I’ve been fairly vocal in my support of the repeal of the Head Tax on social networks like Nextdoor; the first step is to get a referendum on the ballot in November. I think giving the people a chance to repeal the Head Tax is the right idea. Our City […]
Author: Steve Murch
Kshama Sawant Uses Taxpayer Dollars for Her Political Movements: Not OK.
“I do not share the anti-business animus that I feel you are sponsoring…” Councilmember Sally Bagshaw, to Councilmember Kshama Sawant For some time now it’s been rumored that Kshama Sawant was allowing city resources to be used to print out posters and signs for her various causes. It was good to […]
Tap-tap: Is this thing on?
Hello, Seattle! I’ve just set up this blog. I wanted a spot to put various thoughts out there. I expect the topics to be varied. Things that interest me: making Seattle better, entrepreneurship, volunteering, technology/software, fatherhood (and more broadly the often undersold importance of fathers, as well as parenting more […]
Seattle Citizens Speak Out In Ballard
The Ballard Town Hall meeting on May 2nd 2018 may well be looked back upon as a sea-change moment for the city of Seattle. Many Seattleites like me have grown increasingly fed up with Seattle’s approach to homelessness, increasing taxation, lax law enforcement and general fiscal mismanagement at the City […]
Which Seattle Restaurants Have Had the Most Closures Forced by Inspectors?
King County’s Restaurant Inspection Grades, which is based upon the average of red-card violations in the past four inspections I’m exploring the Python stack for data analysis and machine learning. I know I’m late to the party, but have only recently discovered the impressive Jupyter Notebook (formerly IPython) data analysis […]
Comparing Trump and Hillary Clinton on Twitter
I’ve been dusting off my machine learning/data-science skills by diving into Python, which has become a lingua franca (along with R) of the data analysis world. Python’s libraries for data analysis and visualization are really superb and can make quick work of complex data analysis tasks. Sentiment Analysis Today, it’s […]
Build Your Own Enchanted Rose Prop (Part II)
Part 1 of this article covers the basic parts list, code, and assembly. UPDATE (April 2021): The Bluetooth shield used in this Arduino-based project is apparently discontinued. If I were to build this project again today, I’d make it a Raspberry Pi Zero W with Headers (or 3B+) based device. […]
Build Your Own Enchanted Rose Prop
My daughter is in Beauty and the Beast this spring. So I thought it’d be a good opportunity to test my Internet of Things (IoT) skills using Arduino, Bluetooth and iOS, and build a remote-controlled Enchanted Rose prop which has variable-color lighting and can drop petals on cue. So I contacted […]