My academic website (biostat.jhsph.edu/~afrazee) and this blog have been merged into one fantastic nerd site, alyssafrazee.com, as of today!
If you subscribe to this blog with RSS, you can just delete that feed and add alyssafrazee.com to your reader instead (it has RSS enabled, and all the wordpress posts were ported over). New posts will go on the new site from now on, but I’ll keep this site live so I won’t break old links.
Enjoy!
Here are some great pages I’ve found myself referring to a lot in the past few weeks, or pages I want to remember (without bookmarking, since I never look at my bookmarks). I’m collecting them here so I can have a somewhat reasonable number of tabs open in my browser at one time. (Things are getting insane at the moment). They’ve helped me, so maybe they’ll help you too.
more to come!
Today is the 11th official day of my summer at Hacker School. It. is. awesome. By day, I get to surround myself with great people and work on whatever project I want. Seriously, no rules. It’s been so easy to get in the zone: I start coding and lose track of time, in the best way. And if I get sick of coding, there are other great things to do, like help other people with their code, go to little student-organized working groups, get a book from the Hacker School library and do some reading, or pair with another person on his or her project. Or I can take my code to one of the eight gazillion experts here and have them review it – I’ve done this a couple of times and I already feel like I know how to write neater code than I wrote a month ago. I really love it here – it’s so awesome to go to “work” in the morning and be able to work on whatever whims and fancies occur to me, as long as they are sort of programming-related. (And honestly, a lot of my whims and fancies are programming-related. Nerd alert.)
And by night, I get to explore New York City!!!!!! More on that later.
For these first few weeks, I’ve been having a blast coding up my favorite game, 500, in both R and python, which is a surprisingly great exercise. It lends itself well to object-oriented stuff, and the logic is totally sensible but complex enough to make the implementation a fun project. I’ve also been working through the Matasano Crypto Challenges, because cryptography is awesome, and because it’s nice to have little self-contained problems to work on, and because it’s another fun way to improve my python skillz. Also, they’re based on real-world security problems, so the application is interesting and relevant. I’m almost through number 6 (of 48…).
I’m storing all of my Hacker School code and notes in my hackerschool github repo. You can source and play my 500 game, but sadly I can’t post my solutions to the crypto challenges (it’s against their rules). To make up for it, I’ve been keeping a little journal of sorts about my experiences with them in the README.md file :)
It’s already day 11 and I don’t have a Big Summer Project With A Deliverable that I’m working on at the moment. However, I think I would like to study a bit of web development – I’m excited about making software that non-programmers/non-statisticians can use, and that definitely involves making some kind of user interface. I’ve dipped my pinky toe in these waters with things like shiny (for R) and d3 (for JavaScript, which I don’t know), but I’ve never actually jumped in and made anything with these, and I’d like to figure out how to make things that aren’t necessarily focused on data analysis. To be clear, I think data analysis is awesome and I want to be some kind of data scientist someday, but there are so many other cool tools to be made. People casually throw out software ideas all the time: “I wish I could block certain websites during my study times”, “I wish there were a better to-do-list app than Google Tasks, I want to categorize my to-do list”, “I wish I could automate the process of checking whether my dissertation committee follows the school’s rules”, “I wish there were software that would turn people’s crappy slides into good slides”, “I wish there were a bot that would to search Craigslist for me and email me with promising ads” — people have mentioned all these ideas to me in the past few months. The thing about being at Hacker School is that you start to believe anything’s possible…all I’d need is a little bit of ______, and I could definitely make that with a [language I already know] backbone. I’ve been feeling like “all I’d need is some practice doing web development, and I could definitely make some of this software wtih R/python/HTML/CSS.” So we’ll see what happens! Stay tuned for Alyssa’s Awesome Web App. (Now I’m accountable.)
Also, New York. NEW YORK IS SO COOL. For reference, I’m living in central Brooklyn and working in lower Manhattan. I’ve been here for just under 3 weeks, and I haven’t been above 34th Street (!) so I have a LOT left to explore. But based on these three weeks, here are my New York thoughts.
THINGS I LIKE ABOUT NYC:
THINGS I DO NOT LIKE ABOUT NYC
And finally, some pictures!
One time we went to Washington Square Park after work to eat ice cream, and it looked like this:
Another time, my friend Mandy came to visit – it was a beautiful day, and we went to the Hudson River Park!
The tallest shiniest building in that last picture is the new World Trade Center – one of four planned.
Mandy and I also went to the High Line, which we really enjoyed – the High Line is this park that’s built on an old railroad track that runs about a story above the streets of NYC, over neighborhoods like Chelsea and the Meatpacking District. She insisted on taking this picture of me while we were having dinner there:
And here is a picture of the street I live on. I don’t live in one of these (I’m a few blocks over, where the brownstones are less brown), but I enjoyed the picturesque-ness of this area. Plus it was a great opportunity to use instagram’s vintage-y filters. So artsy ;)
stay tuned for updates!
Hello from New York!
Tomorrow morning, my summer adventure begins: I’m a student in the summer 2013 batch of Hacker School! Basically, Hacker School is three months of learning about programming, in a bring-your-own-project-ideas-or-enthusiasm, collaborative, friendly, flexible, awesome environment. I haven’t actually been yet, so that’s my one-sentence interpretation of what it is based on the website, and from my three Skype sessions with facilitators (so definitely check out the website if you want to know more).
I’m really excited about this, for many reasons.
I’ve been interested in learning JavaScript for a while, mainly because of a pretty neat tool that some of my friends/colleagues developed for interactive data visualization, using d3. So, one of the Hacker School facilitators recommended starting by reading the book Eloquent JavaScript. It’s free and it’s actually delightful to read (I’ve chuckled out loud several times in the first few chapters). So that’s where I’ll be starting tomorrow!
Keep an eye out for more Hacker School/New York musings this summer! AND ALSO, if you have ideas for useful software projects, I (and I suspect my fellow Hacker Schoolers) would love to hear them.
At this time last week, I was experiencing my first ENAR! Overall I had a great time – met some cool people, went to some cool sessions, hung out by the pool and went to Epcot, etc. But as we were hanging out over the course of the conference, I found myself in more than one discussion with friends about how stat conferences could be so much more awesome. I thought to myself last Monday: “Alyssa! You haven’t written in your blog since Election Day. ‘Ideas for Super Awesome Conferences’ would be a fabulous post!” And then I was beaten to the punch by Yihui’s post on conferences. Read it, it’s good. But I have some different (and sometimes conflicting) ideas, so I decided to write “Ideas for Super Awesome Conferences” anyway.
DISCLAIMER: I’m no expert. I’ve only been to two big stat conferences (ENAR 2013 and JSM 2012 in San Diego). I’m a TOTAL CONFERENCE NEWBIE (since I’m a third-year student). Also, I have also never planned a conference so I most likely have no idea what goes in to such a huge endeavor. Bearing this in mind…
Ideas for Conference Organizers:
(1) Choose a good venue. This is probably the first thing that happens after the city is chosen, so I’m sure a lot of thought goes in to this, but the venue at ENAR left a lot to be desired. For one thing, the conference was held in a giant conference-center/hotel megacomplex with pretty much nothing outside the complex. This meant:
I also found it somewhat hilarious that the conference material plugged the venue by saying that this conference center has the “largest pillar-free resort ballroom” in the country (which is oddly specific, but whatever) – and then saying that ENAR wouldn’t actually be using this ballroom but that we were free to go take a look at it! Okay…
Anyway, my ideal venue would be located within walking distance of several hotels, restaurants, bars, convenience or grocery stores, etc – the key to me is having options. I think this is where Yihui and I diverge a little bit, because I don’t think a college campus like Iowa State would be a good place to have a conference at all. For one thing, most college dorms are occupied with college kids during the school year, so the whole dorm option seems unlikely, and if you’re in a small-ish town with limited hotel space (like Ames, or like the small town I went to college in), it just won’t be possible to fit all the participants in. For another, I don’t think forced interaction between participants because there’s literally nothing else to do is very healthy – I’ve found that having somewhere to go (an interesting restaurant or bar) is a fun way to socialize/network with people you’ve just met. It takes away some of the tension. Also, Ames is 41 miles from the nearest major airport – I know that’s specific to Iowa State, but it’s true for a lot of more rural universities, and I think it would be a major inconvenience. For an example of a venue I really liked, take last summer’s JSM in San Diego – nice conference center, many hotel choices, good food around, the beach was accessible by public transit…
Also, the venue should have good wifi. Accessible within the entire conference center, including the session rooms (in case presenters need to upload their slides from Dropbox because their favorite flashdrives mysteriously went missing the day before they needed to leave and their backup flashdrives suddenly decide to be “malformed” or whatever. Not that this happened to anyone I know…). The cost of such wifi could probably be included in the registration fee.
(2) Have a conference app! It’s 2013. We work in a tech-y field. Lots of people have smartphones and would use the app. It would include most of what is in the printed program (which would solve the excessive program-printing problem) in addition to a scheduler – so you could plan out the talks/sessions you want to go to that day (thanks to my friend John for this idea, which I LOVE). It could also include things like a live twitter feed, an “announcement area” for room changes and lost-and-found issues and whatnot, and some of the social networking features that Yihui was talking about (e.g., search for participants by name or by university, so you could see whether anyone you know from years ago will be coming). This app could probably get made cheaply and quickly if it were a contest (in a word: crowdsource!)
(3) Like Yihui said, have the nametags be printed front and back. Such a good, simple idea. Also, potentially ask for first and last names in separate boxes on the registration form…my friend got a printed badge that said her last name in giant letters instead of her first name, which was kind of hilarious and also kind of unfortunate.
(4) Think carefully about placement of the poster session, because it’s often hard to get people to go to that part of the conference. I had a couple discussions about this. I tend to agree with Karl, who suggested having it as the only thing happening during an afternoon session in the middle of the conference. This way: everybody’s around. They’ve all arrived and they aren’t leaving yet. (The one at this conference was Sunday night – the first day – so a lot of people weren’t there yet). Nobody has another session they really wanted to be at that conflicts with it. I talked a little more about it with Tom, a conference vet who says that people still don’t really go if it’s scheduled like that. All I’ll say is this: even if it’s in the afternoon, have food and drinks. Kind of a happy hour situation. Maybe not open bar, but cash bar would be awesome (though a beer should cost less than $11…). And advertise the happy hour nature of the session.
Now, the responsibility making a conference awesome does not fall only on the shoulders of the organizers….
Ideas for Conference Participants
I really only have one, and it’s this. Give a great talk. I know not everyone likes giving talks, but either someone thought you’d do a good job and that you have interesting work (invited sessions) or you thought your work was worth sharing (contributed sessions), so in either case, you kind of owe it to the attendees to at least try to engage them in your research. The ability to clearly communicate your research is an integral part of being a good scientist, I think, so it’s part of the job, and conferences are a good way to practice this. ENAR actually puts out a list of guidelines for giving an effective presentation! The most engaging talks I’ve seen have these qualities:
I’d be super pumped to go to a stat conference in a cool city with a sweet app, a happy hour poster session, and some really awesome talks – keeping my fingers crossed!
My advisor told me today, in a fit of excitement and enthusiasm, that “the real winners in this election were statisticians.” (He later went on to joyfully declare, “Man, I LOVE being a statistician!” The guy is living the dream.) According to him, today is statistician’s Christmas. What a great metaphor! Check it out: all year long, we predict and model and analyze and see if we can figure out what will happen. Everything goes down on Tuesday night, and we wake up Wednesday morning to the best gift of all: the real data. And this lets us figure out how well our models and predictions and analyses did.
This year, the stat nerds did awesome. Nate Silver (of fivethirtyeight) is Mr. Popular in geek circles right now. Should Florida officially go Obama, he will have predicted every state’s vote correctly. That’s really hard to do, since so many factors influence how people vote and not all of them are measurable, but man, he and some other awesome people rocked it. Check out this amazing Twitter hashtag it spawned.
It’s also kinda cool to look at the data visualization stuff that comes after elections. I “watched” a lot of the election coverage on Huffpost – their state-by-state graphics were really nice. I liked the interactive parts – e.g., how hovering over a dot on the county scatterplot told you which county it was. On another note, the main way we visualize US election data is with the results map, where states are colored red if they went Republican and blue if they went Democrat. This caused my roommate (who isn’t from the US) to comment “That map is looking pretty red…Romney must be winning?” And that’s the problem with the election map – big, unpopulated, 3-vote states are usually red. NPR did some fun stuff that addressed this issue by making the sizes and colors of states on the map a bit more informative.
So, merry stat-mas to all! Enjoy the peace and quite of the election being over.
In my software/hardware setup post, I talked a little bit about working on a remote machine. As promised, here are the details about how I make interactive coding easy for me.
Let’s start from the very very beginning. Our department has a pretty sweet set of really powerful computers (“the cluster”) available for us to use. Because the computers are so awesome, they have to be kept in a room that is specially cooled and maintained, and they don’t have desktops that we can sit down and interact with. As such, you need to use a different computer (i.e., a laptop) to remotely log in to the cluster and either (a) start an interactive session, in which you can type commands into the Linux shell, or open up an interactive version of (say) R or python and type commands there, or (b) submit a batch job or shell script to run without user interaction.
Batch jobs and scripts are pretty straightforward, so I’m not going to yammer on about that in this post. But working interactively is a little trickier, mostly because it’s good practice (in the name of reproducible research, scientific integrity, and organization) to keep a record of the commands you run to get your results. If you get results interactively on the remote machine, there’s not a built-in way to do this. But never fear! Software and shortcuts exist that allow you to save a script on your local computer, but run each line of that script interactively on the remote machine. Since statisticians like me usually do most interactive work in R, I’ll describe here how I run a local R script interactively on the cluster.
I’m currently a Mac user, so my main tool for this purpose is Aquamacs. This is basically a version of an Emacs text editor. My opinion on Emacs is that it’s a really powerful tool, but requires a lot of customization to access all that power, and it has pretty funky keyboard shortcuts. Aquamacs allows you to use either Emacs keyboard shortcuts OR common Mac keyboard shortcuts (e.g., command-Z for undo) in an Emacs session, which I find really useful. Aquamacs makes use of ESS (Emacs Speaks Statistics) when interacting with R.
So let’s get to the point: here are the steps!
(1) Install Aquamacs.
(2) Open your local R script inside Aquamacs.
(3) Type M-x shell (M means escape key), which will basically open up a Terminal window inside Aquamacs. (Once you hit M-x, you won’t be typing in the R script anymore, but will see your stuff appear at the bottom of the window).
(4) In the Terminal window that just opened up, log in to the remote machine. (I’m making the assumption here that the login process to the remote machine involves some variant of an “ssh” command in the terminal.)
(5) Click Window > Move tab to new frame. The terminal window will slide over to the other side of your computer, so you’re now seeing the R script and the prompt of the remote machine simultaneously.
(6) Start R on the remote machine.
(7) Staying in the remote-machine-R window, type M-x ess-remote. You’ll then be prompted for a dialect – type r – the line “options(STERM=’iESS’)” will have been run inside your R session.
(8) Move back to the local R script. You can now run line-by-line on the remote machine either using control-n to run just the current line, or using control-r to run a block of highlighted lines.
This has worked pretty well for me, but I am definitely interested in hearing others’ ideas if someone knows of a more efficient way to do this from a Mac. I use Aquamacs almost exclusively for this, which feels a little like using a sledgehammer for a tiny little nail, since I’m not really harnessing all the power of Aquamacs/Emacs or using it for any of its other intended purposes, and I haven’t put a lot of time into customizing it. But it does get the job done, and it’s definitely better than the ol’ copy-paste trick.
I’m incredibly happy with my Macbook (it’s a delightfully fast, beautiful, efficient computer), but I really really miss Notepad++, the best text editor I’ve ever known – it’s Windows-only. Running interactively on a PC is smoother than the Mac workflow I described above: it basically involves (1) logging into the remote machine using something like PuTTY and opening R, (2) opening up your local R script in Notepad++, and (3) hitting F9 to run a line or highlighted set of lines. So much more elegantly simple! Something for Mac software developers to aspire to, I suppose…
Our tendency to stick with what’s right in front of us is well-documented. (I know it’s Wikipedia, but check out the fat list of references and further reading!). I was at a lecture on obesity a few weeks ago, and I learned that in 2006, Disney World’s fast food places changed the kids’ meal default sides to carrots and milk (rather than french fries and pop) – and the majority of people actually got the carrots and milk, even though fries are way tastier and are still available if you ask for them. Michelle Obama was pleased.
I think we can harness the power of the default. I’m talking about something on a slightly smaller scale than the national obesity epidemic. I’m talking about the problem of really terrible academic talks. As most of my school friends can attest, I’m pretty opinionated when it comes to talks. I’m really impressed when someone gives a good presentation, and I’m irked every time someone shows up and reads their slides (full of bullet points and equations) to a room full of smart, literate people – WHY OH WHY!? There is so much advice out there on how to give a good talk. It’s absurdly easy to find. So what gives? I think a major part of the problem is PowerPoint’s default.
That sounds so simple, but I seriously believe that if PowerPoint’s default slide layout was “blank slide” rather than “header and bullet point box,” the overall quality of presentations worldwide would increase significantly. People wouldn’t be initially prompted, over and over, to fit their research into a bullet-point framework. People would feel freer to add pictures, graphs, schematic diagrams, videos, etc etc, if that bullet point box wasn’t cramping their style. With less text on slides, people might run through their talk once or twice before giving it, just to make sure they know what they’re saying and that they aren’t going over time.
Don’t underestimate the power of the default. I think it could do magical things for the academic and business world.
p.s. http://lmgtfy.com/ – “let me google that for you.” So hilariously snarky.
Last fall, I read an article in the New York Times called “What if the Secret to Success is Failure?” It’s a pretty long read, but I really enjoyed it. The article centers around Dominic Randall, headmaster of a New York City private K-12 school, and a few other prominent figures who thought hard about what qualities are most important for students’ success in school and how to teach and develop those qualities in their students.
They were figuring out how to predict student success in high school and college, but I have no trouble believing that that the conclusions and findings presented in the article probably extrapolate immediately to graduate school success. The question was “what kinds of people succeed in academic situations that are extremely challenging, often to the point of discouraging?”
What they came up with as the answer was…inspiring. Their list of the qualities necessary to really succeed was as follows: zest, grit, self-control, social intelligence, gratitude, optimism and curiosity. I call this list “inspiring” mostly because of what it doesn’t contain: competitiveness, supergenius IQ, hardness…the qualities of the uber-smart but really intimidating people I’ve met and don’t ever feel like I can measure up to. But no — the big-thinking educators and psychologists mentioned in the article found other qualities more important. Qualities I’ve found and really value in people I deeply respect. Qualities that show “character is at least as important as intellect.” Zest, grit, self-control, social intelligence, gratitude, optimism, curiosity. The kinds of people that have those qualities are the kinds that succeed.
The most discussed quality on that list (and I believe the one that gave the article its title) was grit, described as:
“a passion for a single mission [combined] with an unswerving dedication to achieve that mission, whatever the obstacles and however long it might take.”
So grit is mostly developed through failure. It’s hypothesized that kids who have never failed, who haven’t really faced obstacles, who have always been told “great job!”, never develop one of the key elements to success: grit.
But…that means that the most successful academics – the ones with zest, grit, self-control, social intelligence, gratitude, optimism, curiosity, the ones I look up to – developed grit at some point. They failed at some point. They FAILED! This was such an eye-opening realization to me. Even the best fail. A lot. Most successful people I’ve met don’t really advertise their failures, but I think (at some point) they should. For example: My advisor wrote a whole public blog post on his failures, which I thought was awesome. When smart, successful people share their setbacks, it teaches students that if you fail at something, it (a) doesn’t mean you’re not smart enough, (b) doesn’t mean you’ll never be successful, and (c) doesn’t mean you should give up or play it safe. It just means you have to stay motivated, stay confident, and figure something else out.
Then the question becomes this: how do people develop those traits? Are they personality traits? Should they somehow be taught? (One of the main topics of the NYT article was how the school should go about developing kids’ character). When you’re in your 20s, how do you work on developing your character? I don’t really have answers. I have some ideas – ideas that I don’t implement perfectly, but that I think would help develop zest, grit, self-control, social intelligence, gratitude, optimism, and/or curiosity:
(1) Hang around people who already exhibit those traits. Get to know them. If they’re your peers, be friends with them. People with zest and gratitude and optimism and social intelligence are often really fun people to hang out with anyway.
(2). Read. Word on the street is that successful people read a ton. Check out Goodreads to turn reading into social networking (a great way to get recommendations!).
(3). Work hard, play hard. Like your work enough to spend a good amount of time on it – enough time to try out crazy ideas (that might fail spectacularly) and to do quality work. And be social – build relationships, make friends, enjoy your city.
(4). Be a big thinker. All my favorite people in our department are what I consider big thinkers: people who have big ideas – ideas that sometimes seem crazy (and sometimes are), people who LOVE what they do, people who aren’t afraid to get enthused about statistics or bioinformatics or computer science, people who proudly and loudly geek out, people who set really lofty goals (and often don’t meet them, but accomplish significant things while trying!), people who speak up when they have an idea or a question, people who encourage others, people who listen to those who are smarter than them. Be one of those people.
We’ll see how this goes for the rest of grad school (and beyond)!
Inspired by the awesome Hilary Parker and the dawn of a new academic year, I’ve put together a rundown of tools I find essential in my day-to-day as a biostatistics graduate student. None of this was formally taught to me – much has been recommended, learned on the fly, or found via the “just Google it” method – but I hope to inject some sense of coherence into the whole situation with this post. We thought something like this would be especially useful for incoming students or anybody looking to change or optimize their setup. So let’s begin!
Hardware
My personal computer is a 15″ MacBook Pro, which I got in October 2011. I was hesitant to make the switch over to the Mac (I had owned only PCs before then), but I’ve never been happier with a laptop. The work I do on a daily basis is much better streamlined on the Mac. However, either platform works in our field, so I’ll be sure to note when a piece of software I discuss is Mac- or PC-specific. The laptop is my main piece of hardware (not counting our departmental computing cluster, which I’ll mention later) – the only other thing I’d mention is my 300GB external hard drive, which I use to back up my computer with Time Machine. Backups are absolutely essential – I choose to use an external drive, but backing things up in the cloud has become common practice. I use Dropbox (you get 2GB for free) for backing up my most important files and for creating shared folders. Other common cloud storage solutions are Amazon S3 and SugarSync.
Software
By far, my favorite piece of software is R – every statistician’s best friend. It rocks. In the genomics world, most R packages are published on Bioconductor. The R GUI on the Mac is pretty awesome, so working with R and Bioconductor locally required almost no setup for me.
What was a bit more challenging was figuring out my R situation when working on our departmental computing cluster – i.e., when working on a remote machine that I’ve logged into from my laptop via ssh. There are two pieces of software I’ve found really useful when working remotely: Cyberduck (for file transfers) and Aquamacs (for running code interactively from my machine to the cluster – Mac-specific). I’m not fully convinced that Aquamacs is the best way to go for the interactive code – in fact, the thing I miss most about having a PC is the text editor Notepad++. Notepad++ is a PC-specific editor that connects beautifully to R (with NppToR – just hit F8 to run a line in R locally!) or to an ssh client (just hit F9 to run a line remotely!). However, I have a pretty good system worked out using Aquamacs and ESS – I’ll post the specifics in another post. And, speaking of text editors – I’ve come to like TextWrangler (Mac-specific) quite a bit.
For typesetting anything with more than one equation in it, I (and most of the mathematical/statistical community) use LaTeX. I use TeXShop as my frontend and MacTeX as my TeX distribution. This setup works like a dream on my Mac – it’s incredibly fast, and it took NO customization to get the two features that are really important to me: (1) automatic PDF refresh when you change your TeX code and (2) a backward search feature where I can click on the PDF and be taken directly to that point in the TeX code. When I used a PC, I used TeXnicCenter as my frontend and MiKTeX as my TeX distribution, but I also found that I needed Sumatra (an alternative to Adobe for reading PDFs) and some extra customization to get my two required features.
I use PowerPoint for presentations containing zero or one equation(s), and I use Beamer (a LaTeX class) for anything with two or more equations. I have PowerPoint 2008, which is pretty slow on a Mac, so I’ve been considering trying Keynote. (Thoughts, anyone?). I’ve also tried to get the best of both the PowerPoint and Beamer worlds (WYSIWYG + nice equations) by using LaTeXiT. There’s a PC-equivalent called Aurora, which I used once for 30 days until my free trial expired.
Anything else?
That’s pretty much all I use on a daily basis. I’ll mention a couple other miscellaneous things: I’m just starting to use github to manage and share my code – git has great mechanisms for keeping track of all the craziness that comes with doing a shared project. Lots of people in my department use Sweave, a cool way to integrate R and LaTeX. I am not one of those people. Sweave is especially good for putting together manuals, but not so good for working with analyses that take a while to run or that need to be very specifically formatted.
I’d love to hear about any setup tips that you find useful – do share!
alyssa frazee 
