2020 was a strange year for everyone. It was no exception for me, though most years of my adult life have been pretty different from the last, so 2020 didn't catch me too off-guard.
Anyone who spent time with me in 2020 heard all about me "turning my crank", which was my shorthand for working on a machine learning project and doing my online courses in machine learning. I continued (and in many ways completed) a transition to working as a machine learning engineer, and that transition has proved to a good fit. Online courses provided an excellent on-ramp to build skills in machine learning and programming, and I continue to thoroughly enjoy the slow and steady learning progression: there are just so many courses to take!
At the end of 2019, I started what I thought would be a short-term contracting project in natural language processing (a branch of machine learning that deals with language). I ended up spending the whole year working on this project. A company with an English language instruction app for Koreans wanted to provide pronunciation guidance to their users, and they asked me to build a machine learning model that would listen to the users speak and determine if they pronounced the words correctly. It's similar to how Siri works except where Siri predicts words, my model predicts phonemes.
Building one of these models turns out to be... much hard than I expect, which has actually been somewhat of a blessing. I recently spoke with a professor of phonetics at Oxford (he wasn't named Henry Higgins) and, he confirmed it is a hard problem. In figuring out how to build this model, I spent most of this year figuring out where I can get more data and how I can process that data faster by using fancy computer processors called graphics processing units (GPU's).
Another interest that had been developing over the last few years and blossomed in a more significant way at the end of 2020 has been my interest in open-water swimming. I am trying to approach this activity in a similar "turn the crank" kind of manner (instead of "turn the crank" the phrase is "just keep swimming") in that I'm trying to focus on just doing the activity without having too many goals or aspirations.
However, if I were to have any sort of goal, it would be to swim around the island of Manhattan. The "20-bridges" swim is 28.5 miles around Manhattan and is one of three swims that make up the triple crown of open water swimming (with the other two being the English Channel and Catalina Island off LA). I myself am not really sure how serious/capable I am about swimming that long, but I figure if I "just keep swimming" I may eventually get there. January 2021 has been the most serious swimming I've done and I'm up to 6 miles in a single swim. Now that I recently moved to Queens, I have started to take short dips in the East River; when I wrote this in February it was a chilly 39F!
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| 20-bridges swim around Manhattan |
The "turn the crank" and "just keep swimming" represent a reorientation for me from outcomes to processes. Rather than finding some goal and working to reach it, I am just trying to find things that I enjoy doing and that promote my well-being and accept that by doing those things I will end up someplace good. I admit talking about swimming around Manhattan is not NOT being outcome-oriented, but a boy's allowed to dream, right?
And that "process-oriented" mindset has been really helpful for me throughout 2020 because when the world was falling apart in many ways, I could just focus on the things I was doing day-to-day and try to be content with that. "Tending to my garden" as Candid put it.
So with that not so brief summary, here are some pictures:
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The 2020 year began with a family get-together in Bozeman, MT. This was the most complete family picture I had (sorry mom and Denise...). The glasses boys.
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I had run out of money to pay rent at my friend Garrett's house in Reno, so I lived the millennial dream of moving in with my parents! My mom moved down to St. George, UT last year, and so I didn't complain too much about the change of scenery. I had plenty of opportunities to walk, run, and scramble up red rocks.
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After a few months in St. George, I took a short trip to Bozeman, MT to see my brother and sister and go skiing with my friend, Jon. This is a view while hiking up a ridge at Big Sky. Jon and I enjoyed exploring some new territory higher up the mountain.
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I figured if I was living with my parents, I might as well practice growing my hair. My nieces gave me ponytails attempting to spruce up my look but even then, Madison, one of the twins, didn't approve.
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Just as I was leaving Bozeman around the end of March, covid started hitting the US. This is papa's attempt at a paper towel DYI mask.
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| Mama was kind enough to make me my own mask which eventually came with a matching bag! |
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| Trying to avoid going out of the house too much, I bought a small boxing bag and started kickboxing again. Luckily, I didn't forget how to wrap my hands as the teachers at Phoenix gym in Yangon taught me. |
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| I started taking more selfies to share with: no one. |
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| I spent a lot of time studying machine learning, and it's hard to express that in pictures. These pictures show the internal layers of a convolutional neural network, which is often used to classify images. Through a series of layers, the network is able to learn progressively more complex image components from edges to shapes to eventually representations of traffic signs, faces, or dogs. |
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I enjoyed biking around St. George.
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| And biking around Bozeman. In July, I drove back to Bozeman to see my brother and sister. |
My brother Davis (on the left) and I realized you can make some pretty sweet fires using Cheetos. I got pretty good at growing my hair as you can see from the photo on the right.
I had originally planned to return to St. George after 3-4 weeks in Bozeman and had packed accordingly. As happens in life, one thing leads to another and I never did return.
Davis moved from Bozeman to Fargo, ND in August, and in the process of helping Davis move, I spent some time in my hometown of Watford City, ND.
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I stayed in Watford for about 6 weeks before going to visit Davis again in Fargo. This is some pretty fog a few miles from my house the day I drove to Fargo.
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| My friend Jon (who I skied with earlier in Bozeman) and his wife Katharine got married, and they honored me by asking me to officiate their wedding. I flew from Fargo to New York for the wedding. It was a small ceremony in central park and a very beautiful occasion; one of life's unforgettable memories :) |
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| Right after the wedding, Jon, Kat, and I drove up to Vermont where some of Jon and Kat's friends and family had rented a house for a month as a honeymoon/covid-getaway. We had a wonderful time cooking meals, playing games, and going on hikes. This photo is of the only night I cooked where I made my mom's homemade noodle soup: it was a hit! I was a very nervous cook... |
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After the month in Vermont, I returned with Jon and crew back to New York, and Kat and Jon generously offered to let me stay with them for the month of November. I got a few good swims in the East River. It's safe and gross to swim in the East River... except when it rains. Don't swim when it rains.
The photo above is from a swim in Candlestick Lake in CT near Jon's Dad's home where I got to try out swimming with a wetsuit for the first time. My hands still started going numb after 30-45 minutes in the water, which was around 55 F.
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| I returned back home to Watford City in December for the holidays. It ended up being a quiet Christmas, and we celebrated with a family Zoom call in typical covid form. |
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| My dad eventually told me that there was an open pool in town (why he didn't tell me earlier...) The pool wasn't very busy, and I started swimming 4-5 times a week. Saturdays were my long swims, and I wore this blank stare most of the day. You get pretty bored swimming for 3-6 hours, and you're awfully tired afterward. |
In early February, I moved Queens to live with my friend Curtis. I was somewhat apprehensive about moving to New York in the middle of winter during a pandemic, but it has been a seamless transition. I've really enjoyed being more settled after bopping around for most of 2020.
I imagine 2021 may still be a challenging year for many people. I'm going to try to "just keep swimming" and keep "turning my crank".
Thanks for reading!
