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Posts on travel, code and life.
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South to Nyamagabe
We left Kigali in the early afternoon on Tuesday, after spending the morning working on our field collection methods – Samsung tablets with a GIS data collector installed, with custom surveys built and distributed to the five student researchers. I went out to take care of some housekeeping – got cash from the ATM, a…
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What am I doing here?
This question comes up fairly regularly. Rwanda? Why Rwanda? There are a number of reasons for that, the first one being that I’m a masters degree candidate at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and this opportunity came to me through RIT. This trip is funded through a National Science Foundation grant, with a two-fold purpose:…
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Settling in to Rwanda
It’s Sunday, a bit of a day off after a week of meetings and introductions, exploration and adjustment. We finished up our meetings with the UNHCR on Thursday, and then the US Embassy on Friday. After that meeting, we went out to a Rwandan buffet, which was tasty and cheap, then walked back to the…
- South to NyamagabeWe left Kigali in the early afternoon on Tuesday, after spending the morning working on our field collection methods – Samsung tablets with a GIS data collector installed, with custom surveys built and distributed to the five student researchers. I went out to take care of some housekeeping – got cash from the ATM, a few groceries and then to […]
- What am I doing here?This question comes up fairly regularly. Rwanda? Why Rwanda? There are a number of reasons for that, the first one being that I’m a masters degree candidate at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and this opportunity came to me through RIT. This trip is funded through a National Science Foundation grant, with a two-fold purpose: give American students international research […]
- Settling in to RwandaIt’s Sunday, a bit of a day off after a week of meetings and introductions, exploration and adjustment. We finished up our meetings with the UNHCR on Thursday, and then the US Embassy on Friday. After that meeting, we went out to a Rwandan buffet, which was tasty and cheap, then walked back to the house through some neighborhoods, really […]
- Hello from KigaliSitting out on our house’s terrace as the day gets going. The house is on the side of a hill, like almost everything in Kigali, looking over a valley to another hill a half mile away. To my left is the roofs of more large houses with fences and gates (some with razor wire atop the fences), which seem to […]
- Rwanda arrivalAfter months of Zoom meetings, reading and uncertainty, the day finally came. I finished a few home projects, then hugged the kids – with some tears – and drove toward Boston with Bean. It was a sunny, warm day, and we stopped once in New Hampshire. Then, suddenly, I was pulling to the curb at Logan, and we were hugging […]
- Vermont Real Estate Pricing ModelThis is the term project for a regression class I took in the summer of 2021 as I worked toward my MS in Data Science at RIT. I looked at a dataset that has long interested me, the Vermont real estate tax data published weekly by the Vermont Dept. of Taxes. The model did not work well, but this project […]
- Turtle-Tac-ToeAs part of my JavaScript training, I created a Burlington Code Academy project that features a tic-tac-toe game. This games allows you to play against a dumb AI, another human player, or a smart AI. The theme: Turtles vs. Tortoises. As my kids sing: A turtle lives in water, A tortoise lives on land.A turtle’s not a tortoise,It’s not hard […]
- Geo-VermonterA Burlington Code Academy project written in Javascript with a Leaflet map, based on the popular Google game Geo-Guesser. Players are randomly dropped on a zoomed-in section of the map of Vermont, and have to guess which Vermont county the pin has been dropped in. The map view can be moved, but each move costs a point, and each wrong […]
- Fire on Skippy DippyWe turned west again through upstate New York, heading towards Elmira for my oldest, best friend’s wedding. It was raining hard again, waves of water smashing into the windshield, and we passed through the downpour into the gentle hills just north of Pennsylvania. There were no hotel rooms for 100 miles – it was Hall of Fame weekend in Cooperstown, […]
- Heading EastThe week wore on. We played a game of tap-dance with the moving; after renting a U-haul to bring our stuff to the Dome, we unloaded our belongings at the end of the driveway and returned to Novato to pick up the trailer hitch at the Advance. We’d hook it up there, then drive to Woodland and pick up the […]
- BeginningsThe week before we left California, we began to get phone calls from Tim. “I’m bringing a trampoline cover,” he said. “And a come-along, and some drills and tools. Do you have any tools?” The calls were ominous. We’d packed dozens of books and other things into boxes, hauled them to the post office, and sent them off to Vermont, […]
The starter says, “On your mark,” the feet toe the line and the pause is peaceful, it is reckless, it is grating. Someone is talking in an insistent voice, away to the right, and over to the left a judge holding a measuring tape is shifting his feet, watching a shot putter enter the circle. That pause is everything – the sounds and the colors of the world fade away, and the waiting, which has gone on so long, reaches its climax.
Then the gun goes off, and the race begins.
-Legend of the Also-Rans