Well, it's real now. We are moving to Nashville. I came to Boston in 2009 to study computer science and stayed for the career opportunities, loud and then quiet music scene (where I met Alejandra), and the wonderful friends we've made over the years.
Becoming a parent has reinforced how important family proximity is. Last year {was a doozy}. There were tough, tough moments, both from the challenge of Keep Baby Healthy and stress from my work. We have friends who would leap to help us here in Boston, but it's intangibly different. It feels like asking for a favor rather than something unconditional. I'll note how lucky we are to have a family like that.
I spent the last week starting to prep the house for a move, packing the basement and de-cluttering. We put loads of free stuff out on the curb which was scooped up with alarming immediacy. My parents visited to hang with Meadow and help prep. It was a good week.
I'm especially proud of some repairs my dad and I made: each room has a spot where where radiator pipes penetrated the floor. Those radiators now removed (we replaced the gas furnace with heat pumps a while back), the holes are apparent and unsightly. We cut fit pieces of hemlock and plywood to plug the holes and artfully stained them to match.
Tomorrow is back to work, though. Woke last night to an onslaught of stressful work thoughts I had blissfully suppressed for the week away from the computer. Alas.
A lot of work ahead to do the whole sell house thing, but very excited to be close to parents and brother.
The last time I experienced a major solar eclipse Alej, Q and I traveled down to Nashville to experience totality. It really was something. I remember first darkness, then cicadas and bats coming to life, then humans all around us hollering and applauding.
August 2017 in Nashville, TN moments before totality. Moments before werewolf transformation.
For a brief moment, everything changed and all life was connected to two distant, coincident bodies.
This year we did not travel to totality. On the tail end of a weeks-long illness, the 9X% eclipse Boston was getting was good enough, fine really! Toddler and pup in tow, we went on a many mile stroll during the witching hour. I brought a plastic container a plant came in, with holes perfect for eclipse projection. While the sense of all-living-being-unity was not acute and profound as it was in August of 2017, we did have some nice interactions with the swarms of people out and about.
The catastrophic and the celestial - the duo able to shake humanity awake for just long enough to stop for a moment and look around (or up).
Wrote {New Year, 24}. Quiet day to start the year, spent with Alej and M. Long walk to Malden Center, cooked saag with tofu, and got a climb in at the new rock gym (and felt strong). Here's to a more stable and fulfilling year.
Small note: I fixed something that had bothered me on the site for a while. When images were an aspect ratio that didn't fit the page's content width and the alt text/caption were long, I'd end up with a large black area. To fix, I had to add the following style:
Impenetrable fog settled on the Heights this past week. Weird warmth on wet made point light smear, the full moon a melodramatic dim blob.
I gave my company the last week of the year off, so my last few days of the year have been spent with Meadow and Alejandra.
During naps and after bed I prototyped wxql, a query language inspired by a conversation at my undergraduate advisor's retirement party. The aim is to handle challenges with n-dimensional data such as those that are found in the domain of meteorology, and to provide a foundation on which a number of expressive queries can be used to build.
A few weeks ago was my undergraduate advisor Norman Ramsey's retirement party. Norman taught two main classes: Machine Structure and Assembly Language Programming and Programming Languages, which were both the most demanding and rewarding courses in the Tufts CS curriculum. Many students, myself included, found these courses formative, and the right of passage was the bedrock for the culture of the department and a number of enduring relationships.
Fellow students, TAs, advisees traveled from afar to share anecdotes of Norman's teaching. Many of us, myself included, attribute our success in our endeavors since school to Norman. This man was a legend, if I haven't made it clear. There were tears, jokes about compilers, and stories of overcoming imposter syndrome.
Someone at the event mentioned that they were designing a domain-specific query language in Rust for their work. This sparked an idea for me - the query languages that I've encountered to-date have been designed for table or graph-like structures of data. As my mind becomes more immersed in the domain of meteorology, n-dimensional data structures have stood out to me as underserved by the design of languages and file formats. After the party, walking through campus, I wondered to Alden (who also traveled to the retirement party), what if weather data had a programming language or query language expressly designed for its challenges? What would it look like? For now, I'm calling it wxql.
They're tearing down the long-abandoned hospital next to my house. At one point a brick facade was visible below the outermost brick facade. Clearly from the era we all accept existed when craft was zenith. The under-brickwork was beautiful, ornate. It appeared as though the crew ripped a section of building off and paused at the discovery.
Before:
After:
A derelict brick building with the right half of it torn off
We did it. Marsh, Meadow and dax, home alone for 48 hours after our mission abort trip to NYC due to the torrential rain and flooding. Alej went by train the next day while we three held down the fort. Very little time for my attention to wander, save nap times. During naps, I continue to think about weather forecasts, about the steep learning curve and convoluted methods of access. Of their centralization and points of failure (gov shutdown? sorry!).
The uninterrupted and intense time with Meadow went much better than expected. She ate voraciously, slept consistently and was a joy to walk and play with. It's a silly thing, but I'm proud of myself for handling it with little stress and no mishaps.
Tired now. Some things I want to write soon:
Art imitates life, life imitates art: videogame edition: I've been studying some of the techniques and math behind shaders, game simulations and other technological feats and thinking about how they apply to problems in my universe of interest.
A guide to starting a business/organization, if I were to do it again ;) I get a lot of outreach from folks asking me for "readmes" for my current co. Although I think I did quite a good job, I'd change a few things if I had the opportunity to.
I drew some goldenrod and some architectural drawings (I'm very bad at the basics, consistent perspective and scale) - but fun nevertheless.
Went down a TodePond rabbit hole over a cup of tea (i.e. this live talk). Their energy and enthusiasm about spatial programming -- and their storytelling bringing us along the discovery journey -- was incredible. It was one of those mind expanding nights. I've been dealing in "spatial data" from the meteorology, satellite, and geospatial perspective for some time, but this concept of rule-based computation (like, say Orca), explained in this way, had me scribbling down sparks of thoughts, not yet ideas, about how they could relate to forecasting dynamical systems and defining environments.
We've spent the last few months in the mountains of the western part of the state. Cool, misty mornings and sunny afternoons perfect for swimming in the many lakes and streams. My trail shoes got some solid miles; on my last run before we came home I saw three bears, a mother and two cubs rolling and playing and scratching trees. I don't think they saw me as I observed for a while before doubling back to not disturb them.
We also did a first excursion up the green river, walking in and through the riverbed itself, shifting bank to bank to avoid the strongest currents and most harrowing rapids. I'd like next time to travel the full distance upstream to see where the river takes us.
Henry in the Green River
Two things I would recommend not mixing: a newborn entering your family and a complicated and prolonged corporate restructuring/financing. Thankfully, one of these things makes my heart sing. The other has been a metaphorical storm cloud; I've done a lot of journaling about it but nothing I can share yet.
Henry, Alejandra, and Meadow at MassMoca
I can't stop thinking about weather forecasts. A few things in particular:
Numerical weather predictions (NWPs) are incredibly hard to access, both due to the most common file format and their dimensionality
These hard to access predictions are surprisingly inaccurate (you'd think we - humans - would be better at this by now, but it's very hard)
The forecasting models are extremely brittle to an input being unavailable
NWPs, when presented, don't do a good job communicating confidence intervals
In talking to my longtime collaborator, there's the seed of an idea how how to address all of these issues. We have more thinking to do, but the benefits of an improved weather forecast are far-reaching and energizing.
