Update Ashworth Ave

We moved from Abilene, Texas to Seattle, Washington back in April 2013. I am fond of saying “we escaped to Seattle” as my affection for Texas is quite low. Seattle, by comparison, is amazing. I have found every possible group to satisfy my million hobbies.

Music

• I joined the Washington Scottish Pipe Band in August 2013, a Grade III Pipe Band. The pipe major, Jim Guthrie, is quite particular about rudiments. I have relearned every song I already knew and been practicing my embellishments daily for 6+ months and I am still not good enough to march with the band (my own opinion). I think I will be ready soon and I am very happy with how far my skill has come.

Volunteering

• There is a park across the street and down a couple houses from our townhouse. In May 2013 I began assisting the Friends of Licton Springs once a month in maintaining the wetlands at the park by clearing invasive species, planting plants, cleaning up garbage, etc.
• I began assisting the Ingraham Robotics Club in September, 2013 for their first year doing an FTC team (FTC 7462). We did great. We built this fantastic robot and made it to rank 7 of 32 teams at the State Championships.
• I became the IEEE Power & Energy Society Seattle Chapter Webmaster in December 2013. We also added a Facebook Page too.
• Seeking out more robotics groups, I found Swerve Robotics located in Woodinville and offered to help with their website in January, 2014. Swerve has been awesome  and I have begun writing a plugin for their website in an attempt to reduce maintenance overhead. Swerve is incredibly organized, using Podio for project management. Podio has an awesome API for retrieving information remotely. Swerve’s website is based on Drupal so I am writing a Drupal plugin which should allow us to automatically convert Podio App entries into Drupal nodes. According to the lead mentors at Swerve, this will allow us to teach the students process. We create a App Content Item on on Podio and assign and author. The author writes the content and assigns a reviewer. The reviewer reads and updates the content and then approves or denies the publish of it. When published, Podio sends a Webhook call to the Drupal website and Drupal will request the Podio App Content object data and update the Drupal node (in theory).

Activities

There are an insane amount of activities to do in the greater Seattle area. We have easily done more in Seattle in 10 months than we did in Texas in 4 years.

Website

With all my work helping other groups with their websites, I am finally thinking of making my website more functional. I may rip the whole WordPress part of it down and put up something far simpler… and I may not. Yay for my first post in forever.