I took the Google Data Analytics Professional certificate course

I decided to take the Google Data Analytics Professional certificate course on Coursera recently and just finished it. Definitely, an interesting field and I’d say this course just barely scratched the surface. If I want to make real use out of the skills I was introduced to I’m definitely going to have to start working on some projects in my free time to hone the umpteen various skill sets needed to be decent at data analysis but, hey, that could be fun!

Look at my pretty credential:

TrueNorth Transportation Co - putting more money in the pockets of truckers

Occasionally a company that Y Combinator funded catches my eye, in the past it has mostly been food-related with the occasional SaaS company, but this time it is a trucking company - TrueNorth

TrueNorth: Profits to truckers

First, let me preface this by saying I have 15 and a half years of experience in international freight. I clear international freight through Customs and any other applicable agencies. My specific facet of the industry relies on airplanes and what we move via air is just a drop in the bucket of what gets moved by semis. A lot of that stuff you see coming in on cargo ships, yeah, at some point in the delivery chain that ends up being driven by a semi-driver. Break 1-9 for a radio check, something like 72.5% of the nation’s freight by weight is moved by truck.

I think this company is awesome. The trucking industry is full of predatory practices that are all about maximizing profits for companies and not for the backbone of America, CDL truck drivers. You see, the trucking industry is a 700 billion dollar industry in the United States and is only growing. So, what exactly does TrueNorth do? Well, in their owns simple words they help increase “profits to truckers”.

Wait, what do you mean Ryan? Basically, they make the life of drivers easier. building a new operating system for trucking carriers, they've started by building a trucking carrier themselves that consists of roughly 200 owner-operators under their MC. In Nathan Lowell’s science fiction series Trader’s Tales crews of space-based freighters can book loads via a single software platform (maybe someday Ishmael and his peers will use TrueNorth to book freight for their fleets as they work the trade routes in the deep dark!), lining up their loads and handling the bulk of the paperwork from their ship tablets - TrueNorth is doing something analogous to this - TrueNorth's software allows drivers to find and book their next load, plan an efficient route, manage customers they are serving, and most importantly get paid and get paid promptly instead of needing to hound companies to pay their invoices.

Instead of going “there isn’t a problem, let’s make software just to complicate things while we try and make bank off of subscrptions” they’ve gone and realized that the truck driving industry still relies heavily on phone calls and physical paperwork to get things done and they’ve begun building a platform that allows this industry to come from the mid 20th century, screaming past the late 20th century, and into the 21st century. They simplify the work truckers have to do, they get better insurance rates through group buying saving drivers money, they get drivers paid quicker and easier, and who knows what the future will bring from their platform. TrueNorth Transportation is doing something that should have been done ages ago.

This week TrueNorth Transportation hit it out of the park with their Series B bringing in a cool $50 million in funding to grow their operations. They’re operating in a fraction of the country and, from external reporting, appear to already have a very healthy revenue so this is probably going to let them scale as fast as they comfortably can and can start saving more and more drivers from predatory practices and companies that have the lion’s share of the industry.

There is a truck driver shortage right now, and it’s mostly because of compensation. TrueNorth exists to make drivers more profit and to make their work-life just a little bit easier. That’s awesome. Not only is it awesome but it’s refreshingly different in a traditionally predatory industry. Bravo Zulu Jin Stedge and Sanjaya Wijeratne, you are good people.

Find TrueNorth at https://www.truenorthfleet.com/

Update February 4th, 2022

Just wanted to give full disclosure. I liked what I saw so much with TrueNorth that I have accepted a job offer with them as a Data Structure & Quality Specialist!

Update March 11th, 2022

TrueNorth now has a podcast called Let It Ride with TrueNorth! The first episode is a pretty great discussion with two of TrueNorth’s earliest owner-operator drivers Jasen and Lee.

Getting into amateur radio

This past weekend my wife and I took amateur radio license tests, she tested for the Technician and I took both the Technician and General.

Today our call signs were issued: KD9TWC

Right now I’ve only got some HTs but, hopefully, eventually next year I’ll be able to start dipping my toe into HF as I’d really love to have that reach. We live in a rather rural area and I can sometimes just barely hear 1 repeater, and actually reach 2 other repeaters, but there just isn’t going to be a lot of 2M/70CM activity in this area given it is mostly corn and soy fields.

KD9TWC, 73.

I got my Lean Six Sigma Green Belt!

I was on vacation this past week and decided to get my Green Belt. We have something similar at work called QDM (Quality Driven Management) and fortunately it made getting my Green Belt really easy as I was already fairly familiar with the concepts and just needed to spend maybe 5 hours going through some training as a refresher.

Now I suppose the question is do I continue towards a Black Belt or do I do I go down the Agile path since I will have to take a Scrum class for 3 credits of my degree sometime next year… choices choices.

Reflections on my first semester of BYU-Pathway Worldwide

I thought I would write up a little review of BYU-Pathway Worldwide as when I was investigating the program I just wanted to know “What is BYU-Pathway like?” but it wasn’t very easy to find any content from people that had done the program with the exception of a few very brief YouTube videos that didn’t really tell me anything.

What is BYU Pathway like you ask? Let us start with what exactly BYU-Pathway Worldwide is.

What is BYU-Pathway Worldwide?

BYU-Pathway Worldwide was created to serve online students. Degrees are awarded by BYU-Idaho and Ensign College, while BYU-Pathway provides the resources to help applicants succeed. You start with 1 year of classes that help prepare you for admission into BYU-I or Ensign College and earn you credit for those institutions during that first year. This program is designed for busy adults that want to continue their education.

The best part, at least to me, is that this program locks in a VERY cheap credit hour price. At the time of writing this, July 23rd, 2021, the program locks in a $77 credit hour for students. Obviously, this will go up for future participants but while I’m doing it that was a major selling point to me as it means I should not have to borrow a single cent to complete a 4-year degree.

But you say “wait, Ryan, I Googled this and it looks like one of those Mormon religious things…”. Well, erm, yeah, it is. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has colleges, clears throat, just like the Jesuits have Georgetown University and Boston College, Notre Dame has a Catholic affiliation, etc. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has created this program for both members, and non-members, alike as education is something that the Church holds to be very important.

“But Ryan, I get that Notre Dame is a well known school, is this just some kinda degree mill from some university I’ve never heard of?” Nope. As of the time of this writing, U.S. News & World Report ranks BYU-I as the 13th best college. BYU-I is accredited by the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities.

Alright, enough of that, so you want to know what a semester is like, right? Well, I have just finished my first semester and, while finding parts of the program a bit annoying or just tedious, overall have been happy.

The Basics

At present, the program consists of 3 semesters spanning the course of a year. Each semester you do a religion class and a regular class for that first year, the religion class is to satisfy the religion requirement for BYU-I and, at least for the first semester, is very basic and not too painful or stressful.

The Gatherings

Each week you have a 2-hour‘ gathering’, while before covid these were in person (and may return to in-person at some point) my gathering is done via Zoom each week. The first hour we do the non-religion class, take a 5-10 minute break and then use the remainder of the second hour for the religion portion. These 2-hour gatherings are student led… yeah, at first I was like “ugh, this is going to be terrible” and “ugh, this is so annoyhing” and “ugh, I totally don’t want to have to lead 1-2 of these things each semester” but, you know, it’s really not that bad. I’ve found that after the first few weeks when we all figured stuff out, that I actually enjoy having a different student leading each week as really the bulk of what you do in the gathering is going over the stuff you self-studied and it is actually refreshing to me to have a different leading style for each hour every week. The gatherings have an agenda, provided ahead of time by the program, that you basically just read and help nudge people to discuss the topics. Some of it is done as the whole group and some is done in breakouts from 2 people to 3-4 people depending on what the agenda suggests for that portion. This sounds kinda blah but, again, once you get into the swing of things it actually works out rather nicely as it helps you to share personal experiences/thoughts and then come together as a mini group to share with the larger group what you discussed and how it applies to the material. As someone that has worked in an office for 16 years, this emulates an office/team dynamic really well and would be great for people that do not have that real-world experience.

The group you gather with, if it is anything like mine, is likely to contain quite a variety of people. My gathering contains 2 immigrants, a Canadian couple, people ranging in age from 20s to 60s, 2 individuals that are converts to the Church within the past year and a half, blue and white-collar workers, 2 recovered addicts, and even someone improving their life via education after having served time in prison, and we have 3 native languages represented with no communication difficulties in our group. It’s a truly diverse group and I’ve definitely been inspired by, and learned from, the unique experiences of my gathering-mates and I would suspect my unique experiences have also helped some of them. I definitely feel like I have a much more diverse group of people here than I would in a traditional brick-and-mortar college program where I live.

The Classes

The class content you access via a web portal like this:

From here you can click on your courses on the right hand side to open them. As an example here is what the PC 101 - Life Skills course modules look like for the first week:

In a typical week in the Life Skills class you will have a devotional video to watch, some reading material which covers some general life skills, writing and math instruction, a writing assignment that builds each week based on what you have previously been introduced to, a math quiz based on the math contained in the week’s lesson which may also include math from the previous weeks as a refresher, and then in the gathering module you can see the gathering agenda for the gathering and you will self-report that you attended the gathering after the gathering.

For the math extra links are included for videos and other content that can help you learn what is being taught if the course material is insufficient. You will also go over a sample problem in the gathering as a group that covers the material taught that week. For me the math was definitely a stumbling block as the highest thing I had passed in high school was pre-algebra (for those reading between the lines, yes I did not graduate from high school but I did obtain my GED when I should have graduated) but my wife teaches math for a living so I was very blessed to have her as a resource to be my personal tutor so don’t be afraid to ask those around you for help if you are struggling with some of the math. There will occasionally be short videos to watch in the self-study material too. This course would realistically take you 1-5 hours of self-study a week depending on your familiarity with writing and the math for the week.

For the religion course you have a comparable weekly course load:

You will have a few minute devotional to watch, personal study (scroll down for a screenshot of week 2 as an example of the amount of content), an assignment where you teach a friend/family member based on the material for that week which then has a couple of questions you answer in a few hundred words about what you learned teaching them/about the material, the gathering preparation which includes the agenda and some questions you will discuss as a group, and then a personal study report which is a few multiple choice questions then a few 75-300 word questions asking you to describe specific things about what you learned that week. I found this course required 1-2 hours a week of self-study/homework from me, your mileage may vary depending on your familiarity with the material. Here’s an example of what you will study in a week:

The Annoying Bits

Like with everything, there are some annoying bits:

• People are going to drop out. My gathering by week 4 or 5 had lost 20-30% of the students, by week 10 we were at half the number we started with which means we went from needing to lead 1 gathering each to needing to lead 2 gatherings each. Your gathering is together for the entire 3 semesters so who knows how few of us will be left by the 3rd semester.

• For the material you are already familiar with, it can feel like you are doing extremely tedious busywork. The assignments in each week can be quite repetitive, I imagine this is great if the material is new to you, but if you are competent with the concepts/familiar with the material it can be a wee bit annoying.

• There is a limited ability to see each week’s content until close to that week begins. I would prefer to be able to look at the material for the whole course the first day and not just the headings. Given full time work, a calling, a wife, and trying to maintain some sort of life outside of these things it would be nice to be able to know in advance how much time I’m going to need to set aside for a given week

• Everything is digital. If you are someone that likes to hold what you are reading, or to highlight and make notes, I hope you have access to a printer as you’re going to have to print the content. Personally I don’t mind this, but watching my wife work on her Masters degree I can tell some people 100% need to have physical media they can scribble and color all over.

• The entire web interface is just a bit clunky and will either require a lot of muscle memory, a lot of bookmarks, or a lot of tabs chronically open to be able to quickly look at everything for the two courses. There is an announcements section which honestly, I completely forgot existed after the first couple of weeks and only remembered it existed when someone, in my final week of the semester, mentioned in my gathering that their religion grader had shared a bunch of stuff that way and I’ve found no way to receive notifications to my email when new content is posted.

• Attending the gatherings are a good deal of your grade. You’re expected to miss none, but my understanding has been you can get away with missing 1-2 before it is a very serious problem and you will lose points for both classes by missing just one gathering. I understand the same mostly applies for traditional college but in a program designed for busy working adults, that may or may not have children, that may or may not have Church callings with demands, that may or may not be single parents, I personally think this should be a little more relaxed. If you do know, in advance, that you are going to be unable to make your gathering you CAN visit a gathering that meets at a different time or day that one week though, so that does allow for planned absence and in my gathering we’ve had 2 people attend ours for a week each due to scheduling conflicts.

• In general the byupathway.org website is wholly lacking in information about the program and what information is there is often buried under multiple page navigations. It is often frustrating to try and find out any sort of information about the program itself as well as what transitioning to BYU-I will be like after the completion of your 3 semesters.

• If you have previous college credit, they will NOT tell you what will transfer until you finish the 3 semesters of Pathway… I really want to know how many of my credits from when I attempted an associated previously would transfer so I could judge how quickly I might complete a 2-year degree and 4-year degree, as if very few were going to transfer I likely just wouldn’t have done the program because I’ve already sunk a ton of money into those credits 15 years ago. This is extremely frustrating.

Conclusion

Overall I’m happy I decided to do the program. I grumbled quite a bit to my wife throughout the first semester but I don’t regret doing it and look forward to knocking the next two semesters out so I can start “proper” college and know how close I am to finishing my associates and heading full-steam ahead into a bachelors degree. As a final assignment for the PC101 class we were asked to write a letter to new students, I’ll share that here:

“Welcome to Pathways! You are in for an interesting ride. I remember being in your shoes wondering what classes would be like and who would be taking them with me. I can tell you that you are likely to meet some unique people from many different walks of life. Hang in there and enjoy your group. They will be a big motivation and support system to help you keep going. Two things that you should do to prepare for the course are to set aside some time every week to complete the workload and be open to help from others. It is important that you are prepared for each class so that you can contribute to the discussions. I would say that you need at a minimum 2-3 hours a week to read the materials, watch the videos, and complete the assignments. What really helped me was to set aside the same block of time each week/day to complete the work. It kept me on schedule. Another big thing for me was getting help on the math from my wife. Just remember that it is okay to ask for help. Your classmates will be a strength to you but have a support system. People who ask you every week how it is going and who will help you even if it is just reading with you or looking over your papers.

Coupled with the preparation, two things that helped me succeed were to finish the assignments a day or two before the due dates and listening to some of the assigned talks instead of reading them. Getting the assignments done early gave me a cushion in case there was extra reading or math vides for the week. It also helped me to not feel anxious or stressed about the upcoming class on Wednesday. I also found that reading each talk took a long time. It was faster for me to listen to them online and follow along. I could stop the video if I needed to and look at paragraphs or places in depth.

My only other piece of advice is that you can do this. Many of the people who started with me dropped out over the weeks until we were down to just a handful of us. I am sure each one had their reasons for not continuing, but it has been extremely rewarding to me to complete my first semester. Remember the reasons why you started pathways and stick to those. Praying for help is also great too.”

A morel is born

Many years ago, when my father was still alive, my grandfather had been having trouble finding morels. He paid his way through college delivering ice blocks and morels and had decades of experience finding them. Somewhere, presumably while on patrol, my father found a morel statue and stopped by to see my grandfather. He placed the statue on the left in my grandfather's yard and asked him how mushroom hunting was going. Reporting to my father that he'd had no luck my father asked him how he missed the one in his own yard, taking him outside to see the statue. A decade after my father died my grandfather died and at his funeral my great uncle retold this somewhat known story. My grandfather's second wife auctioned off the house and its contents, but before this could happen though my great uncle stole the statue out of the yard to give to me. Fast forward another 12 years and I buy my first house, find a nearly identical statue on eBay and purchased it back in November of last year. Today I was finally able to get around to painting it. This family relic will remain safe in my office while the new one will represent it in my yard, under an evergreen, just like the original did in my grandfather's yard for all those years.

Please don’t make me go back: Some of the reasons I hope work from home continues and I never have to return to an office

I just hope my employer continues to allow me to work remotely.

Working from home I:

• Have been exceeding production for the past year

• Don't have to share a keyboard/mouse/desk with another shift (gross).

• Do not spend an hour a day(+/- 10 minutes) driving, and save all the money associated with that commute.

• Do not have to worry about driving on snowy/icy roads as my job requires us to be there unless there is a county emergency making travel by road illegal.

• Do not have to go to work sick, because they act like you murdered 30 children if you call in sick. I can work comfortably while isolated from my coworkers.

• Do not have to be exposed to multiple sick coworkers at any given time.

• Do not have to fight 100-130 people for 1 of 3 microwaves on my 30-minute lunch break, assuming someone hasn't taken my food out of the refrigerator and eaten it/thrown it away/left it sitting out to make room for theirs.

• Do not have to use a restroom that, with frequency (to the point of multiple times over the years management threatening supervised restroom usage for adults), has boogers/urine/feces/blood on the floors/wall/toilet seats.

• Pack into a noisy open office where I can't focus as people are constantly talking, walking by, burning popcorn, microwaving ox tail and greens that smell worse than burnt popcorn.

• Deal with ear-damaging fire drills, cram into tiny offices with 20 co-workers for tornado drills/warnings.

• Deal with an HVAC system that regularly gifts temperatures in the mid-60s Fahrenheit in the winter and mid-80s Fahrenheit in the summer inside the office where business casual is required.

• Drink milky-white water from the tap AFTER it comes out of a filter that has algae growing in the transparent tube feeding the faucet.

• Deal with coworkers damaging vehicles. Just about everyone's car has multiple door dings. Personally, I have no less than 1 dozen that, I know for a fact, occurred at work.

• Have to deal with random coworkers coming to my desk/cornering me at the urinal and blabbing incessantly about their divorce/kids/wife's boyfriend/vet bill, this was a regular occurrence in person and has happened exactly once via teams since work from home started.

• Don’t have to breathe jet exhaust that inevitably makes its way into our building through the cracks around the doors that you can pass multiple pieces of paper through.

• Can be here to sign for packages.

• Can eat healthier because I have an entire kitchen at my disposal during my half-hour lunch.

• Am far more likely to work overtime when needed as I’m saving an hour commuting!

• Don’t need to spend tens of seconds inspecting the toilet seat and/or constructing an elaborate ring of squares to ease my mind if I need to poop.

• Don’t have to wear business casual.

• Don’t have a desk and chair forced upon me, instead, I have the freedom to pick a desk and chair that I like, that fits my needs.

Why I love and hate the RG351V handheld game console, an honest review Saved as draft

Check out the RG351V Handheld Game Console on Amazon

• 3.5-inch IPS screen

• Built-in WiF

• 3900mAh battery

• Support for more than 20 emulators, including NDS, N64, DC, PSP, PS1, openbor, CPS1, CPS2, FBA, NEOGEO, NEOGEOPOCKET, GBA, GBC, GB , SFC, FC, MD, SMS, GG, MSX, PCE, WSC, transfer games and more than 20 formats of games.

My father died 23 years ago, his voice is now an NFT

Twelve days before my 13th birthday my father lost his battle with cancer, that was twenty-three years ago. This was hands down the most difficult event that I’ve ever experienced in my life. Losing my father at such a young age is something I didn’t handle well, and it had negative impacts on my life starting with me largely dismissing school and not applying myself to anything for roughly the next decade.

My father welcomes me into the world

Sadly, my father died before there was the ease of recording moments in high definition video via these nifty little things we call smartphones. A couple of dozen photos of my father exist and, until very recently, it was all I thought I had to remember him by. While I did find the audio of his funeral recently and digitize it to publish to YouTube, I didn’t have any audio or video of him.

Then I found a microcassette tape with my name written in my father’s handwriting on the label. I went to eBay and bought the cheapest microcassette record I could find. My father worked for the Indiana State Police and, at the time of his passing, was a detective so he frequently used microcassette tapes for notes and interviews, would this be a personal message to me that I’d somehow not discovered until now? Sadly, no. It was one of the tapes from our answering machine in 1998.

Did my father leave me a message?

Jackpot.

My father’s voice. MY FATHER’S VOICE! Dad, through almost 23 years of time you’ve reached out and spoken to me. I cried. At first, I listened in shock, rewind, play, rewind, play, rewind, play. Then I cried. I’d heard my father’s voice for the first time in decades. But it’s so brief, ever so brief, just him saying our phone number at the time and to leave a message. I listened to both sides of the tape and sadly, this was the only capture of his voice. The rest of the tape was filled with me rambling to the machine that so and so would be bringing me home after basketball practice, people calling to leave messages to mom that they were so sorry to hear of his passing, but alas only these few words of my father’s voice. Even now I have tears freely flowing as I write this.

Wow, dad, you sounded a lot more country than I remember. What have I forgotten about you?

My father has been dead for almost two thirds of my life now, aside from a few memories that grow fuzzier each year, I don’t have much to remember him by. I write a yearly letter to tell him of what has happened in my life, you can find the most recent one here, I find it a therapeutic process and it lets me feel for a brief few moments that I still have my father here and that he’s part of my life still. This letter gives me some way of keeping him alive, digitally, by treating him like he’s still there.

Enter NFTs. NFT stands for non-fungible token, they are these blockchain creations that allow you to carry out transactions involving the ownership of a specific digital thing. Recently NFTs have made headlines as people have begun selling digital art. Then I joked to someone about the only known recording of my father’s voice as an NFT to someone.

Well… why not? If I make my father an NFT, I could give him some extension to his digital mortality by getting another person involved in the stewardship of this digital artifact that captures a brief moment of his time on earth. Maybe he’ll go on to be sampled in a song or used by some electronic music artist to be the next “the system is down, the system is down, doo doo doo”, used in a film, catch a news cycle, or maybe someone will become his champion like me and work to keep some fragment of his existence preserved for as long as practically possible.

Mark Mercer, born on January 24th, 1953. Died March 11th, 1998. Rebirthed (sorta) as an NFT on March 17th, 2021.

Dad, you are now a unique digital asset. Your voice now exists as a non-fungible digital property. You could barely operate an electric typewriter and now you 'live' on the internet in the latest in blockchain developments.

The NFT listing can be found here on Rarible.

https://rarible.com/token/0x60f80121c31a0d46b5279700f9df786054aa5ee5:492427?tab=overview