It is chilly, foggy, and dark outside this morning. My drive in to the office was long and slow, quiet and uneventful. Our coffee makers have been dormant, laid low by the building electrics taking advantage of the holiday weekend. I have been walking to Halcyon a block south to get my cup filled after I check mail. Halcyon is in an old rail warehouse building on 4th street and has tall ceilings with exposed rafters, wooden floors over a storage basement, big, heavy front doors. It reminds me of the 24 hour coffee shop across the Drag from campus, Metro, where I spent a good piece of my free time and money in college minus the cloud of cigarette smoke pre-dating the indoor smoking ban. It is staffed by pleasant but slightly aloof baristas who, never the less, will give you the refill price on your insulated stainless mug whether or not it has their logo screened on the front. The speakers were playing Portishead, Sour Times as I walked back out. I am even wearing a plaid flannel shirt.
I’ve been taking some classes on Coursera. One was Interactive Programming in Python which was half intro to Python and half UI Library event programming. The weekly projects were little games which was half the reason I took the class. Our final project was an Asteroids clone. Here’s a link to mine for as long as it lasts.
http://www.codeskulptor.org/#user38_7rT6kprKlN_0.py
The other class, for which I finished my final project with 14 seconds remaining on the clock Sunday night, was Programming Mobile Applications for Android. They asked us to make a screencast of our application in case the graders couldn’t get it to work properly in their emulators. That video is on YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymlyk06uyk8
Last night I started my next class, “The Data Scientist’s Toolbox”. This is the first of a nine class sequence. I’ve paid for the “Specialization” which means my grades get verified somehow, I’ll be eligible to complete a capstone project at the end of the sequence, and if I pass all of that I get a slightly fancier digital participant ribbon. At least the company has agreed to pay for it.
All of this has combined to leave me in a very 1997 state of mind.