2016.12.18. Christmas Concert by Oregon Symphony

12/18 Sunday evening. Oregon Symphony presents Comfort and Joy, a classical Christmas concert. I received a pair of free tickets for being a donor.

DEL CASE                 Rocket Sleigh
ARR. DRAGON              Jingle Bells Fantasie
ARR. LOESSER/DRAGON      Christmas Waltz                             Sidney Outlaw
ARR. BERLIN/MOSS         White Christmas                             Sidney Outlaw
ARR. BRAD ROSS           Twas the Night Before Christmas             Sidney Outlaw
ARR. SAYRE               Rockin’ Christmas Carols
PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY Mother Ginger from The Nutcracker

BENJAMIN BRITTEN         Men of Goodwill
GEORGE FRIDERIC HANDEL   Behold I Tell You a Mystery 
                         The Trumpet Shall Sound from Messiah        Sidney Outlaw
RICHARD WAGNER           Song to the Evening Star from Tannhauser    Sidney Outlaw
ARR. TYZIK               What Child is This?                         Martin, oboe solo
PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY Waltz of the Flowers
ANDERSON                 Sleigh Ride
ARR. FINNEGAN            Christmas Sing along                        audience

The new Associate Conductor Norman Huynh conducted this concert. He spoke before each piece. He's funny. Definitely not an English major. He is probably the youngest person in the house. Most musicians on stage wore some Christmas decoration. Red gift bows were stuck to the bow of the string instruments. Quite festival.

2016.10.18. Snowshoe to Twin Lakes from Barlow Pass Snow Park

12/18 Saturday, cloudy - sunny - cloudy. Twin Lakes from Barlow Pass Snow Park, but we didn't go to Palmateer Point. We followed PCT south, went to Upper Lake, then Lower Lake, then out. Total about 8-9 miles (9am-2:30pm). The Upper Lake has view of Hood at its SW end. Not sure about Lower Lake. We didn't have time to walk around, because one of us turned back earlier. There's a creek, outlet of the Upper Lake, running under ice and snow.

The trail is well trodden. Gentle elevation changes, up and down. Fabulous weather for December. The lakes are very pretty now, totally white. I didn't walk across the lake. The temperature wasn't too cold. Sometimes you'd be hit by a snowball falling off the top of a tree. Obstructed glimpse of Hood at times.

2016.12.13. LoRa Workshop using MultiTech mDot and Senet network

LoRa is a low energy long range WAN solution. I arrived 50 minute late, due to bad traffic and off-time bus. Missed part of the presentation, offered by MultiTech, ARM, Semtech, and STMicroelectronics.

During the lab, we tried a hello-world sample app (MacOS uses cloud-based compiler) at https://developer.mbed.org/teams/ST/code/HelloWorld_IKS01A1/ to print gyro data obtained from an mDot to serial line. 2nd sample application at https://developer.mbed.org/users/pferland/code/mDot-IKS01A1/ to upload data to Senet Portal. There are a couple of ad hoc Senet Gateway on premise to access its network.

Pizza, salad and beer towards the end - unexpected.

We didn't get to keep the hardware. Had to pack into the original boxes, so they could be used in the next workshop in Seattle. Instead, we were told to take pizza home. They ordered too many.

2016.12.10. Snowshoe at Snoqualmie Basin

12/10, Saturday afternoon. Raining. Drove to Alpital area for snowshoe. Beautiful powdery snow. Went off-trail in the basin, fell into the waist deep snow a couple of times. It's tough to get up a creek bed. Uncanny how heavy it is to lift my legs up in the unspoiled snow. Good exercise.

2016.12.3-4. IoT hackathon using Edison

12/3-4, a weekend of coding and networking at Simple's new location. Very spacious and modern, as you can see in the photos. They even have a toaster dedicated to "gluten free"! -- overkill, in my opinion. There's also a food scale by the regular toasters.

Organized by Women Who Code, with a theme of renewable city. This IoT hackathon is sponsored (maybe instigated) by Intel who provided hardware: Edison compute module, Edison developer kit, Grove starter kit (a set of sensors). 2 weeks previous, a webinar about what software to download and past projects. Friday night is dinner and team forming, which I skipped.

Saturday, I arrived at 9:30, when a scheduled talk by Intel "IoT Evangelist" Grace Metri was supposed to happen. Some connection problem caused more than half an hour delay. Meanwhile, I walked around the tables to find a team to work with, as well as took a bagel and apple for breakfast. I settled down with these 3 ladies: Kelly Becker (developer using Ruby), Ildiko Toth (designer), Christy (program manager, who has done a bunch of these Hackathons before). A guy named Andrew from Treehouse was sitting with us and helping us to debug. There're a few "mentors" walking around, proved to be useless (I was having trouble finding the IP address of my Edison, eventually resolved it myself). We got two sets of hardware, so Kelly and I can both work. We get to keep them! Lunch was sandwich and wraps. Dinner was pizza.

Sunday, repeat the same thing, prepare for demo. Lunch was pizza. The kit you see in the photo is made by Ildiko. She also made nice slides and gave a talk. We managed to get two different LEDs to turn on certain temperatures, and upload data (readings were very different between the two sensors) to the cloud, and made pretty graph which you can see on your cell phone. There are about a dozen teams, the smallest was just two girls. One demo was presented by a guy and demoed by another guy -- I wonder why they are here.

I left Simple in the middle of the presentation. Went to 49th Annual Celebration of Oregon Authors at Oregon Historical Society. Overwhelmed by how many authors there. They are amicable and eager to talk.