Dry Run Report
in Metis
I have journeyed to downtown Chicago today.
I will be joining the 2018 Winter Cohort of the Metis Data Science Bootcamp.
The actual activities begin next Tuesday.
But it seemed very prudent to make a number of dry run commutes to work out the kinks. I’ve been collaborating with Metis for a couple months now in the sense that I’ve been coming to their facility for a number of meetups and events. For all of that I simply drove. Driving to/from Chicago in rush hour times is a rather undesirable task, but the real kicker is the expense for parking. To pay the evening rate for an evening meetup is a lot different than paying every day for a full day’s parking. In a real sense a car in downtown Chicago is a liability.
I actually came down last Friday. I made that a leisurely affair. I left shortly before noon. I brought my young son… who actually helped because he was familiar with mini-DisplayPort adapters. I haven’t needed to use that sort of connector between laptops and monitors before. After an our or so playing around with basics of hooking up to the network and external monitors and whatnot, we returned. Again, it was at our leisure. We popped into a number of stores along the way back.
Today I’m trying to match real times. And (as I kind of expected) I missed my train. It took a lot longer to find parking at the train station which was also a lot further away. I thought it was far away last time. Sheesh!! But that’s why I’m doing these dry runs. Nathan, the Metis Chicago Program Manager informs me this cohort will be changing the schedule a bit. So Friday, I’ll actually take a different train and attempt to get get here by 9am. Nobody may be here. Again, there’s no reason for anyone to be here at the moment. But if so, I’ll just pop on over to UIC and work from there.
I’ve plopped myself down at a workstation. I may pick up an adapter to be able to use more than one external monitor. I’ll be continuing work on the blog and the MOOC I’m pursuing… at least till Nathan boots me out.