Started the morning early at the Sarah Greenwood school, a K-8 dual language school in Dorchester. The Headmaster was a wonderful person, and I really liked the school. They are interested in having somebody work in their makerspace. After visiting for a bit I went to Boston Public School’s office in the Bollis building for a meeting with Augusta, and then to the Dearborn to help Tim L with resume writing and PIC applications. Got to the office around 1pm, pretty hungry, and grabbed a sandwich from Fooda in the building lobby. Headed home a bit early and was able to go for a quick run, linked below, before Ash and I headed to Santarpio’s for dinner. I added mushrooms to our normal pizza order, proved to be a smart decision. Been playing with Foreflight all the time. Looking forward to flying with it.
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Stopped by the office in the morning, but then headed to the Dearborn to meet with Chelsea to learn more about her work creating a curriculum for the DSA for their new building. Seems like a daunting role to put all that together, and there are certainly a lot of unknowns with respect to the new building. We had a good, albeit quick chat and then I headed downstairs to talk some more to Tim and Estefania. I learned more about their concerns, and think we have a definite understanding of roles for the program. After work I walked to Chinatown and stopped by the market to buy some Szechuan Peppercorns, dried chilis, and scallions to make some Szechuan chicken. It was delicious as per usual. Meant to post this photo the other day – it’s the Ricotta Pie from Toretta’s. Also delicious.
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Began the day with meetings at Excel HS in Southie. The school used to be called South Boston High School, and is actually a beautiful old school building. See image of the seal located within the entry vestibule. After Excel I went back to the office to get some work done. In the afternoon I caught up with former colleague who is now a Principal at a prep school in Omaha. We discussed STEM education and what it really means to be a STEM school. I was glad for his time, and it was good to catch up. Headed home and had some leftover pasta fagioli for dinner. Added some homemade sausage to it from the weekend.
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Took another run this morning – this time I decided to use the East Boston Bike Trail. It goes from Constitution Beach all the way to the water on the bay facing downtown Boston. It’s a bit longer of a run, but no need to worry about cars. A couple of good moments, which you can see in the video, at 4:55 a random guy asks me is the Sox won the night before, and somehow I actually knew that they had won. Around 36:40, I stumbled upon a turkey who looked very lost under the bridge in middle of East Boston. After my run, Ash and I finally went to Toretta’s and Italian bakery in Beachmont, just up the road from our house. We both had paninis and I was very satisfied with mine. They have a lot of desserts, and we tried a piece of their Ricotta pie – it was a nice, rich cream cheese-like treat. Really good. I did some more flying on the simulator in the afternoon and made some sausage. Ash made homemade pasta for dinner and combined it with a lemon sauce recipe from our Bianco book.
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Got up a bit late and took a run. Spent most of the day at home cleaning and flying the simulator. I finally purchased the basic version of Foreflight and was able to connect it to Xplane. It’s actually really cool, once connected, your position on the in the app on the map mirrors where you are in the simulator. It then logs the flight as if it was a real flight. Not wanting to make dinner we went to downtown Winthrop and had some dinner and drinks at La Siesta. It is surprisingly good Mexican food, and it has a bar. Covers all the bases.
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Spent the morning at the Dearborn, first with a meeting with Tim and Estefania and then sitting in on classes to see what STEM activities are taking place in the classroom. I watched a video game class, where students were using Unity to create single shooter games. The teacher, Jon, and I discussed what he thought made a high quality STEM internship. He thought 3 things were important, first was exposure to office professionalism and etiquette. Second is access to hardware and software not available in schools. Third, is an understanding or exposure to the different types of careers within a given field. Those seemed like very good bullet points, which I will use going forward. After work I met Ash at the Last Hurrah for a cocktail and then we had tickets for the ballet, Romeo and Juliet. I love going to the opera house, it’s a very beautiful building. After, we walked across the street to Legal for dinner, not the best, but it was after 10pm, so we could not be choosy.
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Had a phone call early this morning, so I decided to take it at home before going to work. Some of the people on the call must have been double booked, and were unavailable. Still, Augusta was on the call, so we used the time to talk about our project for a while. I then headed to the office and worked all day from there. Went to the Asylum this evening and got a chance to fly the simulator that Matt has created in order to test his new software for autonomous planes. He uses Xplane, which I also use, and connects it to Foreflight. He really pushes the usefulness of Foreflight, so I think I might have to throwdown for a copy one of these days.
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Meeting this morning with all interested parties for the GE Fastworks program. We made some headway and have a path forward. Spent the majority of the rest of the day working on documents needed to keep all this information relative in my head It’s nice to be able to work again in Google Docs, so easy to use, and easy to share. The architecture office still used Office – which seems like a relic from the past. Google Docs is such a better system. I’m also using Google Mail for work, which again, seems so much more user friendly than Outlook or even Mac mail.
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Began the day with a meeting of companies that employ high school students with summer internships. There were a lot of companies present at the meeting, and my take from everything was that the program was more about quantity over quality. Hopefully, I’m mistaken on that assumption. I stayed after the meeting to discuss some more important points regarding my role in getting internships for students, and then headed back to the office. In the afternoon I took a tour of the new Dearborn STEM Academy building – it’s pretty serious. It looks more like a high end mall or shopping center rather than a school, and many of the finishes seemed too nice for a school – as in I bet the money could have been better spent. Still, it’s a very lovely building with some nice spaces, so I think it will be a special place for students and teachers next year.
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Began the day at BPS and ran into an art and sound exhibit by Masary Studios. The exhibit used white cubes placed in a GPS located field and they light up and play noise based on their location within that field. It was quite beautiful. I had a meeting at BPS and then afterward stayed at the BPS building to see some STEM projects from middle schoolers sponsored by BOSE. The projects were not really STEM in my opinion, basically BOSE has created some speakers that students put together and then they created some art projects with speakers in them. I appreciate the effort, but feel this type of activity misses the mark, and servers only as a PR endeavor for the company. I also went and spoke to some people at the Roxbury Innovation Center, housed in the BPS building, and then headed back to the office for work.
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