Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

A weblog created by Dr. Nels Lindahl featuring writings and thoughts…

Month: November 2018

  • Thinking about this new AWS DeepRacer announcement

    All of my spare time is being devoted to working on AWS training and certification this week. The one class that really caught my attention was the course, “Seeing Clearly: Computer Vision Theory.” With the announcement of the new AWS DeepRacer and corresponding league it seemed like a good thing to think about and dig into today. Digging in is the fun part of being a lifelong learner. I’m not entirely sure how I feel about the DeepRacer announcement. It is a good method to help build models. It sounds like a very interesting thing to push forward models at an accelerated rate. Seeing what happens will be pretty interesting throughout the next year.

    This whole thing looks like it would be fun to do with my first grader. Maybe that would be a good enough reason to buy the racer car and start building models. I really do think this is a method to get people to produce a bunch of distributed models to farm out the work without having to pay top talent. It is a pretty good strategy to get a market edge or to in some ways change the market. People would probably watch this type of racing league.

  • Apparently Qwiklabs has about 35 free hands on demos you can do

    I just did the “Introduction to Amazon Machine Learning” hands-on demo from Qwiklabs for free. Apparently, Qwiklabs has about 35 free hands on demos that you can do right now for fun to learn and grow your skills. That as you might have already guessed is pretty darn cool and a great opportunity to sharpen your skillset. You can login to Qwiklabs –> Catalog –> Filter: Price –> Free. That should let you check out what hands-on labs might inspire you to start learning today… If that does not inspire you to start digging into the world of machine learning I do not know what will. It is fairly amazing that we have access to free online hands-on labs. Labs are one of the best ways to really see the technology in action. Sure, you can watch a demo, but that type of learning is not the same opportunity. Being able to really dig in and poke around is what makes a hands-on lab so impactful.

  • Really digging into those AWS machine learning specialty courses

    You are going to be totally surprised. Yeah – you are probably not going to be surprised at all based on my post yesterday. All of my free time today was spent watching AWS machine learning videos. I really started to dig into those videos and all the content that is now online for free. My honest opinion is that the content from Coursera on the Google Cloud Platform was more dynamic and the combination of constant quizzes and hands-on labs really helped me dig in and absorb the material. However, given that the AWS machine learning content is free and organized pretty well to be highly consumable it works. My plan is to take on every single bit of content they made available. That is about 30 courses and 45 hours of material. The one thing that I have noticed so far is that you can only listen to the content at 1x speed. That might not seem like a very big deal, but normally I listen to lectures in fast forward. That is how I like to go about things. Instead of listening to music in the morning and at night I’m powering through machine learning content. Focusing in on machine learning and improving my skillset has been pretty rewarding.

    The AWS training and certification learning library is sorted into domains and a few other filters. Sorting down to the machine learning domain will reduce the learning library to 92 items. At the moment, I have completed 17 of the 92 items. That is not a bad start. I’m not entirely sure how long it will take me to power through all of that content. Some of the items are more involved than others. That is probably a good start toward consuming the whole learning library of 393 items. Some of them looking interesting, but I am willing to bet that the machine learning related items hold my attention better than any of the general items. Based on my recent laser focus on machine learning investing the time to finish the 92 items probably makes sense. They are free and a little bit of training every night is pretty much the path I am electing to walk down.

  • That AWS certified machine learning specialty certificate looks shiny

    My thoughts are awash with what might be in the 45 hours of training that Amazon just released. All of my efforts to date have been focused on the Google Cloud Platform certifications, but I think it might be fun to chew through the 30 courses featuring over 45 hours of training that was just released and take the exam. I do enjoy taking exams for some ineffable reason. The idea that the exam is still in beta does make it seem extra shiny. That might just be enough to drive me to the finish line. Being first in the pool is always more fun than having to take the boring post beta version of an exam related to machine learning…

    https://aws.amazon.com/training/learning-paths/machine-learning/

    Starting tonight I’m going to tear through these courses and probably write about the process for the next two weeks or so as I absorb the content. The thing that I am the most curious about is which platform I will want to use going forward. I’m super comfortable in the Google Cloud Platform and ready to go do machine learning in that ecotype without reservation. My knowledge of AWS is rather limited. I just spun up an account about fifteen minutes ago.

  • My baseball card collection is not worth what it used to be

    A few careless searches on eBay earlier today reminded me just how far my baseball card collection has fallen in value. It fell a lot. Seriously, it fell a lot more than I had expected or anticipated. In terms of packs of cards, I have been collecting cards from around 1985 to last year. That collecting has involved buying packs of sports trading cards at stores. A lot of them were bought at Target over the last few years. Before that the bulk of them were bought from grocery stores. I pick up a box or two. They end up on my desk and I have enjoyed opening them. The experience today is pretty much the same for me as it was decades ago. I mean they stopped putting gum in the packs, but that was pretty gross anyway.

    Today for some reason it seemed like a good idea to search for “baseball card lot” on eBay. With just a couple clicks and a small amount of reading it was very clear that the value of my baseball card collection is not worth what it used to be. My large boxes of 1990’s commons cards are stored in BCW super storage boxes that hold about 5,000 sports trading cards. Within some of those eBay searches I could see stacks of those boxes in people’s basements and rooms. Each of them holding a reasonably sized sports trading card collection. Every one of those boxes contains cards that somebody cared about and carefully transferred from pack to storage. A lot of my best cards were sold about 14 years ago. In hindsight that was as sound decision. The vast boxes of common cards that are currently in the basement are not even really worth selling on eBay. I’m not entirely sure they could be abandoned (handed over) to a sports trading card store anymore. Those stores probably do not even have the space to store them in perpetuity.

    Sports cards have value based on the people who want to buy them at the time they go up for sale. My guess based on a quick assessment of the online market is that the number of people selling has greatly outpaced the number of people buying. That market dynamic is a recipe for dropping prices. Most of my collection does not have any real emotional value to me outside of it being mine and I have kept it safe for over twenty years. A chunk of that collection includes graded George Brett cards, autographed Kansas City Royals cards, and autographed Kansas City Chiefs cards. Those three categories cards are not classified as common cards. That is how the bulk of my collection would be described. My collection is without question a vast set of common baseball cards from the 1990’s and early 2000’s. For those of you who know what that means in term so value you already know they do not have a ton of value anymore. A few of them are probably useful for people who collection anthologies of specific players or maybe team sets. I have been working on a graded George Brett anthology for about a decade. It has value to me and brings me joy. That is probably a nostalgia-based joy mixed with the joy a get from collecting sports trading cards in general.

  • Just a bit of snow in Denver and some wondering

    Today feels like it is starting a little slower than it should. We had a light dusting of snow last night in Denver. That is just enough snow to remind you that it is cold, but enough that it requires any real action. The titles for the blog seem to be getting longer every day. That seems to be something that is happening for no real reason. Maybe it is just one of those things that happens. Today I spent some time looking around at guitar pedals on eBay. I’m not entirely sure why that happened, but it sure did happen. Apparently, the eBay algorithm thinks that I want to purchase either an Earthquaker Devices Sea Machine V3 Chorus pedal or a Mr. Black dark echo effects pedal. I mean it is entirely possible the algorithm thinks that I am going to buy both of those guitar pedals. The sea machine pedal I looked at this morning did look pretty amazing. Part of this afternoon will probably be spent listening to demo videos on YouTube to get a real sense of the pedal.

  • Managing the ongoing narrative by writing daily and being reflective

    At any moment, I’m pretty much poised to sit down and write a ton of words. Targeting a specific topic is the hard part of the equation. Managing the ongoing narrative by writing daily takes a certain amount of effort and a commitment of time. Writing in the earlier hours of the morning or right before bed seems to be the best method to produce some weblog appropriate prose. That is however not the best method to build out academic work. That type of writing takes a certain amount of focus and dedication. Sitting down to write an academic article generally involves some thought about why that subject matters, an outline, and a lot of research. Generally, it is not something that happens in the moment. A good think piece might happen in the moment. That is the fun part of the whole thing. Out of nowhere something shows up and springs into existence.

    Part of the fun of writing and posting things is learning the frameworks and the platforms. Right now, I just realized that the World Online platform is transferring a few HTML artifacts during the cut and paste to the Guttenberg editing WordPress is currently using. It turns out that the best method to cut and paste over to the editor is to use the code editor view. Yeah that was some inside baseball about how this post formatting came to be this morning. Sure, that is not the most interesting thing that is going to happen today, but it was what caught my attention. That in short is the nature of how most things develop and how they persist. Attention matters these days. People are trying to garner as much attention as possible in all sorts of forms and in all sorts of ways. Advertising is the last great scramble to amass as much attention as possible for a variety of reasons. Some of those reasons are good and some of them are questionable.

    That scramble is the part of things that get interesting. Nothing these days really grabs the bulk of the people’s attention. Very few singular things grab the full attention of the public mind. These words right here right now are not going to capture the public mind. They are not really written toward that purpose. Writing for a blog is more or less about the exercise of writing. It is about the act of writing. What I have found over the years is that writing begets more writing and that is how the quality of writing generally improves.

  • All those tempting black Friday deals are out of control

    Throughout the last week — deals, previews of deals, and leaks about deals have flooded my inbox. Overall, the sheer volume of deals competing with each other during this window of time is really out of control. The public mind only has so much attention to behold and process all these deals. It really is about the attention merchants trying to grind out their share of a highly finite commodity. Beyond just getting people’s attention the matter of translating that attention into financial action still exists. People only have so much bandwidth to buy things during the now two week long black Friday deal window. That makes it even more problematic for the companies trying to convert deals into transactions. At this point, I just sort of look at the emails and sometimes click the links. The only deals I ended up buying were for a couple 4K movies from Best Buy. They were pure impulse purchases. I probably ended up purchasing them due to the sale price. The content at the regular price had never compelled me into making a purchase before. To that end I guess the email and the deal worked. Apparently, the market for selling physical entertainment media is shrinking. For better or worse, I still buy Blu-ray discs and probably will keep doing so until our cable company removes the monthly data caps. 

    Sitting down to write a second paragraph seemed an inspired thing to do. It may not have been the best decision of the day. At the moment, I’m watching a video on YouTube from Andertons music company featuring some black Friday deals on Jackson guitars. They look pretty amazing, but my next guitar purchase is pretty much set in stone at this point. I have been looking at the Chapman guitars ML3 BEA for some time. Sometime next year it will be mine. Right now, my arsenal of guitars includes three that I play on regular basis. First, my main guitar is a modified Fender Stratocaster. Second, for those times that I need a Les Paul guitar one sits next to me in my office. Third, now recently repaired my original circa 1995 Jackson Kelly modified guitar is up and running. The Floyd Rose on that one needed a couple new parts to get back to a reasonable floating state. A ton of tempting black Friday deals are out and about today. I just cleared around 30 of them out of my Inbox before writing this paragraph. Sure, this one was not as creative or constructive as my normal blocks of prose, but it was here and now it is done.  

    Generally, within my weblog (blog) posts I do not insert direct links to things. I try to use all the words necessary to describe the linked item. That should help anybody with a reasonable understanding of searching the internet locate the link or item. These works will remind the same, but the internet is a current of ever-changing content that inevitably will leave my links broken and otherwise stale. For things in the moment my platform of choice is Twitter. That seems to be a good platform for in the moment shouting into the grand public commons that is the internet. At the moment, Twitter seems to be the largest public commons dedicated to people shouting at each other. Everything else is smaller in size at the moment or dedicated to other purposes. 

    Oh yeah, I forget to mention that yesterday a viewing of, “Ralph Wrecks the Internet,” was on the agenda. If you enjoyed the first movie, or the Lego movie, then you probably will enjoy the film. 

  • Today is a planned day of rest and thanksgiving

    Today started off with two shots of espresso from my Nespresso Expert machine. It is featured in the thumbnail today. Turning the photo to black and white made it look a little more professional. I used some filter called Eiffel within Google Photos. Overall, the filters seem to work really well. My Google Pixel 3 XL generally does take great photos. We have been looking for a new mirrorless digital camera, but they have such strange price points. A lot of them will probably be on sale today or tomorrow. This week seems to be the peak of sales season online.  

    The thing that got me thinking about photos again was my Google Home Hub. That tiny little screen and speaker might not do anything extraordinary, but it does work as a great little picture frame. It has been showing pictures from my family album and some of the throwbacks are pretty fun to see. We rarely look at archived photos. Over the last two years, I have purchased a couple of picture books for people and we have 3 of them in the house. That probably showcases about 300 of the 15,000+ photos that are archived.  

    Today I’m planning on relaxing and engaging in some thanksgiving. Working on appreciating and being thankful for things seems like a good way to spend some time today. Outside of that goal I’m planning on watching a movie today. Tickets have already been purchased for a movie called, “Ralph breaks the internet.” That is the big adventure for the day a little bit of entertainment and a whole lot of working on being thankful for things. If that does not work, then I’m going to spin up some classic Warren Zevon records and work on relaxing. That is the order of operations for the day and we will see how it ends up going. Starting Friday, I’m going to start digging into my digital sandbox and working on crafting something new and interesting. 

  • Finishing up a few advanced machine learning courses

    Throughout the year I have been focusing on some professional development related to advanced machine learning. Today I finished up the Advanced Machine Learning with TensorFlow on Google Cloud Platform 5 course specialization from Coursera and the Google Cloud team. It was fun to really dig in with TensorFlow and learn what the right tools can help you accomplish. It is an amazing time that you can just get online and check out the out the Advanced Machine Learning with TensorFlow on Google Cloud Platform specialization with just a web browser and a small fee. That gives you access to a ton of videos, labs, and quizzes. I really enjoy learning and digging into things. Part of being a true lifelong learning is just jumping in and learning new things. That is something that can be done by reading books and enjoying the written word in other forms. Some of the more complex things like advanced machine learning call for a more hands on approach. That is where the labs provided by Coursera really help me dig into actually using and running advanced machine learning models. My technical knowledge of the subject was stronger than my applied skills. That was something that I needed to work on and have been attacking for a couple hours a night.