Skip to main content

COVID-19 Home Day 2

March 19, 2010

COVID-19 Telecommuting Day 2

Preliminaries for the day

6:30 am - Today I send my check-in email to my supervisor at 6:30 am, and signed-in to the Skype for Business app so that people can reach me if needed (can see my status as available). After preparing my first cup of coffee and taking my morning pills, my work day had started.

Work tasks

7:00 am - The newer version 2.5 of ArcGIS Pro requires re-configuring and reinstalling the Python environment for the application, which means recreating a cloned AGP python environment, reinstalling all packages and extensions that I need for my code, re-configuring the Jupiter notebook and lab apps, etc. That process is quite lengthy, and I had to do it twice, for both my home desktop workstation, and my laptop.

7:45 am - I also had to download and install today all the ArcGIS Desktop 10.8 software. I do have access to the software downloads from ESRI, and about a month ago I had worked out with our software admin for ESRI and received stand-alone software licenses for the software (I needed them at the time for the Azure Spatial Machine Learning Server I had set up). Installed and configured the software on my home desktop workstation. Can't install it on my laptop because of disk storage space shortage, but I can always remote desktop from my laptop to my workstation locally.

9:00 am - I am getting my second cup of coffee. This time I used the espresso maker.

9:30 am -  I felt a lot of back pain from sitting on the uncomfortable desk chair. I had to move to my recliner and my laptop to continue work. I also had to update Visual Studio for my laptop. It was running an older version so that had to be updated.

10:00 am - Big rainy day today. I can hear the rain outside starting - we're not that used to rain here in California, so this is good news I suppose. It did not last very long, about 20 minutes.

10:30 am - Preparing a new pot of coffee. We consumed a whole pot since yesterday. Re-configuring packages for AGP python environment.

11:30 am - Send some geodemographic data to be used for the County's emergency center analysis of vulnerable population. They need updated estimates and population counts by different geographies: cities, zip codes, census blocks and block-groups, school districts (elementary, secondary and unified), State legislative districts (Senate and Assembly), and US Congressional districts. I can't fathom how difficult are the tasks that the Emergency Operation Center has to do. Protecting the population in our County is such a major and critical task!



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Empowerment, Cognition and Learning

I read a very interesting editorial article in Science this month, written by Bruce Alberts [1]. The editorial raises attention to the science function to frame "scientific habits of mind" including skeptical attitudes and emphasis on logic and evidence. Some clear characteristics of such scientific habits of mind are honesty, creativity and openness to new ideas. It also calls for a new type of science education that aims to empower how students think and act, especially when are called to perform challenging problem-solving tasks. Empowering students for learning is not a new idea. I would point to Bloom's taxonomical approach to learning [2]. Among other functions, Bloom's taxonomy addresses issues of quality of life [3], computer-based problem solving [4], or the empowerment of multiple intelligences [5]. The taxonomical approach to learning, dating back to the late 1950's was developed by Benjamin Bloom as a cognitive tool to boost the intellectual intellig...

mindscribble.net web page redesign

Today finally I have spent quite some time redesigning my new mindscribble.net web page. Although I have not finished all the pages, I have nevertheless migrated most of the content from the old web page. In the next few days and weeks, I am committed to upload new content. It turns out that it is easier to devote a certain amount of time, if not every day, at least a few times a week to the web content. I also now consolidated and listed most of my multiple accounts and profiles in the home page, including my personal profiles (e.g., facebook, twitter), as well as my professional ones (linkedin, OrchidID, ResearcherID, GitHub, etc.).