Wasn’t late! Woo. (But not by much; I got a fast hissing flat on the way in and walked the last handful of blocks.) Thinking I might need to start up sitting group again, if only for myself. It really helped me get here a bit earlier, and start the day on a good and successful note.
It’s like my brain is in quicksand this week. Every once in a while, I manage to fling up an arm or two (much like my experience in the ball pit, come to think of it), but it feels almost impossible to get more than that above the surface. And then I sink back down, and it’s not so bad, only not much can happen down there.
But I got out of the ball pit. Several times, in fact, in the course of a half hour. Maybe I can eventually lift myself out of this as well. It might just make my muscles sore. Nothing I can’t recover from, and it’ll make me stronger.
I find a lot of solace in metaphors.
Joined the new little statistics study group, which is awesomely beginner-friendly. Alicia’s taught a bit of Bayesian statistics before in an intro CS class (for quite some time, if I remember correctly), and some other folks appear to have some experience, but I don’t feel entirely out of place yet. Just like I need to practice reading more often.
In any case, we’re working from this book, which looks kinda fun. Got a bunch of things installed in a fresh virtualenv, so PyMC and Numpy? and Scipy and Matplotlib are all like <3 <3 <3 in my terminal.
Headed back to my little weather thing. It currently displays a couple lines pulled from the Dark Sky API, which makes me feel powerful and awesome. But that’s hardcoded.
I want to make it a little more extensible for myself (though I’m not concerned about making it generalizable for everyone), so I started looking into what one needs to do to use command-line flags and stuff. Turns out Python’s argparse is happy to help! And of course there’s a concise, friendly tutorial. Also I finally figured out how to display code inline on WordPress (control option x). YES.
Took me forever to figure out what the difference is between defining optional and positional (mandatory) keywords. Deep in the docs, I discovered that when using argparse, anything with a – (dash) at the front is optional; anything else is positional. Well crap. That’s not so tough. Yay!
Got on a good roll shortly before the jobs talk for the evening. Hoping to take some of this momentum into tomorrow. Ended up having really good conversations with Steve and Shad afterwards, continuing my trend of “never go home on time, be grateful for having such a flexible and understanding partner.”