Travel

Note: This post is rather long and photo heavy. Sorry!

View from our hotel room

So, I quit my job a few weeks ago. It was a good job with good people,  but I found myself wanting to spend more time on my data-sciencey coding stuff, and less time actually doing the day-to-day duties of an analyst. I know that if I had continued on, I could have done a few pretty cool projects, but it seemed like a good time to go. I had been doing work all day, school all night for almost a year. I was burnt out. So I saved up enough money and quit. I’m doing a web development bootcamp, and hope to start looking for a job in 4 months or so. But all of that is for another post. 🙂

Anyways, Ryan was going to a conference in Tokyo about a week after my last day at work, and he joked that I should tag along. Just for fun, I looked at tickets to see how bad it would be. Surprisingly, I found tickets at ~$500 and under! These were flights on a terrible airline with terrible layovers, but hey, it seemed like fate. I couldn’t NOT go.

So the cheap tickets were worth it, but man I had to work for it. Getting to Tokyo took 30+ hours, and included a rainy layover in Shanghai. The food on China Eastern was terrible even for airline food, and gave me some weird stomach ish.

Even though I was feeling tired, I pushed myself to go into the city, had some fun, and then I got stranded! It took a couple tries and several hours, but in the end I was able to get back to the airport via black cab. Of course that is not safe, so don’t do that. Once I made it back,  I barely slept on an airport bench, with my head on my luggage, avoiding the airport’s bright fluorescent lights, wondering what I was doing with my life.

Shanghai in the rain

Given that the China leg of my trip was so unpleasant, being in Tokyo has been a dream. The food has been divine, and the dollar is strong here.

It seems that Tokyo is similar to San Francisco in that it can be a totally different city depending on who you are and what you’re interested in. I am interested in food, robots, culture, and kitsch, so that’s what we did.

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Life

If you follow me on Instagram, you’ve already seen this, so apologies!  Sharing here for my mom, who is the biggest TinTin fan ever, and most certainly not on the ‘gram.  🙂

Oh Halloween. It’s come and gone, and now here we are barreling right into the holiday season. I was incredibly boring this year and on Halloween night I didn’t go to any haunted houses, silent movies, raging bars, pumpkin patches, or any other such debauchery. The stars just didn’t align, and also I was SO FREAKIN’ TIRED.

I did however have a costume that I felt good about! I love Halloween, but I don’t love paying a lot for a costume that I will only wear for one day out of the year. I’m on a budget, so this year I picked a costume that would minimize my spending – TinTin :D. Most everything was in my wardrobe – I just needed to buy a stuffed dog and a blue sweater.

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If you ever want to be TinTin as well, it’s a super easy formula. From CostumePlaybook.com: 

Tintin-costume-snowy-Adventures

  • White button up shirt
  • Blue sweater or sweatshirt, crew neck is most accurate (Uniqlo was great for finding just the right blue)
  • Brown/reddish orange pants or “knickers” – I just rolled my skinny jeans up
  • White socks pulled up real high
  • Sensible brown oxfords
  • Way too much hair gel / hair spray (a curling brush is good for getting the right quiff)
  • Optional: Spray your hair orange
  • Optional: trench coat
  • And of course you need your sidekick Snowy! Official Snowy plush toys are very expensive, but any white dog will do.  I bought this realistic looking Westie, and freaked people out all day long 🙂
Health

It’s Running Season

After an unusual heat wave in the Bay Are, we’ve returned to our regularly scheduled fog and gray, just in time for fall.  Also, just in time for racing season, thank god.

Another year, another JP Morgan Corporate Challenge. While the race is a short distance (3.2 miles), and the whole thing goes by FAST, that doesn’t mean that it’s easy. If you’re competitive, you’re sprinting the entire way.

Last year around this time I was in tip top run shape, and was gearing up for a half-marathon. This time around was much more casual. I have been running for fun, and barely training for a 12K (coming up in a week…).

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Run team run!

While the race is really just a corporate bonding event, there was also a greater international challenge being hosted at the same time. Basically JP Morgan flew in 2014 winners from around the world, and pit them against each other. They got to go first, and then it was the “fast” regular runners, then the rest of us regular office drones (walkers and runners). According to the race’s website, there were 10,000+ runners from 330 companies. !!!

Short fun runs are always the worst races to run. While they can have fun themes and cool schwag, you are also surrounded by people (and some children) who … hmm.. how to put this kindly… get in the way. You’ll be running behind someone, and suddenly they’ll just decide to start walking, right in the middle of the road!!  Also people dart on and off the courses, and there were quite a few small collisions. My coworker said he saw one guy trip into a barrel roll! Thankfully they keep medical staff on hand in case of emergency. Last year I saw someone being loaded into an ambulance at the finish line, but this year seemed pretty quiet.

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Jeans, brah, rly?

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Running.

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Finish line. Ready to go home and eat nachos.

With all the different waves of runners,  we didn’t get to start running until 7:25 or so :/ . Even then we were walking a solid couple of minutes before things thinned out enough to “run.”  I made an 11 minute mile, which is about a minute slower than last year. For not actively training, however, I’ll take it.

I love the post race happy hour with my teammates, but given all the build up and waiting around, I’m not sure that I’d do this race again. I run the same distance on my morning runs down Valencia street, and it’s much less stressful.

Life

It occurred to me the other day that I’ve been learning programming for about a year now! Happy code-a-versary to me!

About a year ago I wanted to go deeper into data sciencey stuff at work. After reading a ton of DIY curriculum guides, it seemed that there was no way around it: I was going to have to learn to code, probably in Python. I’d used SQL a bit in my previous job, but it was a bit of a bore, to be honest.

In the past year I’ve tried learning so many different ways. At first I used online tutorials and taught myself on the job. That was slow goings, with small victories few and far between. However things really came together this spring when I took a Python class at the local community college. Hmm… it’s funny how much you get done when there are deadlines!

After my class I was able to do a lot more on my own, especially at work. Recently I got interested in web development, so I signed up for an intensive front-end web dev course. The class was 6:30 – 9:30pm, from Monday to Friday. I felt like I had no life for an entire month. I woke up early to get some exercise in. Every night I came home exhausted around ten. I had a beer, watched some tv, and went straight to bed. What time I had off on the weekends I spent catching up on cooking, cleaning and more studying. It was hectic and stressful.

And yet… I learned so much. I don’t regret taking the course, even with the *ahem* high fee and time commitment. Or maybe that’s just me rationalizing the expense since it’s too late. :) Now that I’m back on my own and without a set study program, I’m trying to figure out my next steps.  I thought that after trying all these different methods, I’d have a better idea of what was working… but not really.

A little googling turned up the VARK questionnaire, which claims to help you identify how you learn best. It looks like I am a read/write and kinesthetic learner. The other options are aural and visual learner, btw. Read/write is apparently good for traditional schooling, with note-taking and lots of reading and handouts. Ah, that’s why I like regular classes. Kinesthetic = learning by doing, which I was pretty much doing with my work projects.

So, I have way too many options for continued learning:

  • Real Life
    • Continue learning on the job slowly, project by project
    • Go to meetups and informal coding lessons. I’m always so tired after work, and also I’m nervous about going to meetups without knowing anybody there. So, this one will be hard. But being around like-minded people is such an encouraging boost.
    • Books- I don’t really own any relevant books, but I haven’t checked out the SF public library yet.
  •  Online
    • TreeHouse is a nice tutorial site, kind of like Lynda.com. I lucked out a year or so ago and got a free lifetime membership ($25-50/month).
    • Working my way through this Udemy web dev course, which has 147.7K students. (OMG I need to make a Udemy course. That course is 200 bucks usually, but I got it for $10 with a coupon. Either way, this guy has gotta be a millionaire!)
    • Free Code Camp  One bonus of FCC- After you complete all of the lessons and projects, you get to work on portfolio-building projects for non-profits. Win-win!
    • Finish auditing the ever popular CS50x class.

It’s honestly really overwhelming, and why I seem to gravitate toward traditional classroom settings. Somebody just tell me what to do! For now, I’ll just be plodding along as usual… Whatever I do, time will pass. Might as well learn something, even if I’m unsure if I’m going about it the “right” way.