Monthly Archives: January 2020

2019 Recap

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So, what’d I do in 2019?

Corn Palace of South Dakota, April 2019

Travel

You’d almost guess I don’t like Minneapolis the way I traveled last year:

  • Denver, CO
  • Sunnyvale, CA ( for work) x4
  • South Dakota + Wyoming
  • Anchorage, AK
  • Las Vegas, NV
  • Vancouver, BC, Canada
The crew at Mt. Rushmore

Ten Year Anniversary

In August, Alicia and I celebrated ten years of marriage with a trip back to Las Vegas, the same city we were married in 2009.

Elevator of the Aria, August 2019

Same city, but not the same place. We were married at the Wynn, which treated us great, but we thought it was time to explore the rest of Vegas. We stayed at the Aria for a full week, long enough for us to get bored of Vegas. Well, almost – it’s pretty sweet vacationing for a week.

Alicia is awesome and I’m lucky to have her.

Job Title Change

With no effort on my part, I changed titles from “Data Scientist” to “AI Scientist”. Title inflation, yo.

…well, to be fair, I’m doing slightly more fancy stuff than before. In November, I gave a talk at Sisyphus Brewing about Natural Language Generation, part of a series of Data Science talks sponsored by Target. My coworkers have an every-other-week series of talks where we’re expected to speak about something we are interested in.

I’ve previously written about Natural Language Generation on this blog when I tried to recreate the Burger Hunter. I had been reading a lot about OpenAI‘s GPT-2, which was “so powerful, they couldn’t release it.” That certainly struck me as marketing hype, so I spent some time investigating it and created a presentation about it. No original research, but fun none-the-less.

Digitizing Slides

I FINALLY transferred slides from my parents into a digital format. It had been on my todo list for years. Feels so good to have it done. Side benefit, it is so much fun to see photos of my parents from before I was born. Although it’s been awhile since I was a beard guy, there’s definitely a resemblance.

Without permission (sorry Dad), here’s a few of my favorites:

Okay, that’s not fair. Yes, there were way more slides of my father, but I should embarrass my mother too. Here’s my favorites of her (sorry Mom):

Other Random Stuff

Livia is a chunker
Happier than over having a house alone

Here’s some other bullet points from 2019:

  • Livia is living the life having a house to herself.
  • I replaced the flushing mechanism in my toilet at home, which was running too long. Yay for plumbing!
  • I was David Bowie for Halloween.
David Fucking Bowie
Halloween 2019
  • Went thru a vegetarian phase again over the summer. I seem to do this about every four years. It’s not necessarily for moral reasons, vegetables just help me 💩better.
  • Perfectly average performance at Fantasy Football, I got 3rd in the season and 5th in the playoffs.
  • Mentored my third intern at Target over the summer, for which I’m 3 for 3 getting my intern a position at Target. My fifth year performing intern on-boarding, too!

Not a bad year, eh? Previously, I’ve said my 28th year was my favorite, but I think 34 has taken the cake.