trick. But use it to answer a really a good question and then perform some action to make life better, and you're a superhero.

So anyway, that was my key insights today as I hauled in 8 miles. If I'm way off on this shit, let me know in the comments.

Nearly a year ago today (give or take a few hours), I formally began this path toward Data Science. We'll call that t_0.

Back then, I had the faintest idea of what Data Science was. It seemed to me to be a collection of tools and programming languages. Like, oh, if I know R, or MapReduce/Hadoop/NoSQL, I'm a data scientist. Well, I'm happy to report, in the year that I've been studying Data Science, I know enough to tell you that it is a lot more than that. I am now on my fifth probability and/or statistics class. I've had one Big Data class (that focused on NoSQL and Hadoop) and I can say, it was probably the least of my concerns. Data Science is not just some extension of being a software engineer. Sure, being a Software Engineer will make a lot of things easier, but being a data scientist is an extension of being a statistician who incidentally has some software engineering skills.

I will still say, the biggest help to me throughout grad school thus far has been my professional background. I see all these kids going straight through from undergrad to grad, and they're still just students. There's really no professionalism in them. I've hit straight As or A+s in my first 4 classes, and I ascribe that entirely to having a strong professional background. I approach school like I do my job. I'm not trying to just pass the tests, but rather completely understand the subject.

So today, a year later (let's call this t_1), I am feeling smarter. But not by any means ready. If I were to be hired as a data scientist today, I would probably be in an intro level job. And I wouldn't blame someone for putting me there. I'm basically starting from scratch (with a little software engineering background to help me out). I am hoping I can sneak in some actual real-world work before I graduate to give me a foothold though.

I may have a little consulting work in the healthcare field, thanks to the Lady. I will definitely be able to help her with her Capstone project, but may also be able to help out one of her professors with data he collected on recertification of CRNAs and whether it is effective to do so. I'm kind of itching to do something like that. It's out of my realm of expertise, so it'd be cool to get healthcare data experience. Do I have time? Eh, I think I could make time probably.

My current work project is somewhat coming along. After hitting the point where I decided it all needs rewritten, things started moving faster. We just finished up a demo to our customer, and they approved. I think this is going to go nicely. Time to get the backend services knocked out.

Alright, well anyway. Intro to Data Science and Bayesian Statistics this semester. Two classes. But I think Intro to DS will be a piece of cake. Bayesian, though... We'll see. I want to keep my 4.0. Gonna have to keep pushing.