Another Special Family Vacation
I try to create a blog post at least once a month. However, there’s a good reason why I have no August blog post this year: I’ve been on vacation during the month, spending quality time with my daughter, her partner, and my two grandsons. They live in a somewhat remote area of Australia where attractions require many, many hours of travel. So, instead of my visiting them, they travel to Canada for a long vacation, where we can do day trips to the plethora of attractions Ontario has to offer within a short drive, as well as visit family in person rather than on Zoom.
For me, it meant my house was full of bustle! Lots of noise, laundry, kid meltdowns, and preparing food and snacks for day trips. I loved it.
We enjoyed attractions close to home (Cambridge Ribfest, TheMuseum, Waterloo Busker Carnival, St. Jacobs Farmers’ Market, Hespeler Village Market, and Shade’s Mills Beach), as well as taking many, many day trips.
Some of these day trips were to Toronto. We attended the Jr. Jays Sunday activities outside of the Rogers Centre; saw the CN Tower, Joe Carter statue, and Legends Row outside of Scotiabank Arena; walked the downtown lakefront along the boardwalk to the Music Garden; and visited the St. Lawrence Market and Eaton Centre.
We also took the ferry to the Toronto Islands, where we went to Centreville Amusement Park and explored the rest of Centre Island, including the beautiful beaches and the Centre Island pier that extends into Lake Ontario.
We also took day trips to Storybook Gardens, Niagara Falls, Fort George, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Grand Bend (including the Pinery Flea Market), Elora, Fergus, Mountsberg (including the Raptor Centre), Byng Island, Kelso (where we hiked up the escarpment to Area 8), and the beautiful sandy beaches of Long Point Provincial Park.
I got to spend lots of quality time with my youngest grandson while my nephew and his wife took everyone else to the Hockey Hall of Fame and a Blue Jays game (they won!). I also spent an insane amount of time with my older grandson while Mom, Dad, and my younger grandson shopped at malls. This involved going to the park, seeing the Paw Patrol movie, and playing an insane amount of arcade games (he refers to my arcade game room as “his bedroom”). And he’s quite good – especially at what he calls “the final boss game” (RAIDEN).
We ate massive amounts of awesome food – from burger joints, Chinese food, sausage and cheese curds, to blooming onions and fresh apple fritters. In fine Canadian tradition, we also had peameal bacon and Vachon cakes.
I learned that kids can’t go more than a few hours without eating before they transform into monsters, and that their Australian accents are harder to interpret than those of adults. I also learned that getting kids ready in the morning is a momentous task, and that you can outsmart an ultra-talkative 4-year-old using a combination of snark and dad jokes.
On my birthday, the boys surprised me with lovely presents, and we had a great birthday family dinner at my mom’s place the following day.
Of course, no vacation with an IT person is complete without tech support… so, yes, I managed to recover the files and reinstall the OS on my daughter’s laptop while she was here. At least she is now running Linux ;-)
I know this vacation meant a lot to my daughter, her partner, and my two grandsons – but it also meant a lot to me. I loved every minute of it, and it allowed me to reset and refocus on what is important.
I miss all of the kisses and hugs from my grandsons already. And while I took a bazillion pics of them this past month, these two are my favourites:
Out-of-Office Autoreply:
I’m somewhat famous at work for having funny out-of-office email autoreplies. For posterity, this is what co-workers and students received if they emailed me during this vacation:
I am currently out of the office on vacation at various outdoor attractions across Ontario until September 2 and will not have access to email during that time. If your matter is truly urgent, you’ll need to find me.
Start by collecting publicly available images from the social media feeds of Ontario’s provincial parks, conservation areas, beaches, splash pads, chip trucks, and ice cream stands. Do not worry about the ethical implications.
Next, label the dataset, remove duplicates, normalize the images, and split them into training, validation, and test sets. Train a TensorFlow computer vision model capable of identifying a middle-aged guy wearing a technology-themed T-shirt, carrying approximately 80% of the family’s belongings, while attempting to keep up with two energetic grandsons. To improve model accuracy, incorporate additional features such as the presence of melting ice cream, sunscreen being applied, and at least one child seemingly asking, “Can we go over there?” while pointing in the opposite direction. Bonus points if your model remains robust despite frequent occlusion by backpacks, beach umbrellas, and souvenir bags.
Once your model reaches at least 98% precision with an acceptable F1 score, infer my current location and call the nearest Tim Hortons. Ask them to let me know that I should check my email for an important message from you. Trust me… they’ll probably know me by name by then.
Alternatively, you could simply wait until September 2. The expected response time is remarkably similar, and the implementation effort is substantially lower. Cheers, Jason