Visiting my parents this summer with my kids, I was excited to find that the zoo served beer. That definitely wasn't an option for my dad when I was growing up.
History major. First job was managing inter-modal shipping in a giant Excel spreadsheet and emailing it to our India office every night. At the time, I thought Excel was so cool because it seemed like I could do anything with it. I didn't know anyone who wrote code. I had no no idea what was out there.
11 years with R/Python/SQL in a very small team. The last 5 years over 1500 web scrapes running everyday, and then aggregating, categorizing, and analyzing that data.
I've only interviewed a handful of times since starting. It's not come up in any of them, but I've often thought a good response to a "what's one of your weaknesses" question, would be to say that I'm self taught. Nobody has ever reviewed any of my code. I have no pretense of it being elegant or the best way to solve a problem, but it's simple, it works, and I'm determined to solve the problem in front of me.
“The thing about Coke and Pepsi is that they are absolutely gorgeous,” Judy Heylmun, a vice-president of Sensory Spectrum, Inc., in Chatham, New Jersey, says. “They have beautiful notes—all flavors are in balance. It’s very hard to do that well. Usually, when you taste a store cola it’s”— and here she made a series of pik! pik! pik! sounds—“all the notes are kind of spiky, and usually the citrus is the first thing to spike out. And then the cinnamon. Citrus and brown spice notes are top notes and very volatile, as opposed to vanilla, which is very dark and deep. A really cheap store brand will have a big, fat cinnamon note sitting on top of everything.”
David Benioff’s (Game of Thrones show runner) City of Thieves is a very entertaining book set during the siege. It was an inspiration for The Last of Us video game (and later HBO series)
EB Sledge - With the Old Breed is the account of a combat infantryman in WWII in the Pacific. It's about the fear, misery, and despair soldiers faced as they struggled to survive the horrors of war. It was the basis for HBO's The Pacific (successor to Band of Brothers).
When my first kid was born, I committed this poem and about a dozen more to memory. In the middle of sleepless nights, and zombie stroller walks, they kept me sane because I felt like I could focus on so little outside of work besides the all-consuming kid. I worried for a little bit what passersby thought when they heard me rambling to myself in the park, but that concern didn’t last long. Almost 4 years later, I’m typing this as I rock my second to sleep, thankful for the reminder to go through my list of poems - surprised how quickly they all came back - and still desperately trying to stay sane. Though it is easier this time around.
The museum also includes the battleship USS Alabama, a good collection of aircraft, and then some tanks, artillery, and other equipment. My grandpa took me there every summer as a kid and I could never get enough.
I've been seeing more and more places also include the taxes and other fees in the total used to calculate the suggested tip. That seems pretty slimy to me.
My mom grew up in what was then mostly farms northwest of Detroit. When Eminem's Eight Mile came out, I immediately connected it with the street we turned off to get to my grandparents' place but never thought it could actually be the same road Eminem was referencing. Very different worlds.
