Tired... so... tired...
in Metis
I am incredibly tired.
We have reached another milestone in the Bootcamp. We have finished Project Three and have begun Project Four. Everyone else gave their presentation for Project Three yesterday and I wrapped it up by presenting mine this morning. There is an interesting segue between projects where folk wrap up their work for submission, which includes “publishing” their presentation along with pertinent code, etc., and then the brainstorming for the next project.
I was out for a planned absence Monday and then I got sick. It was something similar to stomach flu, food poisoning or possibly I weak case of the flu (which is possible since I did get the shot a few weeks ago). The illness had a greater impact due to the fact I needed the rest and quite literally couldn’t maintain focus.
I was able to work over the weekend and was the first to submit the last required Challenge Set. We’re still getting a couple challenge sets a week. But from here on out, they’re all optional. And, again, the prioritization is Projects first, Blog second, Challenges next.
So… what I should be doing right now is Project. I have to publish my stuff. So… why am I blogging instead? Well… because I’m fried. I’m not the only one, of course. Derrick gave his Investigation presentation early this afternoon and he warned us he was going to be much more mellow then normal because he’s so tired. And Dean was yawning as much as I was.
I cannot speak for everyone else. Especially since I wasn’t here this week till Wednesday. But I get a feeling many others work just as hard on their projects. I really do wish I had been here to help my “team”. The projects are solo now. But we’re still grouped into clusters where we’re supposed to keep tabs on each other, help each other, even represent each other. Amy channelled me as she imitated me during the MVP and she was much louder as a result. I was supposed to be here to help her practice. I’m not sure it would have mattered. But she drifted back to being really quiet during her presentation yesterday. She did good otherwise. As did Michael. Michael’s project was on predicting likelihood of Chicago restaurants failing inspections. He called out the restaurant we went to for Chinese New Year’s, which was hilarious since my wife, at least, believes that to be a strong contender for my illness. I sort of doubt it since that would have meant a much longer time than usual between bad food and the onset of symptoms. But who knows.
I was rather intent on getting back Wednesday to see the other presentations. I learned quite a bit, not only from what they presented including all their methods and tools but also from the feedback the instructors gave them. I was halfway done with my presentation (having stayed up very, very late the night before) and probably could have winged an incomplete slide show. But Alice was rather gracious in giving me an extra day - like they did for Amy who was actually sick the day of presentations for Project Two. I knew I needed the time so I took it.
And I really did need it. I again stayed up very, very late. Some of what I was chasing wasn’t strictly necessary. But there were a couple of ideas I wanted to explore and have tried out in case I got any questions pointing in that direction. I did NOT get around to a working example of using plotly.js. And it didn’t help matters that I had to spend some time addressing laptop and virtual machine issues because one of the (virtual) hard drives for the VM (the one running Postgres… which I was dependent on for this project) had to be resized.
The next project is reportedly a very difficult one for students. We’re shifting from Supervised Learning to Unsupervised Learning. And no… this has nothing to do with us being given more freedom. Many of us used the experience of Project One to guide our choice of what to do for Project Two. But things are different enough for Project Three that we may not quite be as able to choose wisely.
In any case, I’m having a ball and learning a ton.