Life Moves Pretty Fast

It’s been quite a while since I last posted anything here which is pretty typical and I’m fairly sure on the old WordPress blog there was at least two or three posts that started out with a similar exclamation. In any event, I’ve not posted anything since February and every time I looked at my site I kept on telling myself that I should write something soon, what about, I wasn’t sure but it’s not like nothing’s been happening. There’s been a few small trips, football season here in the ACT has started alongside school for the kids and the resumption of extracurricular activities; including some new ones.

Sunflower Trip

In March we took a brief trip to just past Canberra airport to visit a sunflower maze. It wasn’t exactly huge but it was a fun morning out with everyone and gave me an opportunity to take some photos. It was also punctuated with the roaring sound of jet engines every so often since it was directly in the flight path for the airport. Once child thought it was awesome, the other, not so much.

Football Season Resumes

Another year starts and, eventually, so does football. This year, our youngest has also decided to play, intially at Soccajoeys and now at a local club. Her first game was last week which, whilst inter-club, her team ran out 4-3 winners. Watching football at that level, when you play yourself, makes you wonder how, exactly, you managed to figure out how to play but it was fun watching her get involved and celebrate a victory with her new teammates.

As for my season, it’s had a decent amount of ups and downs already. First couple of games, for two different teams at our club, were resounding defeats. The following weekend was a spirited draw, including a goal for myself, and a decent win as well playing in goal. Last week, I only played for my usual squad at the club and continuing in goal but this time around we were well beaten. I was a little disappointed that, having guessed the right way both times, I failed to save either of the penalties we conceeded. Guessing which way to go is half the battle and having done that, not to save one seemed a shame.

I Even Coded Something - And It Worked

Those who know me from my time at University will know that coding was never really my strong suit. Sure I could code and, generally, what I coded worked, but I would never say I was efficient or elegant. Still, if it works, that’s something. Whilst I’m an ICT Manager at work, a system we use has its own API and can utilise Python. I have, therefore, started to learn Python so that we could leverage some of the unique advantages this server system we’ve implemented affords us. In this case, my code uploads a proxy video to AWS and then runs it’s Rekognition service against that file, returning some lables and, if we want to, labels referring to any famous people it’s recognised in the video.

With the returned values it then patches the data in our system to tag it with the labels returned saving heaps of staff hours that would have been spent on manually tagging our media for future use. It’s not live yet over the whole system as it needs testing which, given I’ve coded it, is not a bad idea at all. However, considering I’d never learned Python at Uni and only picked it up because that’s the language this system could use, I’m pretty chuffed I’ve gotten anything to work at all.

Upcoming Things

There’s not much ahead in the near future. I mean, there is the matter of my 40th birthday in October but that is still some time away. We do have a few things on but nothing I’d say is super interesting. I keep debating on whether I want to write something, not sure what, but something. I’m also wondering if I should write, here, about other things I find interesting, perhaps the occasional review of something, maybe movies, since the website I write game reviews for does not post ones about movies and TV shows.

Anyway, it’s nice to have something up that’s a touch more recent now and I’ll likely go away and think (and not post) for another period of time but maybe, just maybe, I might eventually get motivated enough to post more frequently. Until then, hope you’re all doing well and I hope you come back soon, who knows, maybe I’ll have posted something new!