Day 19: Love to Program
I’ve been feeling an unfamiliar sensation lately. I felt it when I was in college, but since I’ve left the academic setting I haven’t felt it in a while. I feel excited about programming! I think that although I haven’t been blogging every night, I’ve really been enjoying working on my programming skills outside (and sometimes inside) of work. I love writing code - I love the feeling of solving hard problems, and the satisfaction that comes with your code successfully running.
Day 18: Playing With Processing
Tonight I played around a bit with Processing, which is a programming language used mostly for electronic arts and design. I started off trying to create a Star class that would sparkle. Eventually I got something working: My Star class is initiated with randomized x and y locations, diameter and how much shine (how much larger the diameter will get). c = color(255,255,0); diam = random(150); loc_x = random(250)+diam; loc_y = random(250)+diam; how_much_shine = random(7);
Day 17: Apple Oatmeal Muffins
I still have so many apples! Today I baked a dozen apple oatmeal muffins. I found the recipe online, but switched a few things up based on what I had in my kitchen. The original recipe is here: http://blommi.com/apple-oatmeal-muffins-recipe The changes I made: I used skim milk instead of low fat buttermilk I only used whole wheat spelt flour I used 1 large Mutsu apple instead of a Granny Smith Apple, and I may have used too much but they’re still delicious!
Day 16: Apple Pie Crumble Bars
Tonight I wanted to make something with the apples that I picked yesterday. I wanted to save making apple pie for another night, so I found a recipe for Apple Pie Crumble Bars online. You can find the original recipe here. There were 3 separate parts to this recipe - the crust on the bottom, the apple filling and the crumble on top. The crust needed to bake for a while before, and it got a little bit overdone because of my electric oven and I forgot to peel the apples, but the bars turned out well.
Day 15: Apple Picking
Today I went apple picking with some coworkers at Honey Pot Hill Orchards in Stow, MA. After 4 rainy days, today was the perfect weather for being outside picking some delicious apples! After picking (and taste testing) a bunch of Cortland, Macoun, Macintosh, and Mutsu, our bags were full! It was a gorgeous sunny fall day, so we put our bags in the car and went down to the farm store to get apple cider donuts.
Day 14: MIT Mini Maker Faire
I don’t have posts for the past two days - I’ve been really busy and don’t have anything to really write about for those days. I think to fix this I’ll write two extra blog posts at the end of my 30 days, so in total there will still be 30 posts, just over a little more than 30 days. This Saturday I went to the Mini Maker Faire hosted by MIT.
Day 13: Python at Work
Yesterday and today at work have been exciting because I’ve been working on a project that is really interesting! We needed to find all combinations of a list of 62 terms and do some formatting to be able to create output files that we could use in our scripts later on. I’ve never worked with itertools before, but it was really easy and useful for the combinations part of the python script I wrote to be able to create these files.
Day 12: BosGGD
Tonight was one of my favorite nights of the month - Boston Girl Geek Dinner! Every month there’s a night at a different tech company in Boston for female geeks to get together. I’ve been going every month since I moved to Boston a year ago (except for the past two months unfortunately). Each night they have different speakers who talk on a range of topics. Some nights it’s lightning talks, other nights it’s longer talks on anything ranging from what the speaker does at work to some random unique hobby they have.
Day 11: Keyboard
I don’t have too much to talk about tonight, other than that I played on my keyboard. I have a Yamaha YPT 230 which I love and now that I live in an apartment with better storage I can actually keep it with me! My friend Rachel and I jammed before she left, and tonight I wanted to play. After hearing Aphex Twin’s new album (specifically his new song aisatsana) I got the strong urge to play the keyboard.
Day 10: Infinity Scarf
Today I found a project that I had started last winter/spring, but never finished. I was working on a black circle scarf that I finished today. I used Cascade Yarns Magnum yarn in black in a seed stitch pattern. This pattern is really easy, just cast on an even number of stitches, repeat K1 P1 for one row, then P1 K1 for the next and so forth. I did this until I had a good length for a long scarf, and then joined both sides together at the end.