I am probably one of the few people who like the commute when taking a train. The reason I like taking the train is that it gives me time to read. I normally take the train once or twice a week, the train ride itself is only about 35 minutes or so from Princeton to Newark. In Newark I transfer to the path and take that to the World Trade Center station.
So yesterday I was sitting on the train on the way home and decided to take a timelapse video between two station. You can see that video below
As you can see that took about 14 seconds for a 4 minute or so train ride duration. That means if I was to travel at timelapse speed, it would be about 17 times faster. With a timelapse travel speed my commute would be about 2 minutes..... Who wants that, that would mean it would take me a year to finish a book if I only read on the train, However sometimes it is handy, this is especially true when the NJ Transit or Amtrak trains are running late........ which is every day!!
Here are two Google Map images of the two stations to give you an idea where this is all located
If you prefer to see this in Google Maps the go here: Google Maps
I am a big fan of timelapse videos, it is always interesting when you see people in timelapse videos, it;s like watching a bunch of rats or ants
If you like timelapse videos, check out timelapse on reddit if you don't already know about that subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/timelapse
As some of you know, I am part of a premier league fantasy soccer/football league. The new season started last week…. I managed to have the least points at the end of the first match day. I am glad that this is not my real job otherwise I would be in real trouble. What annoys me the most is that I switched out Philippe Coutinho for Roberto Firmino, Coutinho ended up with 15 points while Firmino only had 2 points. Then to rub some salt into the wound, my dear friend Christiaan Baes pointed out the following
@DenisGobo great to see you are letting everyone have more points than you in your league, very gentleman like.
What can you do, this is just the first week, so hopefully it gets better. Last year I finished somewhere in the middle of the group.
Here is what my team looked like that first week
Not sure why I had Cech instead of Mignolet, lost 6 points right there.
I have made some changes, not too many, I want to keep my wildcard in case some of my players get injured.
Btw, you can follow the league here: RealFootball...
Lately I have been messing around with R and I decided to check out the twitteR package to see if I can post from the R console. In order to use twitter from the R console, we need a couple of things:
Setup OAuth authentication for twitter
Install the twitteR package
Setup OAuth authentication for twitter
As of March 2013 OAuth authentication is required for all Twitter transactions. If you don't already have a OAuth setup, head over to twitter here: https://apps.twitter.com/app/new
Follow the instructions, once you are done, you will see the following 4 items
Install the twitteR package
Now in you R program install the twitteR package
Once the package is installed, it is time to get busy......
Load the package by executing the following command
library(twitteR)
Now it is time to setup authentication, you do that by using the setup_twitter_oauth command, below is an example, make sure to replace the keys and tokens below with the values you got back when you setup OAuth on twitter
If that is all set, we can send a tweet. To update you twitter status, you can use the updateStatus command, this is very simple to use, you pass your status into the function. Here is what it looks like on twitter
updateStatus('testing Tweeting with twitterR package from witin Revolution R Enterprise') [1] "DenisGobo: testing Tweeting with twitterR package from witin Revolution R Enterprise"
testing Tweeting with twitterR package from witin Revolution R Enterprise
Of course nobody is doing all of this to update their status. The reason I am playing around with this is because I want to do twitter searches and then store the results in a file or database. So let's do a simple search for the tag #rstats and let's also limit the search to only return 6 results
tweets <- searchTwitter('#rstats', n=6) tweets
Here is what we got back, as you can see some of the results end in ...., those have been truncated
[1] "psousa75: RT @rquintino: @Mairos_B #sqlsatportugal session: all about R in #SqlServer 2016 #rstats https://t.co/DHrqIZrz1e" [[2]] [1] "millerdl: a quick script to use imgcat in #rstats https://t.co/fpUlgWNX33 https://t.co/AhCCMLewCH" [[3]] [1] "diana_nario: RT @KirkDBorne: Useful packages (libraries) for Data Analysis in R: https://t.co/haRKopFyly #DataScience #Rstats by @analyticsvidhya https:…" [[4]] [1] "emjonaitis: Hey #rstats tweeps, do you have any readings to recommend on sensitivity analysis? Books/articles/websites all welcome." [[5]] [1] "caryden: RT @KirkDBorne: A Complete Tutorial on Time Series Modeling in R: https://t.co/7oI6JKyU4E #MachineLearning #DataScience #Rstats by @Analyti…" [[6]] [1] "ArkangelScrap: RT @KirkDBorne: A Complete Tutorial on Time Series Modeling in R: https://t.co/7oI6JKyU4E #MachineLearning #DataScience #Rstats by @Analyti…"
What I really want is to convert the output to a data frame. Luckily the twitteR package has this built in, you can use twListToDF. Here is how to do that
tweets <- searchTwitter('#rstats', n=6) twListToDF(tweets)
The output now has a lot more stuff, you can see if it has been retweeted or favorited as well as the latitude, longtitude and more
1 RT @rquintino: @Mairos_B #sqlsatportugal session: all about R in #SqlServer 2016 #rstats https://t.co/DHrqIZrz1e 2 a quick script to use imgcat in #rstats https://t.co/fpUlgWNX33 https://t.co/AhCCMLewCH 3 RT @KirkDBorne: Useful packages (libraries) for Data Analysis in R: https://t.co/haRKopFyly #DataScience #Rstats by @analyticsvidhya https:… 4 Hey #rstats tweeps, do you have any readings to recommend on sensitivity analysis? Books/articles/websites all welcome. 5 RT @KirkDBorne: A Complete Tutorial on Time Series Modeling in R: https://t.co/7oI6JKyU4E #MachineLearning #DataScience #Rstats by @Analyti… 6 RT @KirkDBorne: A Complete Tutorial on Time Series Modeling in R: https://t.co/7oI6JKyU4E #MachineLearning #DataScience #Rstats by @Analyti… favorited favoriteCount replyToSN created truncated replyToSID 1 FALSE 0 NA 2016-02-20 20:29:54 FALSE NA 2 FALSE 0 NA 2016-02-20 20:24:50 FALSE NA 3 FALSE 0 NA 2016-02-20 20:16:25 FALSE NA 4 FALSE 0 NA 2016-02-20 20:11:08 FALSE NA 5 FALSE 0 NA 2016-02-20 20:11:06 FALSE NA 6 FALSE 0 NA 2016-02-20 20:02:05 FALSE NA id replyToUID 1 701141750161784834 NA 2 701140474019577856 NA 3 701138356466483204 NA 4 701137026075140096 NA 5 701137018508722176 NA 6 701134750296227840 NA statusSource 1 Mobile Web (M5) 2 Tweetbot for Mac 3 Twitter for Android 4 Twitter Web Client 5 Twitter for iPhone 6 Twitter Web Client screenName retweetCount isRetweet retweeted longitude latitude 1 psousa75 3 TRUE FALSE NA NA 2 millerdl 0 FALSE FALSE NA NA 3 diana_nario 50 TRUE FALSE NA NA 4 emjonaitis 0 FALSE FALSE NA NA 5 caryden 41 TRUE FALSE NA NA 6 ArkangelScrap 41 TRUE FALSE NA NA
Now that we have a dataframe, let's dump it into a csv file. Below is what the command is to write the output to a csv file
Here is what it looks like if you open the csv file in Excel
As you can see each column is filled with correct data. How about instead of writing it into a csv file, we write the data into a database? That is pretty easy as well, we need the RODBC package to accomplish that. You can see that post here: How to store twitter search results from R into SQL Server
I started my own Today I learned project on Github
Today I learned
A collection of concise write-ups on small things I learn day to day across a variety of languages and technologies. These are things that don't really warrant a full blog post. Idea stolen from jbranchaud/til
The reason I did this is because it gives me an opportunity to use Github, all my stuff is usually backend SQL Server code, I also don't do any web or app programming. The reason I like the Today I Learned project is that you can easily see all the stuff that you have learned over time. I will probably mostly add R and Powershell items in the foreseeable future. I am messing mostly with R on my own time and Powershell at work. Once I start diving deeper into SQL Server 2016, I will probably add that stuff as well to my Today I Learned Github project.
I decided to write down what I will use to learn Chinese.in the coming weeks. Here are some of the things that I am currently doing and some things I will be doing in the near future.
Watch videos on Youtube
There are a bunch of videos I have already watched, there are also a bunch that I bookmarked. Here is one of the videos that I have already watched several times
I like Dani Wang's videos and will watch all of them shortly.
Here is a video that I have bookmarked but will watch this week. This video is by Yangyang Cheng, it is a Google hangout showing you the most effective way to learn Mandarin tones, tone pairs
I have already listened several time to Lesson #1 - What's Your Name in Chinese? It is actually fun and quite interesting. I listen to most podcast at 1.5 speed but always have to remind myself to set it back to 1.0 speed with this language podcast
Visit websites
There are a bunch of sites that I have bookmarked, I have read some of these already and some are bookmarks because those sites were listen on some of these but I did not get enough time to read them all yet. Here is just a small list for you to check out.
Organized in 25 easy steps, by essential categories
150 Sticky Labels for home and office
Ready-made Flash Cards
This is a real beginners book and is fun to learn from. It will arrive by the end of this week so I will be doing all the other stuff I mentioned in this post instead.
Movies
Watch a movie in Chinese and trying to understand it. I own only 2 movies that are in Chinese: Hero and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. But luckily for me, my local library has a lot of Chinese movies, here is just a small example of the stuff that they have, there are several of these cases filled with movies.
I won't get to the movies for a couple of months, at this stage there is no point, I probably might recognize 5 words in total. But I will try to watch my first movie in April or so and will let you know how that goes.
This year I read 20 books. Ten of these books were fiction and ten were non-fiction. The Game of Thrones books were a re-read, I already read book 4 and 5 of this series before..
The weirdest book I have ever read
One part of this book is about a house which is always changing and somehow the measurements inside are larger than the outside measurements. There is are video recordings of what happens inside the house to the Navidson family as well as some people who are trying to help. The other part of this book is about Johnny Truant who discovers the manuscript written by Zampanò about the videos mentioned earlier, the Navidson record. I don't want to give you more info about the story, this way I won't spoil anything for you
This book has pages with text in circles, braille, upside down text, mirrored text and much more. Here is also a short video with some of the weirder pages of the book
There are also hidden messages in the book, the word house is always colored blue, some of the references are real, some are made up
To the Last Man: A Novel of the First World War by Jeff Shaara
This is a historical fiction book focusing on World War I. This book is very very good, I would recommend this to anyone. A big part of the book deals with air warfare, you will learn a lot about Red Baron, Manfred von Richthofen and Raoul Lufberry. Another thing you will learn when reading this book is how the soldiers experienced trench warfare.
Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania by Erik Larson
Excellent book, a non-fiction book that reads like a novel, I couldn't put it down. Amazon's best book of the month for March 2015. Here are just some highlights of what reviewers had to say.
Larson is one of the modern masters of popular narrative nonfiction...a resourceful reporter and a subtle stylist who understands the tricky art of Edward Scissorhands-ing narrative strands into a pleasing story...An entertaining book about a great subject, and it will do much to make this seismic event resonate for new generations of readers." —The New York Times Book Review "Larson is an old hand at treating nonfiction like high drama...He knows how to pick details that have maximum soapy potential and then churn them down until they foam [and] has an eye for haunting, unexploited detail." —The New York Times "In his gripping new examination of the last days of what was then the fastest cruise ship in the world, Larson brings the past stingingly alive...He draws upon telegrams, war logs, love letters, and survivor depositions to provide the intriguing details, things I didn't know I wanted to know...Thrilling, dramatic and powerful." —NPR "This enthralling and richly detailed account demonstrates that there was far more going on beneath the surface than is generally known...Larson's account [of the Lusitania's sinking] is the most lucid and suspenseful yet written, and he finds genuine emotional power in the unlucky confluences of forces, 'large and achingly small,' that set the stage for the ship's agonizing final moments." —The Washington Post "Utterly engrossing...Expertly ratcheting up the tension...Larson puts us on board with these people; it's page-turning history, breathing with life." —The Seattle Times "Larson has a gift for transforming historical re-creations into popular recreations, and Dead Wake is no exception...[He] provides first-rate suspense, a remarkable achievement given that we already know how this is going to turn out...The tension, in the reader's easy chair, is unbearable..." —The Boston Globe
The Wright Brothers by David McCullough
Loved this book, anyone who travels by plane should read this book, you will appreciate what these two guys accomplished pretty much by themselves
Seveneves: A Novel by Neal Stephenson
Very interesting book, in my opinion way too long, Neal Stephenson could have cut the book in half and still make a very compelling story. I liked the story a lot, the moon breaks apart and there is only a certain time frame in which to save humanity.
The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America by Erik Larson
Another book I enjoyed a lot. The most interesting part of the book for me was that you could see what life must have been in Chicago during the time period the book takes place in. The first time we had tall buildings, electricity and light bulbs, the first Ferris wheel. This book really contains two stories, one about the world fair, the other about a mass murdered.
Hitler's Last Day: Minute by Minute by Emma Craigie
Was disapointed in this book because it also covered a bunch of stuff that happened at other time...but I think if this wasn't done, then the book would have been 50 pages or so. Some interesting facts about what happened in the bunker and what it must have been like for the people inside that bunker.
In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick
Probably my favorite book of the year, Moby Dick was based on this disaster. An excellent story about tragedy and survival at sea. I didn't know much about whaling or whale oil, after reading this book I can only appreciate what a tough job that must have been.
And here are the 5 books I like the most from this list of 20 books
