For the past few months I have been trying to learn Pachelbel's Canon in D. Since April, at least. This is the most difficult song I have ever attempted. Here's where I am so far:
I made at least 4 mistakes, but every attempt after this was much worse. The crescendo is challenging! Of course I can play it better when I am not trying to record myself.
Tonight I also re-recorded myself playing Erik Satie's Gnossienne # 4. This time, without sheet music.
I spent the month of June at ITP Camp. It's my third summer in a row there, and as always, I had a blast. This year I attended a session on building a custom computer keyboard. It was taught by Claire Kearney-Volpe and Ben Light.
In the class we met with several members of United Cerebral Palsy and discussed their experiences using computer keyboards. Traditional keyboards often do not meet the needs of disabled people. We talked about ways we could re-design a keyboard to make computers more accessible and meet their usability needs.
I worked with a woman named Shaniqua. She didn't like the traditional key arrangement of a QWERTY keyboard and often found it difficult to find the next key she needed to type. There were some keys she didn't use at all and she thought the keys were too close together.
It's been a while since I posted something here.
In January and February I was a data science fellow at The Data Incubator and worked very, very hard on projects and assignments to learn more about Python and data science tools. But now that that's over, I have time for other things.
I fixed my laptop and can now record videos of myself playing piano again. Here's Erik Satie's Gnossienne #4:
I made a few minor mistakes here and there but overall I am very happy about it. The broken cords make this a difficult piece to play.
Also, I updated this website theme! Much better than the previous one.
More to come....
I made another lamp; this time, out of an empty wine bottle.
Similar design and build as the first one, made with leftover gravel. The lampshade is the same color and fabric, so they're an matching set!
Someday I'll probably make third one and give it away.
Happy Holidays everyone!
This is a 3D animation I made for my holiday cards. Put on your 3D Glasses and be amazed!
Animation built with by Processing and Camera-3D.
Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies by Kevin MacLeod of Incompetech is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
This past week I spent much of my time writing the documentation for my latest project, Camera-3D. This is an open source library for Processing. It will enable artists and creative technologists to transform their sketches into 3D anaglyphs and experiment with other 3D effects.
Once I finish the examples this will be ready to go live. I am so excited!
Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending the first JupyterDay Conference in NYC. This was a one day event discussing the open source project Jupyter, formerly known as IPython Notebook.
I had a wonderful time at the event. All of the speakers were engaging and I got a lot of great ideas for what I want to learn about to strengthen my technology and data science skills.
I took extensive notes and can't compile them all here. Instead, here are a few highlights from the event:
Jeremy Singer-Vine, BuzzFeed - Jeremy is a Data Editor at BuzzFeed, and does data investigative journalism. BuzzFeed does quantitative analysis for some of their news stories and will back up their news stories with research posted on github that readers can verify. For example, this news story and this notebook. I wish more journalists were this transparent.
Doug Blank, Bryn Mawr - Doug talked about how Jupyter is changing education at his college. Everything is a notebook there. Students submit notebooks for their homework assignments. They've built many extensions to Jupyter to support this. The most fascinating is they have kernels for many other languages like BASIC, Assembly, and Pascal. I am going to set these up on my computer very soon.
Sylvain Corlay, Bloomberg - Sylvain is a quant at Bloomberg. He showed us a demo of a new plotting library called bqplot they will share with the community. He employed ipython widgets to interact with the charts.
These were just a few of yesterday's speakers. The attendees were supportive and bright as well. I had many thought provoking conversations about data analysis and now have a list of tools I want to learn about as soon as I can.
All in all, a great day. Very glad I signed up for this.
Here's a re-recording of Erik Satie's Gnossienne #2, using the new microphone.
I'm working very hard on Gnossienne #4. I can play all of it except for a few notes that I can't seem to figure out. I'll get there eventually.
I had time to record myself playing the next two Gymnopedies. These use the new microphone and sound a lot better than the previous recordings.
Also, updating soundcloud with the new versions.
My piano was tuned on Friday and it sounds great!
Here are two videos of me playing Gnossienne #1 and #3: