Reading – Web comics

I was looking for some new, fun stuff to read the other day and came across this blog in Creative Bloq on Web comics

I’m enjoying reading some of them, still more to try, some might become regular reading 🙂

Walking: Mona Vale to Collaroy walk – 14 July 20019

Today we bussed it up to Mona Vale and walked back to Collaroy. Such a lovely Winter’s day.

The map and stats from the walk are courtesy of my Garmin VivoSport.

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Walking: A favourite walk at Long Reef

IMO, Long Reef in Sydney’s northern beaches is one of the most beautiful places on the planet and a really great place to go for a walk on a sunny day.

My mum used to take us kids to the little beach near the Collaroy pool, and the rock pools on the way to Long Reef (pictured in the featured image).

I’ve lived in the Northern Beaches of Sydney just about all of my life, over 50 years, and IMO its one of the best areas on the planet and is so much a part of me.

Courtesy of my Garmin VivoSport here is the lunchtime walk I went on today.

Map of the route I took on my walk to Long Reef today

Below is a galley of photos from my walk.

Enjoy! 🙂

Walking: Great way to start the day, 10,000+ steps

Today I decided to get out in the sunshine to start the day. Courtesy of my Garmin VivoSport here is the route that I followed.

Starting the day with 10000+ steps

Along the way I walked along the edge of Narrabeen Lake, passed by the markets setting up for the day, up along Warterloo St., along Ocean St. past the middle Narrabeen Surf Club, looped back along the northern edge of the lake, up to Collaroy Plateau past thw War Vets, along Edgecliff Boulevard, down Alexander St, across the road to the Collaroy Surf Club, up to the pool and looped back along Pittwater Rd. to the flat.

Here is a little gallery of the photos I took along the way.

“Mindfulness” or just “it’s easy to believe what you want to hear”? ;)

I’m a fan of @myfitnessapp  and the Blog they publish about health, nutrition, lifestyle, fitness, etc.  Today I came across a really interesting article on ‘mindfulness’ called “The One Trick to Feeling No Guilt When You Skip the Gym” and it made me think of a quote from Barry Fife in the move Strictly Ballroom … “Yeah, it’s easy to believe what you want to hear!” said to Les, when Les was saying he thought Doug wanted Shirley to dance with him in the Pan Pacifics.

Mindfulness, applied to your health, nutrition, lifestyle, fitness is sometimes making a conscious decision to do something you would otherwise deny yourself because it would be “bad for you”.

It sounds great, avoid the cognitive dissonance from a stressful decision by being mindful that you are choosing to do this and being comfortable with your choice.

Cool 😎 I just have to work harder on the “self belief” when I make a decision I just *know* will be bad for me 😜 😂

But seriously, it is a thought-provoking blog and one that’s well worth reading

Data Science: New data profiling package to try (Python)

This won’t be news to people who already know how to do data science work in Python but I came across a ‘new’ package the other day in a presentation at work – pandas-profilings – see https://github.com/pandas-profiling/pandas-profiling

Learning data science, I have been learning the fundamentals a.k.a how to do stuff from scratch. I think that’s very useful but it does take time. It’s always a pleasure to then find a way of doing all the stuff you have just learnt in one easy step. That’s what pandas-profiling tries to do.

Pandas by itself is a wonderful collection of really useful data wrangling/ profiling tools but so far I’m not missing having to do things one at a time.

This package is worth having in your tool kit, especially when you are working with unfamiliar data. It takes the ‘grind’ out of getting to know the data before moving on to finding insights 🙂

Machine Learning: starting my magical mystery tour

For the past few months, I have been on a sort of Magical Mystery Tour learning about ‘machine learning’, data science and AI. I still can’t tell you the exact differences between them all but it does not matter to me, I just prefer to let art wash over me 😜

My journey began late last year when I set up an interest, nay, ‘working group’ with a few colleagues at work. It started small and now we have over 60 people in the working group. There’s not much ‘working’ going on 😂 but we have fun trying

Right now, the keen people in the group are all learning some variety of data science/ machine learning. We have 4 learning groups:

Azure machine learning

AWS machine learning

Python, and

R

The Python and Azure groups are the most popular so far, Python already has a big fan base at work (as a more generalised programming and scripting language) and Microsoft’s Azure machine learning tools are very approachable, I think Microsoft have done a really good job! 👍😀

I am ‘leading’ the R machine learning learning group, its a bit like the ‘blind leading the blind’ as I didn’t know any R before I started and now I’m half way through a very good course on a site called datacamp.com #DataCamp The course I am doing is called “Data science with R”.

I am also doing some other courses in parallel and while I am enjoying it all I find that I am spreading myself a bit thin and recently I have had to pause some courses to focus on fewer at a time. There just aren’t enough hours in the day 🤓

So far, I am finding that I seem to have an affinity for ‘data wrangling’ and my background in data stuff gives me a good base to work from. The hard part for me is knowing what algorithms to use when it comes to making sense of the data, I just don’t have the maths/stats background for this but I am hoping it is something I can grow into along the way. The most interesting part is really learning the ‘work flow’ involved and the ‘mindset’ around setting goals, trying out ideas, failing, learning and trying again.

Another great resource that I have been using is edX.org #edX.org. My journey started there with a course called “Data Science: R basics” and I have since done quite a few other courses, including “Introduction to AI” … I am current contemplating doing a full course with one of the university providers on edX.org HarverdX is one of the providers and looks to have a really good one but I am still undecided as it would be a huge time commitment over and above what I’m doing now

For now I am happy to do ‘bespoke’ modules on datacamp and edX.org and develop my overall skills and experience. One thing I really like about datacamp is access to supporting resources like their ‘data science cheat sheets’ – A3 size posters/ infographics that give you a nice summary of a topic to put on the wall or in a folder near your computer.

That’s about all for my opening blog on my machine learning/ data science magical mystery tour… more to follow as I continue my journey! 😎