What happened in 2021? Time to look back.

  • We got an EV! It’s a Kia Soul, and I love it.

  • Started writing in here semi-regularly. 💪

  • Expanded the weather station: precipitation meter, anemometer, soil temp, particulate matter sensors.

  • Recorded a talk for PyCascades!

  • Much work on machine learning and data science: the dishwasher loading critic, some Kaggle courses, mapping New Westminster trees.

  • A lot of work on Polaris: telemetry analyses, supervising our third co-op student, and a proposal to run code on an ESA satellite (sadly, denied).

  • Radio took a bit of a backseat by the end of the year.

  • I was asked to be an advisor for ALEASAT, and that was wonderful.

  • The heat wave scared me, and I turned that into a focus on climate activism. Small steps, but I’m taking them. Met with my MLA in November to discuss climate change. I think of this as being the start of about 30 years of work.

  • Total distance walked since getting my latest phone in January 2018: 8,664 km. Daily average distance in 2021 was 7.2 km, up from last year (6.4 km).

  • Got more into birdwatching, phenology and natural history. Lots of data taking, which I enjoy.

  • Bird feeder camera with ML to recognize the birds. Does a fairly crappy job of picking out species but a good job of detecting birds.

  • Entered a couple of ML contests – no wins, but that’s expected; it’s the practice I’m after.

  • At work: joined a new team which has a definite data science focus. Learning a lot.

I’m leaving out all the incredibly important time with my family; this isn’t the venue I choose to record that in.