Back from an unplanned hiatus

Original post author: Ryan

It seems that I took an unintentional hiatus from my own blog. I haven’t posted in about 3 weeks, and that makes me sad.

I’ve actually written a few posts over the past few weeks, but I was ultimately not very happy with how they turned out - so I didn’t publish them. I plan to rewrite one of those and publish it soon; it’s music related.

Since I haven’t posted in awhile, here is a catch-up post about some recent happenings:

Government Emails

I am still getting the spam, but far less than I was receiving originally. Although you can sign someone up for a gazillion email newsletters in 30 seconds, they only let you unsubscribe from them in little batches. The state department never responded to my help request.

Cryptocurrency

For the past 5 months, my computer has been mining cryptocurrency whenever I’m not using it. Just last week, the amount of currency it has mined ticked over 1/2 of an Ethereum (which is presently about $300).

Jess’s 30th Birthday

On the weekend of April 13, we traveled to NYC with a group of our friends to celebrate Jess’s 30th. It was a fast paced weekend, because we wanted to pack a lot into a two-night visit. Jess and I were humbled by all of our friends who made the long trip into the city to join us. There were many highlights, but one thing that stood out in my memory was a Korean fried chicken joint named BarKogi.

My Parents’ 40th Anniversary

On April 21, my sister and I organized a surprise party for my parents’ 40th anniversary. Honestly, Casey took the lead on orchestrating this. It was a success, and it seemed like everyone had a good time.

Hojoko

This past weekend, we mostly had to hunker-down so Jess could focus on her final paper which is due on Thursday. We had plans to go to a Red Sox game on Saturday evening, but that plan fell through - we still had our friend Casey lined up to watch Violet, so we used that time to get a few drinks at a place called Hojoko. We both recommend Hojoko to anyone craving a cocktail or Japanese food in Fenway/Boston.

Machine Learning

With the help of the tool I developed, I was able to classify several thousand images over the course of a few nights. I recently fed those images back through the neural network to retrain it. But, I haven’t tested the newly trained neural network out yet. It should be much smarter, but I won’t know until I give it a practical test.

Waltham

According to the Waltham subreddit (yes, that exists), someone spotted arcade cabinets being hauled into a closed storefront on Moody St. It turns out, a store known as Game Underground is opening on Moody St. later this month. They have (or had) an arcade in Natick where they also sold pre-owned video games and hosted video game tournaments. I am hoping they make this place an arcade/bar hybrid, which would work well on Moody St.