summer of 2024
The first thing I want to talk about is that I’ve made pretty significant progress on the TidyTuesday front. Turns out that having a very clearly defined project that works with data and nice APIs really gets me motivated to make progress on it. There are always more features and capabilities to add with these sorts of things, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to finish the baseline version that works with the Fred API by this weekend and get it up and running to be able to make my first renewed TidyTuesday post by next next Tuesday. Just as a reminder if you didn’t catch the last blog post, the idea is to renew the TidyTuesday series by running a random regression every day and reporting on one of the interesting ones each week; maybe there’s some cool interaction to discover (although very unlikely). I’m also using this as an opportunity to get some practice in writing code to compartmentalize and automatically generate chunks of reports in LaTeX where I only need to contribute to writing some qualitative color and everything else is already taken care of (something that’s a very helpful tool when working with products that are run repetitively with different data or small changes much like the work we do with forecasting on DSGE at the Fed).
In other news, this summer is almost to an end. It has gone by both pretty quickly and gruelingly slow at times, but we are now entering quite the stressful era with PhD applications coming up soon. To be honest, I really don’t want to talk much about all the stressful stuff, so here are a few of the new restaurants and bakeries that I’ve been to over the summer that I want to highlight (these are all places in New York):
- Dominique Ansel
- Little Flower Cafe
- Win Son Bakery (can’t believe it took me this long to go here)
- NONONO
- Obica Mozzarella Bar
- Cafe China
- Glaze Teriyaki
- Cha Pa’s Noodles and Grill
I’m not going to talk much about any of these right now, but there is a favorites in NYC so far post that is coming up as well. Along those lines, here are some places that are still on the list and I will be hitting sometime soon:
- Lucali’s
- Steve’s Authentic Key Lime Pie
- Birdbox (really curious to see if this dethrones Rowdy Rooster as my favorite fried chicken place)
Finally, as a preface for next week, I’ll finally be talking about some of my NSF ideas and a really basic general setup for spatial general equilibrium models that is not necessarily what I’ll be using for NSF but something that may make its way into the eventual spatial-sims package (along with some more ideas about the purpose of the package now that I have a better grasp on the literature).