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[Note: began this post a few weeks ago…  to take “tonight” to mean, some evening in time..]

A few weeks ago, I suggested I’d be taking a look at how we/I use social media, and what it implies in terms of the digitization of information.  Other than this blog, tonight I’ve looked up deviled egg recipes via Google, pulled up a particularly yummy-looking Bacon Cheddar Deviled Eggs one from AllRecipes, posted a comment about my enjoyment of my first pumpkin beer this year on Facebook, watched videos and submitted homework for a statistics course on Coursera, and added a goofy comment on Twitter.

That leaves behind a trail of both specific thoughts (my answers for the statistics homework and impressions of pumpkin beer) and sign posts to what things interest me (bacon cheddar deviled eggs, apparently).  The rub for anyone digesting all of that is to determine which of those are core or repeatable insights into me, and which were insights into a particular moment.  Even those momentary insights are pointers – the question is becomes how to interpret what they’re pointing to.  I think of Netflix movie recommendations or Amazon movie recommendations – they’re always heavily tainted by what I’ve last seen, whether or not they were core items or momentary insights.  Yes, I did watch a kids cartoon with my kids after they begged me.  No, I don’t want my feed to be perpetually filled with My Little Ponies.  But I also don’t care to point out which things are core versus which things are momentary.  I’d rather the systems be wrong most of the time than spot-on right.  Would rather not be quite that knowable.  Particularly not by computer systems…

 

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Today was 1 day short of my duodecimal birthday – new word I hadn’t heard before my hubby announced it as upcoming yesterday.  In short, it was one month after my (ahem)th birthday, and he wanted a chance to mark it.  The actual day of my (ahem)th birthday was pretty low-key, and  he decided he wanted a birthday “do-over”.

I woke up to a happy birthday message on the bathroom mirror in dry eraser.  Came back from my gym workout to find breakfast on the table, all 3 kids up, and 2 presents next to my plate.  Open the first wrapping paper to find a Galaxy S5 box.  Open the box, very excited (I’d been contemplating the phone upgrade for a while!) to find no phone, but instead my engagement ring all nicely fixed up and shiny.  Somehow about a year ago I’d bent the ring badly enough that it no longer fit on my finger.  It had sat in my jewelry box forlornly – we hadn’t known who we could trust to fix it well.  He’d tracked down a jeweler, got the original ring reshaped, and the gem setting fixed…   And then he pulled my new phone out, separately wrapped up.

So this evening my ring finger is shiny again and I’m having fun getting my apps and settings over to my new phone.   Samsung’s done a great job making it simple – I gave it my Samsung credentials and all (OK, make that many) of my apps started porting over to the new phone.  I’ve deleted a few that were only useful for a one-time event kind of thing (conference agendas, anyone?), but otherwise am looking forward to a pretty smooth transition!  Cameron will be able to bug me for Temple Run.  One of the apps I haven’t seen make it over yet is the Furby fart and burp control app – I’ll have to work on building it on my new Android Kitkat 4.4.2 operating system.

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I’m reading a book in my company’s software book club called ‘The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies‘ (Kindle edition, of course).   Its points is discussion of a new inflection point in technological and economic growth, driven by advances in computing, robotics, and Internet of Things that were unheard of just a few years ago.  This past week’s discussion focused on exponential increases in computing power (things that follow Moore’s Law double every 18 months to two years, which leads to exponential growth over a relatively short period) and the impact of the digitization of _everything_.

I tried to think of a type of information that exists that isn’t digitized.  Thoughts aren’t, at least directly, until you consider purchasing decisions, search terms, and observations of browsing patterns.  Health records are (and I wish more was available that way), where I’ve been may be (I turn off my location history, thank you very much), my banking information is, photos of my family are, my postings can be used to determine whether I’m happy or sad (spending a bit of time exploring text analytics for sentiment analysis lately), my purchase history on both websites and at brick-and-mortars is…  Yes, I still use a Target credit card; no, if you won’t give me a 5% discount or better I won’t use your store affinity card – pay me for my data at a reasonable price!

I attempt to keep as much of this segregated as I can…  my doctor doesn’t need to know my beer purchasing history, for example.  (Or maybe she’d like to, but I’ll still keep it separate – I prefer porters and stouts to ambers or pils, should there be any particular health benefits conferred..)

But all of this starts to lead me to think about how I contribute to digitization explicitly, through blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Evernote, Google+, Google Groups, LinkedIn …. am I doing these well, to get the most bang for my digitized efforts?  I’m still thinking of more places where I leave electronic droppings…   Considering a post series talking about how I use each of the above, with the idea that readers could suggest better models or other tools.

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Wandering through lots of ways to break code, and discovering all sorts of new things…  Keeping them here for my own mental reference – TL;DR for most of my likely readers…

  1. MongoDB
  2. Vagrant
  3. Neon

MongoDB:

  • Invoked fields with spaces in them.. See doc[“Thing with a space”]
  • Replaced those double quotes with single quotes, when invoking within a Puppet execution
  • Ran a function within a forEach to let me do a calculation for a new field – in this case, a z-score for each US state represented within a record
  • Learned about skip() and limit() – highly useful when needing to jump to arbitrary records
  • find({}, {“field1”: 1}} – return a subset of fields from a record to give me a nicer way to jump through data

Vagrant:

  • logging to help me figure out where things are ka-busted

Neon:

  • query.aggregate

 

Next up: d3!  Except that I had hoped to be well waded into d3 by this time today already.  Grrr…

 

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Today’s my birthday. As in, there are technically two hours left on the day that celebrates my birth. It was a big birthday – the 40 one, the actuarial midpoint in life, whether or not it’s my particular life’s midpoint. Genetically speaking, maybe. Who know what God has in mind, though.

Good point to take stock and see what I’d like to keep and what I’d like to change in whatever time is left. Sort of been on this earth long enough to get a sense of how it works and how I work.

What I want to keep: my kids, my husband, the friendships we have which seem to grow a bit stronger as we get older… a desire to experience and adventure, some of which I hope I’ve been able to share with my kids of late.

What I want to lose a bit of:
* my work goal focus – I want to do good work, but I think I’m past the point where I’m willing to put in over and above for long periods of time. I still have the habit ingrained in me, but every time I do it, I’m less proud and more frustrated with myself. I’m proud of myself for saying ‘no’ to a recent opportunity: to do it well, I’d have had to be prepared to go ‘all-in’, and I just don’t want to trade away all of the other things I could do or be to be ‘all-in’ on a work project. There are so many other things I’d find more worthy, in the end, I think.
* my impatience. If something doesn’t happen now, or exactly the way I have in my mind, it may happen in the future, or it may happen in a better or worse way than I thought. But being frustrated with it loses any enjoyment in what is available now.

So, things worthy of attention:
* taking care of my health… it’ll only get harder, I hear. I don’t need to do the big ‘prove it’ kinds of marathons or fitness events (though I wouldn’t mind notching another half). I want to set a good baseline of fitness and strength, as well as just a general good habit. Oh, and do those pull-ups!
* Spending time with my kids really focusing on hearing their interests and thoughts, and sharing my own. The girls and I just took a trip to New Orleans which expanded all of our horizons, and let us spend time sharing new adventures and memories. Cora can now say she’s eaten a bug (and so can I!).
* Finding opportunities to use my talents or at least energies in ways that benefit the world, particularly “the least of these”. Our church does a few things, I’ve seen other opportunities to use my technical skills, and I’m ready to be surprised by some new angle. Now’s the time, while I have energy and health and my kids have growing independence, to find the things God’s already prepared for me to do.

I remember when I turned twenty, and thus when my mom turned forty. I have a better relationship now with my kids at my forty mark, and I intend to keep that and grow it. Maybe my relationship with my folks will improve or maybe it won’t (see that losing the impatience goal). In the meantime, I focus on what I can directly impact and tend… my relationships with kids, my husband, others we know now and those we may yet come to know.

No mid-life crisis… I think my motorcycle may always remain more of an image rather than a reality. No desire to retire early and go do something crazy… maybe cut back hours at some point to get to dedicate more time to something I find meaningful, but since I don’t yet have that effort identified, it’s still the time to keep looking and doing with what comes in front of me.

So, perhaps that’s my midpoint resolution: keep looking and on the watch and be ready to dedicate effort to those things that come in front of me. Ready for 40 and onward.

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I’ve long been a believer in the 80/20 rule.  Not the way it’s usually thought of, where 80% of the results will accrue from 20% of the input.  But the view that says the last 20% is darned hard to earn.  In fact, I’ve often believed that each incremental movement forward had a strong probability of being significantly harder than the last incremental movement.  In economics, they call it diminishing returns – getting less and less result for the last bits of effort.

So, it’s never unexpected to me when there’s a set of crazy challenges at the tail end of a project.  In fact, I’ve grown to count that as an indicator of nearness of the finish line.  The weirder the curveballs coming my way, the closer I must be to glory.  Hey, if it’s a fantasy, at least it’s a fantasy that keeps me going instead of quitting.

In the last few weeks, I’ve been working diligently on a project for OSCON.  I had some early wins, but the going’s gotten really rough of late.  Once I finally got over my fear of cutting wires to patch in a digital signal, I discovered that signals through wires weren’t really going to get me there.  I found a lot of guidance on infrared signals interacting with Furbys and how to run infrared from Arduino, and then discovered that my version of Furby doesn’t have an infrared sensor.  That’s OK – I have experience driving Furbys with sound, based on my Women In Computing efforts.  Hmmm – not thinking that the piezo that comes with my startup kit is going to do quite what I want.  But Adafruit has a Wave shield… uh, I’d have to assemble it, which will require soldering.  And it’s not available in our area, meaning it _might_ get here sometime Monday.

OK, SparkFun builds an MP3 player – perfect – do a WAV to MP3 conversion using various tools online.  Not so fast – after dragging the family and trekking ’round the Beltway to get the part, it doesn’t work on my Arduino + SEEED Ethernet shield stack.  Just plain doesn’t fit / seat to do anything useful.  Worse, I then read that the MP3 player shield needs to take over exclusive use of certain pins, meaning it would likely cause issues even if it did seat correctly.  I foresee a trip back to Micro Center in my future…

Things got a bit better and a bit worse…  I fell back to an approach just using an SD card, but didn’t have a SD card reader.  That was what I originally went to Micro Center to get, but had decided the MP3 player was the more complete solution.  It would’ve been, if it had worked.  So, off I went to Radio Shack to get an SD shield from SEEED, on the hope that it works  more nicely with the SEEED Ethernet shield than did the SparkFun one.

Hurrah!  It fits!  I’m now fighting issues with serial ports coming and going, and even a Windows BSoD.  Code’s working intermittently.  Gonna be a long night.

 

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Working with a mish-mash of shell scripts and maven files, all of which were designed to work together in an environment with specific paths and environment settings that aren’t all well-documented.  (Even better would be checked at first run from a script with a fast fail, but…)  The builds are long – very long.  So it becomes useful to do partial builds.  Very happy to find someone listing an approach for block comments in a shell script.  That way as I figure out a new hack (documented in my script, of course), I don’t need to execute everything that came before.

Link for future reference: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/947897/block-comments-in-a-shell-script

 

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For my OSCON brief, I’m hooking up an Arduino to a Furby. Got the Arduino, got the Furby. Have had a near panic attack at realizing that what I’m lacking is electronics expertise. The past few days have been a whirlwind of loosely analogous electronic circuits, trying them out, and dashes of terror followed by waves of relief as first something doesn’t work, then it doesn’t work some more, I worry about whether I’ve fried the equipment, and then finally something works. The thing I haven’t yet crossed my terror boundary on yet is soldering… all of my wiring has been through unplugging, connecting in via male or female connectors (see, I’ve already learned something!), and testing to see what’s different…

Tonight, though, I had to cut a wire. Two, actually. My Furby is now dead, though hopefully only temporarily. I’ve severed his ground and power wires (black and red, pretty conventional, I’ve discovered), and will now to attempt to splice them them with new wires that’ll plug into the bread board connected to my Arduino. The bread board has its transistor and resistor and diode all nicely arranged, and pretested with a little electric motor. Here’s hoping my Franken Furby arises again! Or my conference talk next week will be slightly different than I’d planned…..

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It’s the little things that make morning workouts worthwhile: comment from someone in the gym this morning as they walked past my leg press machine.. and I quote: “Damn!” Yes, I’m workout bragging. No, I’m not posting a selfie.. But yes, that was 410 pounds on that machine.

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Spent Monday and Tuesday at Healthdatapalooza in DC. Key objective there was to see how the Code-a-palooza shaped up, as well as what things folks were most talking about.  Recap here is a recap of what I sent to my healthcare-focused team at work, but

Here’s the winner’s list:

1) LyfeChannel’s Smart Hero app, which gives consumers information that they can use to discuss/negotiate with their physician what they’re charging you… (LyfeChannel also won a healthfinder.gov mobile app challenge last year, so is someone interesting to pay attention to… I was also interested in their approach of going to a local IHOP to find seniors and talk with them about what the data set contained, and how they’d like to make use of it… resonates pretty strongly with how my company looks at user-centered design)
2) AccordionHealth:  had an interesting model of tracking likely side effects to help determine an overall cost. These guys combined the CMS data set with a deep data set they had from Texas, so their app only really helps folks in Texas at the moment. Very small company, two PhD students, I believe.
3) Karmadata and its myhealth.io – find a physician for your surgical procedure. For a zipcode, find a procedure, get counts of patients, procedures, and physicians. Their company provides access to healthcare data, as well as an app gallery of apps built on top of their items.

In the demos on Monday, I also heard Fred Trotter talk about the data in light of DocGraph and its new Omni solution. Fred’s blog over at DocGraph also talked about some of the other competitors who’d entered the contest.  In Fred’s presentation on Monday, he pointed out that the data had some real gaps in usefulness. I don’t think the judges appreciated the poke, though I think I agree with Fred’s statement.

Takeaway on my part: we had an interesting angle for our own Code-a-palooza entry.  Via a system processing glitch, ours didn’t get considered for the competition, but we got good feedback from someone kind enough to give us a first-level look.  I’m looking across the Code-a-palooza competitor set (winners and others) to see where we might complement their offerings.  Our solution was much more ‘help me keep up with my own record’ focused than anything I saw in the competition pool.  Think ‘Mint for Medicaid’ with a smidge of Consumer Reports as a first-cut elevator pitch..

Things folks were talking about that I thought were interesting: OpenFDA (FDA data + APIs released giving access to more than 3 million adverse drug event reports), BlueButton (common means of sharing data across systems – intended to give you access to your personal health record), Open mHealth (another means of sharing data across systems, including things like FitBits), and even a bit of SMART platform came up. SMART is interesting to me because of it’s at least on-the-surface analogies to OWF – it appears to have had a resurgence of activity of late. Also tracking something called PCORI (Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute). All leading to – wow, a lot of things to explore and decide whether they’re worthy to track further.

Take a look at this NPR article for more news of HealthDataPalooza. The Kojo Nnamdi Show was also broadcasting from the conference on Tuesday the 3rd – you can listen in or read the transcripts from its site. Looks like the live chat held online has good info too…

One more healthcare world announcement of note that got mentioned at HealthDataPalooza as an aside: iOS X includes HealthKit platform, which is a means to bring together your quantified self fitness / other health data. Interestingly, they’re partnered with Epic. Uh, though this Forbes article points out that others have done that before (Google Health, Microsoft’s HealthVault)..