I've been on the road again, enjoying my 1997 Nissan. Barry suggested we patch up the right exterior with some heavy cosmetics, and I'm open to it. In the meantime, she certainly doesn't look worth stealing, unless for a museum about the DSR ("Kirby's Maxi Taxi"), given the car's starring role in these journals of mine. She was also "Torture Taxi" in a couple chapters, having come from a Gulfstream heritage. I'm alluding to one of those books on my "spy books" shelf.
Back in Portland, I'm moving ahead on the hypothesis that I'll be strapped in and teaching Python from my PWS (that's GST talk) here in Slabtown, starting the day after IPD (Indigenous People's Day). I'm getting a new landing page ready. I've been using this for Monty Python named language since around version 1.3 and here we are up to 3.13 or whatever, with the big jump being from 2.x to 3.x, per the lore I'll be sharing.
Per my teacher workshop near O'Hare (airport, Chicago) years ago, my andragogical style involves oscillating twixt the technicalia of a shoptalk, and timeline context, i.e. history. As you dive into Python, start tuning in the key players (Tim Peters, Guido, Alex Martelli... Steve Holden) and their on-stage roles. Guido is the inventor, Tim a chief contributor and booster, Alex a genius teacher of, and Steve an instigator of the conference circuits latter formalized under the PSF banner.
I've met all of the above, both online and in person. Indeed, Steve lived here in Portland for several years and I played assistant and sidekick at numerous conferences. He liked my calming influence, kind of how Sydney (my dog) is a comfort to me I'm thinking. I took Syd on this recent 530 miles car journey, though I parked her with friends when changing cars to a Mustang Mach-E. One of my relatives shared his fantasy of having a vanity license plate "avelli" as in Mach-E-avelli. Syd stayed on the farm with other dogs for that part.
If you wanna be in my basic Python class it's probably not too late to enroll, although I'm pretty sure the recruiters are wanting you to join a cohort that doesn't stop with the basics. We climb "data science mountain" (easier than "calculus mountain" -- I've been a tour guide there too) to a fairly high base camp, were we look over the crater rim into the volcanic cauldron of Machine Learning. Another instructor takes over at that point, now that the cohort is well prepped and ready for the Pythonic approach (I believe using TensorFlow more than Pytorch -- I use scikit-learn during our preamble).
I've been batting AI-generated art back and forth with a toy company CEO who shares my interest in cartoon animation. I've been focused on the Burbank pipeline, but I understand his wish to avoid unnecessary entanglements, now that animation generation is a thing. We're talking kid characters doing team explorations in the geometry of thinking, our revectoring of American Transcendentalism into such as my School of Tomorrow curriculum. We're both into science fiction, and Cloud Nine or C9 has been a focus. That's the floating city meme, with a focus on everyday physics (relevant right now).
I've filed chronicles of this planning in the TrimTab archive, which is members only. A subset of the membership meets every two weeks to check in and talk about different "wings" of "the business" (let's call it the show and tell business) such as Zome and Zometool, vZome and so on. These toys are somewhat in the erector set tinkertoy lineage. I originally joined the thread on two fronts: through Design Science Toys (DST -- no longer in business) and through Koski's BASKET weaving (adding K to BEAST). Then came the Reed College gigs and I started sprinkling in Lux and C6XTY. You could call it product placement I suppose, but I didn't do any sales talks. C6XTY was never really for sale and vZome is free online.
For all my talk at Multnomah Quakers about supporting NavAm casinos, such as by booking events if not playing the slots or tables, I didn't visit my old haunts or venture into the Tulalip facility, which I still haven't visited (talking about the casino, not the museum, which I visited on my last trip).
I bought some cheaper gas at Angel of the Winds filling station is all, for the trek home. Anyone who follows my curriculum writing (this is some of it) eventually discovers my Casino Math meme and how I used that to carve up Silicon Forest digital maths: Casino, Supermarket, Martian and Neolithic. These are simply shorthand monikers, one might say for: risking and developing; harvesting and distributing; looking forward; looking back.
I'll have more stories to share from this road trip, but in other journal entries as this one is sufficiently lengthy. I haven't pumped out any new YouTubes lately. My attention has turned to stills, key frames, and upgrading my Python source base on Github.
