Minndemo 23

I went to Minnedemo (#23) downtown on July 14.  It was at the Pantages Theater in downtown Minneapolis.  I wasn't so sure I wanted to go because it was closing in on RAGBRAI, but I finally decided I enjoyed the presentations enough I'd make it work.

Presentations included Toursler, which is a cool use of virtual Google-map style functionality to allow tours of high end houses synced to floor plans.  The dev presenting is obviously into the tech as he was already playing around with VR and demo-ed how they'd used a bit of machine intelligence training to get the computer to identify rooms by aspects of the photos (toilet = bathroom) so they could eliminate a lot of the manual tagging. Gave me some ideas I need to explore.

I found Townsourced less interesting.  The point of a local board, such as you find at your coffee shop, would seem to be that it's local.  By allowing individuals to cross post to multiple community boards, that breaks the metaphor (in my opinion).

Genovest is a stock analysis (but not purchasing) tool.  I think the crux of it is visualization meets investing.  There's a lot of math under it as well, but the output seems to give you visualizations you can use to investigate.  This got me to wondering whether there are investment tools/games for kids.  There does appear to be an official app - https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/stock-market-game/id702878174?ls=1&mt=8 - although I haven't used it so I don't know whether it does some of the same visualization tech that's part of the newer app experience.

HabitAware is AMAZING.  You can smell the clever idea w/o significant complexity in their application.  They've taught a bracelet to record gestures.  Then, when you repeat that gesture, the bracelet will give you a warning.  Don't like a particular way you gesticulate, you'll get warnings.  More importantly: nail biting, skin picking, hair pulling.  The inventor created it to help his wife who had constantly removed her eyebrows via plucking.  Now she has eyebrows.  

DiviUp - you buy a coupon/deal and you get savings, a charity gets a cut, and the business gets a little more business.  Groupon with a conscience.  It's a good idea, but those sorts of coupon/rebate/deal apps wear me out.

Kinetic Data.  Well...if you understand this diagram you get it.  It simplifies a lot of backend processes with an easy UI.  We considered variations on the same process for some contract handling work I reviewed.  Their reference to Salesforce and LDAP makes this very much a similar architecture.

And the best...Chicken Scoop AI.  These two came out on stage and gave a presentation on training cameras to identify chickens and present charts/data/visualizations on their activity for purposes of tracking the chickens' behavior, eggs, etc.  Very interesting where they pointed to a chicken that was probably dead (yes sad, but interesting from a data tracking perspective).  Here's a slide that gives you a small sense of their humor.

Murder Mystery

I haven't blogged in a while.  My grandmother died, so I've been running silent.  I'll post a few things about her funeral and some pics from her photo albums soon.

Last night Ming's family and my family went to a murder mystery event at the Spaghetti Factory downtown.  In my opinion, it was a bit difficult to eat and solve a mystery at the same time, but it was fun to have a bit of theater running in the background and it gave us something to talk about while we were eating.  Ming knows my opinion about the quality of food at the Spaghetti Factory, so a murder mystery was a nice distraction.

One person at every table was given a binder full of progressively revealed information in order to play a character in the mystery.  I was Rhett (the) Butler.  I hated working for Master Neil Burger.  Disliked his friend Bob, who called me Jeeves.  Was on the verge of quitting buttling to pursue a career in CSI.  And was well aware Neil's wife Summer was cheating on him with Bob.

It was my job to answer questions as best I could and wear this nice hat and, at the end, testify that I had used my toxicology investigation kit to determine that Bob had been poisoned using blowfish poison.

Eryn was jealous of my selection as actor, but managed to land herself a gig as one of Hazel Nutt's cats.

Ming, his wife, my wife, and Logan, were all in charge of interrogating various characters and coming up with the written rationale for who they thought done it.  They were wrong, but they had a lengthy write up to justify Team Apong's suspicions.

I won an award for my acting ability.  Primarily this involved being really loud because everyone else was annoyingly quiet and making up the fact that I had an iPhone app for doing my toxicology work. Poor Summer the wife asked me for my name so it could go on the certificate, but I thought she was trying to wheedle a confession out of me so, you can't see it, but the award is for Rhett the Butler who goes by "Bob".  An appropriate use of quotation marks.

A fun time, although we probably could have just done a family event at someone's house, ala D&D, and saved a lot of money and enjoyed some more interesting food.  I think I could DM effectively.  It would be excellent to cast Kyle as an angry Irishman.

Bicycling Has Started

I went out both Thursday and Saturday last week.  While the rides wouldn't qualify as sprints, I would say they were "aggressive" for early spring for me.  I did 17.75 on Thursday, biking down to the St. Paul Yacht Club, and then climbing back out of the valley to home.  And on Saturday, I did almost 36 miles, biking into Minneapolis to meet Ming at Hell's Kitchen, and then bicycling home.  That was a lot of hills.  I was running a bit ragged by the time I got home and I don't think I really recovered even by Sunday.  Erik felt bad that my wife had to wake me up to answer his page about whether I could drive him to Code Camp on Sunday.

The St. Paul Yacht Club. Most of the time I bike under the bridge and along the river.  Not exactly possible this year.  I noticed on Saturday that the trail that goes down around the base of Fort Snelling was flooded as well, which I've never seen.  I usually take the trail that doesn't take me down a big hill and back up, but I've been down there enough that it was surprising.

Thursday.  The snow was not yet gone.  On the way back, I saw a couple of co-workers at Lucky's.  I waved and yelled hello, but I don't think they quite identified me as the crazy cyclist out so early in the spring.  Note the orange Specialized bicycle!  I've had it out twice in the potholes without destroying the rims.  The new rims and weight loss are working well.  I'm 50# under my heaviest at the moment and 40# under what I was sometime around Christmas.  That's a lot less stress on a back wheel.  The ride on Saturday burned over 2000 calories, so it's exciting to go into the bicycling season with a low enough weight that I can drink 10-20 beers a week without so much as a blip on my calorie counting.

Saturday morning by the river.  Very high.  It might have been on the banks if not for the cement barriers.  Right after this a particularly attractive woman was dragging a "road closed" sign across the shallower road out of the river valley, so I had to take the steep path up to Carlson School of Management (after stopping to watch her drag the sign.  I didn't want to get in her way).  The people who are jogging, dragging road closed signs, and helping staff early morning marathon training booths, at 7:30 a.m. on Saturday morning are a somewhat attractive lot overall.  I never thought to ride around the river early, when I was single, to find someone who fit my early morning habits.  If I had, I would have never met Pooteewheet unless I was looking across the river through her window (her dorm was almost exactly across the river from here, and that fairly open grassy field you can see is where she dumped me while we sat on a picnic table and bunnies frolicked, or something similar starting with the letter f, nearby).

This really surprised me.  Grandma's!  It's a big hole in the ground full of concrete.  There are pictures on this blog of me standing on the far edge of that parking ramp taking pictures of the collapsed I35 bridge.  And I think there are stories of Kyle and I getting absolutely ill on Special Export at Grandma's, and how I was too hungover to stay awake during class, but had to go because they were giving out the info for the final test, and that I stopped by Hardee's (also gone) on the way back, bumped into Mike R. from high school (whose sister lived with Kim W., my high school crush, in an apartment below Kyle and I when we lived in Cedar Riverside, crack towers as the complex is sometimes known), got a whole bag of roast beef sandwiches and, to the best of my memory, nearly made Kyle heave by repeatedly offering him multiple roast beef sandwiches while he tried to clear his system of the Special Export dregs I'd voided several hours earlier.  Of course, I haven't been back there in forever as Town Hall is only a few hundred feet away.