Holtby should be on the assist leader board

The 2018/19 NHL season started for the Caps last night in dramatic fashion.  They trounced the Bruins 7-0.  During the 5th goal, goalie Braden Holtby got an assist.

https://twitter.com/Capitals/status/1047654680342482944

Because it was the first game of the regular season and there weren't that many assists in total, Holtby should should show up on the assist leaderboards with 1.  However he's nowhere to be found.

Here's a screenshot from NHL.com of the Capital's stats sorted by assists.


It's the same for all teams, he's not there (but it's too hard to screen shot that longer list).  Didn't see it on espn.com either.  Oddly enough, yahoo sports has it:



I suspect the problem is the databases that are feed the other sites.  They don't treat goalies as potential offensive players as they have stats related to saves and goals allowed which other players do not have.  They are therefor likely treated differently in the database than forwards and defensemen. There is probably a good article on software design in this about meeting requirements vs meeting desired outcomes.

Take our Daughters and Sons to Work Day 2017

Ok, next episode of my adventures running "Take our daughters and Sons to work day" events, the 2017 edition.  This one was a lot less ambitious than the 2016 year.  In 2016, I had access to dozens of used keyboards, mice and most importantly, Monitors.  Back then I had more influence on how IT assets were handled, and we had just started a transition from dual 17" monitors to single 24" or 27" monitors. So I was swimming in equipment. There were some reorgs and personnel changes that eliminated all my stock of used equipment.

I pressed on, just the same.  This year I decided to a scratch game on laptops.  It lowered the entry barrier as most parents had a laptop laying around and there were a few spares here in the office.   We had 10 kids for this event.  We almost didn't have a conference room which made for some more drama.  There where a few high profile exec meetings that needed the larger rooms I would ordinarily use.

Anyway, we got things sorted and we got on our way.

Once again I used the book Coding Games in Scratch by Jon Woodcock. In his book he walks you through several different games you can build in scratch, and we did one based on the 'Doom On The Broom' game with a few tweaks and variations.  We called it Bat Blaster.   Started with an overview of Scratch (https://scratch.mit.edu - everyone needed an account).

Next we made some simple animations to teach them how to interact with motion and sprites, etc, and then we got into the game.  I'd have a slide on the projector with all the blocks they would need and what we're trying to do.   I would also spend a minute talking about where each block was in the block pallet and what each block was doing, especially in this case where we introduce variables and doing mathematic operations on variables.

The next slide would be the pieces all put together.  I'd walk the room helping folks who got stuck somewhere.

We would then add new features, like making the bats faster or adding ghosts.  For the folks who could stay longer we started re-skinning the game.  Instead of witches and wizards shooting bats, heroes shooting zombies or space ships shooting aliens.  We also changed it so the sprite was no longer pinned to the middle of the screen and floated forward, like the ship in asteroids.  It was a much simpler day than the year before and went quite well.

Take our Daughters and Sons to work day 2016

So I ran an event at my job for Take our daughters and Sons to work day for the past few years.  They went pretty well and I've been meaning to write about it for a while.  I'm doing a lot of this from memory, so I might have some of the details wrong, but the general idea is the same.

The high level theme was to take Rasberry Pi's, build a game in scratch and turn some LED's on and off.   The outline looked like this.

1. Welcome 
2. Logistics (bathroom, water, etc)
3. Who’s built a computer before?  Lets build one now!
4. Boot/copy - get everyone setup.
5. Intro slides what we do here - Dev, QA, Product, Research, operations
6. Walk through Pi - play a pi game
7. Start scratch go over key concepts
8. Show and tell
9. Timecheck - lunch?
10. Scratch video game  - Catch stars - Product/research
11. Dev’s get to work Set background 
12. Add one octopus, random star placement, catch stars.
13. A BUG! - octopus gets stuck in side - QA catches these  - add on touch bounce
14. This is too easy lets make it harder
15. More octopuses, faster, color, on-bump-face cat
16. Timecheck - Lunch if haven’t had, break time otherwise 
17. Show and tell
18. Interact with the real world - turn on an LED
19. Security alarm (PIR sensor)
20. Wrap-up 

Since I had a supply of keyboards, mice and 17" monitors, the minimum the kids had to bring was the Pi.  I had suggested kits, such as Kana Kits or Vilros kits that have a lot of the stuff already bundled.  These examples are for Pi 3s but when I did this in 2016 they were Pi 2s. 

The majority of the ideas for this even came from the BooleanGirl organization.  BooleanGirl is a fantastic program and I can't say enough good things about them.  One of the new things that has come out between my 2016 event and now is the BooleanBox.  A prepackaged Raspberry Pi kit with all the stuff you need to get started.  It doesn't stop there - they also have Boolean University where they have structured lessons and projects for you to build with your BooleanBox.  If I were to do this all over again, I'd do BooleanBoxes as the base.  Back in 2016 their website had similar content where they walked you through getting started with a Raspberry Pi.  I took that as a starting point (6 and 7 above for instance)  and went from there.

In item 10 I walked the kids through building a video game in scratch.  The book Coding Games in Scratch by Jon Woodcock was perfect for this.  In his book he walks you through several different games you can build in scratch.  I picked one called Star Hunter, which had a similar game play and style to one from the BooleanGirl website.  The book was a great resource to follow as it breaks down the game construction bit by bit, which gave natural stopping points where I could check in with all the kids on how they were doing. The walk through purposefully introduced some bugs to kind of show what QA's job is in our office and introduced new feature requests and other software development concepts to give a feel for what we do here.

After lunch we started working with physical computing - turning LEDs on and off, and trying to get a PIR sensor to work.  This was a bit of a disaster.  The breadboard concept doesn't translate well for younger kids.  It took a lot of one on one interaction to muddle through this.  While helping others, the kids who got the concept and were ready for the next step got bored.  It was further complicated by everyone's Pi being a little bit different - different colors, different bread boards different versions of the n00bs linux packages.  If I did this all over again, I would pre-assemble mini-breadboards and I would also re-flash everyone's Pi with the same image so everyone had the same stuff.  I even had the mini breadboards with me, but just didn't have time to put them all together.  That would have saved a lot of time.

The PIR sensors were next, but by this time, we were loosing kids due to parents being done with work already (we have folks who traveled from Philly to DC) and just general exhaustion.   I had PIR sensors for everyone, and had a few slides how to connect them.  They sorta worked, but would often get stuck in the 'detect' mode.  I think this was mostly due to to GPIO libraries being different across the versions of Noobs.  Almost everyone's screens looked different, had different settings and values. It wasn't a great way to end the day. 

All and all, it was a positive experience, most of the kids enjoyed it and several came back for 2017.  Hopefully I'll write that one up next.

Maybe I'm going to try writing again

Not sure I'll follow through on this thought, but I think I want to try writing stuff down again.  So I've done a take your kids to work day thing for the past 3 years and they've gone over reasonably well.  I need to write those up.  I think more interesting, at least to me, is planning for 2019.  Since I do this in small bursts and then a few hurried days right before the event I need to start early.

So last year's Adafruit based Circuit Playground Express went well.  If I make good on my plan to write, eventually this will be a link to the 2018 event. My initial thought for 2019 was to do some kind of IoT event.  Wasn't quite sure what shape that would take, but I'm sure I could come up with something.  Then Adabox 008 arrived and now I'm torn.  It came with a Circuit Playground Express and their new CRICKIT platform.  It also came with a truck load of stuff to help you make your own cardboard robots.  I started playing with mine tonight and now I'm torn.  It was super easy to set up, and make something move.  I spent more time cleaning off space of my messy desk to work with than actually making this work, it was that easy.

So now I have a choice to make.  IoT or AdaFruit Crickit and their #MakeRobotFriend platform.

Renee's Darth Vader Tie fighter costume 2015.

Decided to write up this year's halloween costume builds.  Before I do that, I want to post about some of the previous costume builds.  I didn't document them as well as I hope to document this year's builds.  

So here's Renee's Darth Vader Tie fighter (Tie Advanced X1).

It's the same idea as Julia's X-wing costume.  It has suspenders for around the neck to have the ship from.  The cape is from my costume and the mask and chest box are from a hasbro toy from e-bay.  The chest box has a lot sound effects - breathing sound and clips from the movies.

I don't have too many intermediate pictures of the Tie.  It had to come together quickly because I was running out of time.  I painted the strip section black then taped over it and the rattle-can sprayed the rest of it gray.  The raised relief of the pilot window was also made free hand.  I cut 8 trapezoids and then angled them up to a circle.  I had to trim a bit here and there to get them to align.

The grey bars are foam tubing you'd use to insulate a door or window frame with, you by like 30' coiled up in a bag at Home Depot for like $4.

The last bit was to take gray pipe insulating foam and stick it to the leading edge.  Originally I was going to make it go all the way around but I had a hard time getting it to stick without straightening out.

Lord Vader is ready to smite the rebelion and get some tasty candy while (s)he's at it.

Julia's Star Wars X-Wing costume, Halloween 2015

Decided to write up this year's halloween costume builds.  Before I do that, I want to post about some of the previous costume builds.  I didn't document them as well as I hope to document this year's builds.  

In 2015 the girls let me make them Star Wars themed costumes.  This was Julia's x-wing costume, complete with an R2D2 droid in the back of the x-wing.

We basically ran out of time to add more details.  I feel like I could have done a bit better but at night out trick or treating it looked pretty good.  Lots of complements.  I scratch built the ship, helmet and vest.  R2D2 was a toy I have (he makes cool sounds and is voice activated).

The x-wing came along pretty good.  I found some large moving boxes in our complexes recycling collection.

So I free-hand cut the pieces out and hot glued them together.  Then I taped the seams with white duct tape.  Next I put some wings on.  I took some mailing tubes and cut them in half to be the engines and started painting the base white coat.

Oh yeah, forgot about the sticks for the guns on the end of the s-foils.  After painting white I masked off and painted a red stripe.  Lastly I put some straps on so she could wear it like suspenders and that was basically it.

Next up the helmet.   I friend, Kevin, had an extra hockey helmet to donate to the cause.  Painted it white and glued craft foam to the side to make it cover the ears.  I also made the ridge down the middle to make it look more like the movie.

Then I took colored electrical tape and sharpie to detail it up, and printed some rebel logos on paper and glued them on.  The visor is a cut up piece of plastic from a paint roller tray liner.

She's already wearing the orange t-shirt we borrowed for the flight suit.  Next we took a white t-shirt and cut the sleeves and neck to look like a vest.  Then we fabric-glued some craft foam to it and drew some flight-suit looking details on with sharpie.

Turned out pretty good all things considered.  The flap hides her candy bucket for trick or treating.

Julia's Costume halloween 2014

Decided to write up this year's halloween costume builds.  Before I do that, I want to post about some of the previous costume builds.  I didn't document them as well as I hope to document this year's builds.

Julia decided she wanted to be a viking, which is pretty simple, we build a shield, Axe and helmet.  Then we buy some fake fur cloth to make a cloak and we're done.  So the helmet was made from a Costco goldfish crackers box with a hot glue gun and Rub-n-Buff paint.

Spray painted it black first, the silver and bronze rub.

The cracking and gaps that let the black show through turned out pretty good.  The 'rivets' are pieces of the hot glue gun sticks.  They didn't stick too well, next time I'll find something better to simulate rivets.

Helmet done, next came a round shield and an axe.  The shield came out great, the axe was a disaster.   Way over sized and the proportions are awful.  Oh well, lesson learned.

The finished costume, complete with fur cloak and boots:

Renee was a storm trooper (we bought the costume) and I was Vader.

A very successful halloween.