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:

My new audio recorder and microphone arrived this week. After a little experimentation I figured out how to hook it up to my computer and make a video with it and a webcam. I still need to tune my piano, but I do believe this is a vast improvement over the previous videos. The zoom microphone makes a huge difference.

The piano tuner arrives on Friday. After that I will re-record everything and repost to youtube and soundcloud.

This week I created a presentation for my research paper on Algorithmic Trading in the Iowa Electronic Markets. I shared it with researchers studying prediction markets at Microsoft Research Labs.

The people there were very smart and interested in what I had to say. They may very well have the largest collection of people studying prediction markets anywhere in the world. It's a somewhat obscure field, as most researchers are interested in either theoretical market models or more developed financial markets. It's a shame because there is a lot to learn from prediction markets, which sit right between the two.

The presentation itself is made with the reveal.js presentation framework. I made it in Jupyter, which now has the ability to output working presentations in reveal. I had a lot of fun learning about Jupyter and building a presentation in a notebook. The presentation workflow was so much better than anything I have experienced before, and I can't image ever using anything else again.

I made a lamp out of an empty olive oil bottle.

After removing the label and cleaning it out, I drilled a hole near the bottom using diamond drill bits and a press drill. The electric cord runs through the center of the bottle up to the opening on top.

The bottle is filled with fish tank gravel. It was very hard getting it in the bottle! I tried using a funnel but it kept getting clogged. Eventually I settled on dumping it in the mouth by hand with the bottle in a large bin to catch the many rock pieces that did not go inside. This took some time.

The mauve lamp shade is made of silk. I think it matches the gravel quite well.

I also made that coaster sitting on the nightstand. That was a long time ago though.

After a few months of work, I now feel like this website is in good enough shape to share with other people.

I added more projects to the Projects page and wrote up descriptions for each. Ongoing projects will be written up in this blog, but complete or elaborate projects will get their own project page.

My priority right now is to improve the youtube videos. I bought a better microphone and will tune my piano soon.

I made audio files from the previously posted videos and uploaded everything to Soundcloud. The sound quality of these recordings aren't very good but now my parents easily listen to my play piano using their Sonos speakers.

Everything is linked together in one playlist. Soon I will replace these recordings with better ones and add new songs.

I finally had time to record myself playing Erik Satie's Gnossienne No. 3. There are 6 of them, but I am just going to focus on the first 3 for now.

This isn't my best rendition of this piece but it will do. I need to record myself more often so I get more comfortable with it. I should also re-record the pieces in my previous posts because I can play those much better now.

Currently I am working on Satie's Nocturnes No. 1 and Robert Shumann's Träumerei.