!date
I just realized I didn't write last day's post.
That's how my sister used to say yesterday. Last day. It makes too much sense because you say last night. Why can't I say last day?
Bringing it back.
I have to be honest.
I didn't feel like writing this post. I didn't feel like writing because I've been coding all dang day and I want to keep coding all dang night.
Great question. I love your curiosity.
Let's start with last day.
Last day started with some dataquest. Not that much though. Not that much at all, barely enough but it was done last day so it counts.
I have been mashing out challenges on Dataquest. I'm learning quite a bit and I'm also learning that the more I know about this crud, the more I'll be able to build. I was thinking about list comprehensions the other day. It's a thing you do in python when you're too lazy to write multiple lines of code and it looks something like this
x = [a function that runs or something that does something and returns or creates a list]
instead of
x = [1,2,3,a,b,c]
Simple as.
Don't worry if you don't understand that, it's not necessary. The only thing that's necessario to know is that it's a thing you can do in Python and something that's kind of unique to Python. Anywhodoo, I used to practice building list comprehendos so much.
I would just write a bunch of different ones and then after a night or year of that I would say
"dang, what is this even good for"
-Christopher McMahon (hey that's me!)
And I was thinking, and I realized that today, last day, and the day before last I was whipping out list comphrendos left and right and I didn't even realize it. My fingers were just doing the list comprehension ...dance.
I honestly sat there for about 47 seconds thinking about what kind of dance I could tack on to the end of that phrase but nothing came to mind so I decided to be ultra boring and write dance.
Crazy right?
Yeah so crazy.
Okay settle down.
Anyway. That was part of last day and today. Today I started off trying to work. Then I started to try to make a bookmarklet that I could click and in the tab title, a timer would appear. I figured out that there are chrome extensions that already do this so I THEN started figuring out where the source code for chrome extensions live on your computer.
This is a trip. I actually ended up finding the source code for a tab stopwatch extension that I downloaded and then I copy pasted all that code into the bookmarklet (because you can actually write javascript inside of the bookmarklet and it'll run, not lying 100P, try it).
However, the code didn't work.
I hope you weren't expecting something remarkable there. Too bad I guess. I didn't alter the code in anyway I was trying to run it as was and ripping it out of a perfectly good .js file where it was hanging out with all the rest of it's ....friends..of...lines of codes. Whatever. I'm not clever tonight and I don't care.
I surprised myeslf though becaues I was able to immediately realize what part of the source code was for the actual stopwatch itself.
Alright quick interjection: I know you're feeling pretty jarred right now, early I was saying timer and now I'm saying stopwatch. I mean running time that starts at zero and tells you how much time has passed, not one that's counting down. I call it a timer for some reason. Maybe because it's TIMING something and a stopwatch is one of those three button dohickies that is on a lanyard and you time "The Mile" or whatever.
Onwards.
I was pretty far gone from work after that, there was no going back. I started to rummage around in my file system and deleting old things, running bits of code that I didn't know would work or not. First time cleaning up in there. I obviously didn't get very far. I found a link to a website that's not updated anymore that had a super interesting post doctoral position listed on it from two years ago doing some really neat language processing stuff.
So obviously I spent the next half an hour tracking down the guy and writing an email applying to the position.
Not really, I did reach out and asked him if he could direct me towards research positions like that.
Don't I want a job in this? Sure. Wouldn't I rather go study the piss out of something in grad school though?
I would literally be getting paid to learn, and burn down every tangent possible and keep track of all of it and then argue my point to a bunch of stogy old people who think they're smarter than everyone else but still only teach and write papers and make up concepts and theories that no one quite understands for years and then someone does and..
You don't get paid in grad school unless you can convince someone to give you money for your research OR you find someone who's already convinced people and needs some hired tireless geek.
Haven't heard back from yet but it's only been a few hours. Give it time. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.
I also tried to make an automated headless browser script that would run Pandora but not in a window so it wouldn't take up so much cussing RAM cuz I have a 200 dollar laptop but right when the bot browser signs in, Pandora actually kicks you out if it detects that your browser is a bot. Then I tried to find an API for it but it looks like you have to have a premium account and there was some weird side project that dealt with nodejs and that was just not my cup of tea right now soooo.....
Then I dove into Dataquest. I quested for so dang long I literally couldn't type anymore and the word "previous" stopped making any sense to me.
Then I made dinner. I actually ruined some ramen noodles and chicken. It was delightful.
After dinner I jumped back on my computer and started working on this OTHER project I started months ago and then didn't progress any and then I messed with it for an evening a month or two ago and then I haven't done anything on it until tonight.
I've been taking screnshots of the end-of-game stats in Fortnite. Fortnite doesn't save these stats for us players, we just get a quick glimpse at the end of the game and that's it. I've probably talked about this project before like it was actually going to make me a data scientist but in reality I used it to justify playing Fortnite.
Not really, I do actually enjoy playing video games but I love video game stats almost more than the video games themselves.
The data is saved in a screenshot. And getting text data from a screen shot is not easy. It's not easy at all. I thought it would be, I mean we have computers that can learn stuff now so I assumed when I started taking these screen shots that I would be able to automate some process and mine data from all 900 of these photos.
Yes. 900.
But I can't. Well I can't with what I know how to do right now and I don't know much so there's another pretty awesome learning opportunity for me here.
Until then though, I have to enter the data into a spreadsheet by hand. EFFFFFFFFFFFFFF.
I am really excited about the project though. No matter what route I take with it I'm going to build some unnecessary awesome thing that does something that no one ever needed ever and by the time I'm done with it I'm sure Epic will open source all player data in multiple data formats, ready to be mined..
So yeah....pretty neat.
That's the last day and the day before. Now I'm kind of tired from staring at this screen and writing for you stalkers so I don't really feel like programming anymore.
This one's on you.
Bye.