Thursday night – open data

June 7, 2012 johncohn Leave a comment

Incredibly busy day. .. Actually, , incredibly busy week.. No month ! I just figured out that I’m working 11 to 13 hour days right now.. But somehow still liking it.. It’s nice that by Thursday I can smell the weekend …
Today I took a short break dad met my friend Tim for lunch.. Actually it wasn’t really a break. We were talking work. I’m trying to find a way to help Tim and his company stage an Open DTa hackathon in the fall. Open data is a really cool concept where city’s, states, countries.. And companies put useful data out in the world for anyone to use. The idea is that tech savvy folks in the community will find ways to make the data more useful and accessible. Cities like Chicago , San Francisco, NYC, Washington, Helsinki, London, Vienna.. Etc ,etc are putting their data out there . Groups like code for America are turning that data into apps that find parking spaces, plan trips, report potholes, find tax records and other useful stuff. I think that kind of thing would be great for Vermont.. One way to raise interest in the open data you have is to stage a short term app writing contest called a hackathon. .. They’re happening all over the world.. It’s a little like the whole maker thing but in software,, my company is interested in supporting the movement.. So this is like legit work for me. it’s gonna be fun !

One side benefit about meeting with tim was the chance to walk around winos ski in the daylight. It’s such a different place now.. It like a little hipster commune

Ok. Time for bed… More tomorrow
-nite all, nite Sam
-me

Wednesday night -Sam cohn awards

June 7, 2012 johncohn 1 Comment

Today marked the sixth time that our family has given out the Sam cohn awards at mount Mansfield high school. Every year at this time we make two of the awards as part of the MMU end of year awards . Today we announced the winner of the Sam cohn Bolton mountain scholarships and the Sam cohn musical soul award.. ( we also give scholarships to burlingotn rock camp and camp abenaki .. But those come later in the summer) these are all things that sam really loved doing.. And we love passing on in his honor. The Bolton scholarship is a year pass, gear rental and a helmet for a skier or rider at Bolton.. That was won this year by a kid Nick who was not there this morning. The musical soul award is the recipients choice of acoustic or electric guitar or bass.. at Advanced music. Anyone can nominate someone for the ward.. But the winner is selected at random from a bowl (so Sam can help chose) This year it went to a guy named John who’s evidently a monster guitarist. Gabe did the intro to the music award.., then Diane chose for all the nominations. It was fun and sad at the same time… We love passing Ono the experiences that Sam loved so much..

One other cool and unexpected thing happened at the awards ceremony this morning. As I was messing with my camera, I heard them call out gabes name.. Our math and science kid won one of the schools history awards . He was surprised too.. We’re proud of that kid !

Ok.. It’s 12:30 pm and I still have homework.. More tomorrow..
Nite all, nite Sam
-me

Tuesday night – transit of Venus !

June 5, 2012 johncohn Leave a comment

All this week we’ve been hearing about the transit of Venus,,,.. This is the last one for the next 105 years. Many commentators have been talking about this being the ‘last one in our lifetime’ . What a strange thought… It made me think about that great line in ‘wings of desire’ where the old man is staring at the sunset.. You hear him wonder how many sunsets more he will see.. Who knows…?

Anyway,, I had a busy day.. And worked until about 5:30. The transit was to start here at 6:09 so I had to scurry to get my telescope set up. I have an 8″ schmidt-cassegranian with computer drive.. I also have a solar filter made for a day like this About 5:45 it was raining pretty hard and overcast. Around 6 pm a bunch of our yoga friends showed up as I was frantically scanning the sky with my scope trying to find the sun through the clouds. It’s harder than it sounds because the dark filter makes everything but the sun black… . At night I could pick out a couple of stars and tell the scope to find the sun.. But in the daylight, there was nothing for me to use for alignment .So I was scanning it back and forth trying to locate the brightest thing in the sky. Finally right at 6:09 the sky cleared.. And there it was.. The sun with the tiniest bite out of the lower right as Venus started to kiss the disk of the sun. For the next half hour I had a steady stream of friends, family and passerby looking at the little black shadow of Venus as it crossed the bright white face of the sun.
It was truly amazing.. Around 7:15 the sky turned cloudy and it became to hard to manually track the sun.. So I packed up and moved in . What a cool sight ! It made me very happy to see something so pretty and so rare.. And so… Really there !!!!

Ok.. That’s it for now.. More tomorrow..
Nite all, nite Sam
-me

Monday night – honors night

June 4, 2012 johncohn Leave a comment

Just got home from Honors night at Mount Mansfield. Gabe and a bunch of his classmates were getting recognized for having decent grades this year.. The gym was packed with students and parents.. which was kind of scary, as I was the speaker tonight. Our freind Elizabeth had invited me to give the Honors talk last year, but I had to bag out due to work travel I wasn’t going to miss it again. I had 15 minutes to give the students something to think about.. a hard task really. I was more nervous about this talk than I am for most of my big work talks. i think sucking in front of a bunch of strangers is not anywhere near as frightening as sucking in front of a bunch of people you know and love..
Luckily I didn’t suck.. it went pretty well. (Thanks to great help from Diane and Gabe helping me prep) I told the students that while they did need to work hard and have goals, they need to hang on to their ability to play. At the end of the talk I did a quick demo of the newly restored musical tesla coil.. it worked great.. that is until it set off the school fire alarm.. Luckily, we didn’t have to evacuate.. but the fire department did eventually show up.. it was just a too funny way to end my talk.. I think folks thought it was part of the show..

Anyway.. it was fun giving the talk.. and we were really proud to see Gabe and his freinds get recognized.. A good night overall..