I left my work computer at work this weekend. I needed to go back in on a very blustery, nearly -snowy/rainy day but even so, I chose to leave it there. I’m trying to work out ways to balance the time I spend on different things; I want to get back to my private scientific and electronic stuff (a home brew ADC and aiming at a small plasma study setup), explore some of the modern scientific programming paradigms more deeply, and play with abstract algebra and algebraic geometry. How can I do that if I’m always going back to get ahead on work? So I left the laptop at work.
When I got home, I spent some time tossing lots of email in the garbage in an ocd-like effort to streamline life. In doing that, I realized that for my gmail account, maybe 70% of the unread mail are blogs from this place called Knoldus. Cool emails about a variety of programming stuff, but some of it is on the edge of how relevant or interesting it is to me, even though they touch on topics indirectly which I am interested in. So to be disciplined I decided I did not and do not have the time to go through their paradigm of understanding Scala. I was sorely tempted to not do this as I feel Scala is really the modern language to learn if you want to pick one. I can come back to it later (right?).
Since my sandbox machine now has a decent amount of disk space (1 Tb with another 1 Tb coming), I can add a bit, so I’m going to install Neo4J (overlap with work, but interesting in its own right) and get back to installing hadoop and spark, especially given that I have one more machine that is perfectly functional with 1 Tb. It currently has Windows but I’m going to spin it into a NixOS machine I think. Can you build a cluster with different flavors of *nix? Guess I’ll find out!
Steve's Analytic Sandbox 