Happy New Years
Work
2017 was a year with great potential for me. I transferred to a new federal government department, and got experience working in new environment. I had a goal of getting more development experience while working there. I had issues due to my father-in-law getting sick, and getting out of the server admin frame of mind.  These two factors sealed my doom for missing multiple delivery dates. I was moved to server admin/installation. No one in the department before me was able to successfully get Datastage (DS) running/configured prior to me joining. I had never installed DS but had fine tuned and configured new installations previously. After I had documented all the steps to install the software, I was made aware that I would not be hired long term which meant I would not be able to get the development experience I was hoping to get. The reason management gave me was that my attendance was an issue even though my team and team leader felt I was performing adequately. Everyone on my team was surprised I wasnât being renewed. Since I wasnât being renewed and my paper work was incomplete I shortened my end date and took a well needed vacation(staycation). Now that I am on vacation I am developing python code which is extracting data from Wikipedia and using nhlscrapi.
Home
During the spring and most of the summer my Hadoop cluster stayed dormant. This was mostly due to all my energy being placed in my new job, and helping my wife be with her father during his hospitalization. Many nights we werenât home until 10pm. We have also been working for the whole year on renovating our home so we can sell it and move to a larger home. This put a lot of stress on our relationship and gave me a feeling that I never could have a break. My motivation was at an all-time low. The summer came and renovations made very slow progress. During this time it felt like I was the only one working toward the moving out goal. In December, my wife finally started to see that she needed to be part of the solution, and she started doing more. I am making steady progress now also since I am home and have the energy and time to do the required tasks.
Personal
I grew personally while at the new job. I am a bit of an introvert so I found myself alone in my office more than I like which told me that perhaps I needed to make a few more changes. I was also found that I had to fix a habit so that my family could afford the finer things. This will be something that I will be wrestling with in 2018. Especially, if I start getting on-call pay and/or my Hadoop-Machine Learning cluster successfully predicts game outcomes.
2018
I am hoping that the data gathering will allow for an accurate ml algorithm to predict nhl game outcomes. I installed MAPD a gpu accelerated DB and data visualization software. I am unsure if it will aid much in machine learning but it might provide some visualizations I will be able to share here. I may dabble in deep learning, but still feel I am missing the required knowledge to excel at that task. I am unsure what I will be working on at work but as long as it is one of my old systems I should be able to support it with enough time to take training on predictive algorithms.
