I've always been a little bit obsessed with graduation speeches. Put simply, I like being reminded of the great possibility and great responsibility of living.

But as it's going to be a while until May rolls around again, I decided to try my hand at generating my own graduation speeches using some basic data science techniques.

I'm happy to report that after a little bit of NLP using Markov chains (and a whole lot of data-scraping and data-cleaning), I was able to bring forth to the world this inspiring sentence:

They listened to someone who makes nothing but flaming hot Cheetos.

If you're interested in reading more about the specifics of my project, I wrote about it in detail on the FloydHub blog, or you can try it out now:

Click this button to open a Workspace on FloydHub where you can generate your own "commencement speech style" sentences in a live JupyterLab environment that we call a Workspace.

The commencement address dataset of ~300 famous speeches (that I painstakingly assembled) will be automatically attached and available in the Workspace.

The speech_maker notebook has three sections for you to try, where you'll generate commencement-speech sentences:

1. Using the entire dataset
2. Filtering to only the top ten schools by count of speeches given
3. Filtering to one school at a time using a Jupyter widget extension

Where can I read actual good speeches?

Right here. I put together this simple Gatsby.js static site with the raw text (and some YouTube links) of the speeches in my dataset. PRs are open for the dataset if anyone's interested in contributing. Right now, the best we have is the NPR "Best of" commencement speech website, which hasn't been updated since 2015. It would be great to find a way to make a new home for great speeches on the web.

I recently logged into my Arrow Card iOS app to check my balance and was pumped to discover that my team's Spring 2017 Hackathon project…

More arppegiator magick using the Apple on-screen keyboard in Logic. I still would like to learn how to program my own drumbeats. In the…

More arppegiator magick using the Apple on-screen keyboard in Logic.

I still would like to learn how to program my own drumbeats. In the mean time, thank goodness for Apple loops. Learning Ableton would be another fun benefit of this endeavor.

We ran ~38 miles of the Zion Traverse this past Saturday, including the I-can't-believe-this-is-actually-allowed Angels Landing climb.

Here's video proof:

Very little prep work or research or even training was done on my part. I'm lucky to have found a crew of like-minded adventure runners always ready to plan the next excursion. But, next time, I need to be taking at least a little bit more time to prepare.

For example, I knew almost nothing about Zion National Park. This was a mistake that I've since ameliorated with some healthy Wikipedia-ing. One fun factoid - Angels Landing used to be known as the Temple of Aeolus (aka the Greek demi-god/god of winds and also a lovable sidekick on TV's Hercules: The Legendary Journeys). I wish I had known that when I was there - I could have tried to summon him or something. Next time, I guess.

Similarly, I felt pretty drained by the time we hit the last ten miles. Nothing compared to the Rim2Rim2Rim or the North Face 50M, but still - I definitely overestimated my fitness for the task at hand. If I'm going to keep doing these runs, I'll need to start logging more longer distance runs on the reg.

Water - or the lack thereof - was our crew's only major snafu. Turns out that springs do not mean treated water pumps - they mean semi-dirty trickles or puddles of water. Thankfully, we were helped by a few fellow-hikers (angels descended from the landing, IMHO) who lent us their water filter. Lesson learned - always bring iodine tablets or a filter on any adventure run. You just never know.

This was my first ultra where I didn't track anything on Strava, and it felt great. I've been off Strava for a while now, and I'm not really looking back. The quantified-self stuff has been less appealing to me lately. When I'm on a run, and I find something cool or gross or beautiful that I want to stop and inspect, I don't want to have to think about how that impacts my splits or run time. I know there's auto-pause features, etc. but I can't auto-pause the stress in my brain about my stats. Instead, I just ran with a plain ol' Timex watch (and my phone in airplane mode to take pictures). The watch can tell the time, set an alarm, set a timer, and, of course, turn on its amazing Indiglo night-light. Basic, essential watch stuff. Nothing smart, just reliable. Yes, I sort of missed having a map with my exact GPS route after the race, but I think instead I'm going to just find a map of Zion and try to figure it out myself. That feels more rewarding anyway.

Here's a log of what I ate on the trail, just so I remember for next time:

• 3 Honey Stinger Waffles
• 2 Clif Bar Chocholate Bars with Stuffed Peanut Butter
• 5 salt pills
• 12 Clif Bloks Salted Watermelon bloks
• 1 Nuun water tablet
• 1 McDonald's Dollar Menu Cheeseburger

And here are the creatures I saw on the trail:

• 8 deer
• 1 small gecko
• 10 chipmunks
• 2 squirrels
• 1 California Condor (seriously!)
• A murder of crows