Bruce Elgort

You Want Me To Fail?

In this week’s episode of Getting Work To Work, Chris Martin talk about failure and share five ways to change the way you think about failure. Every week it seems there is a new blog post for creative professionals espousing the value of failing, but to a lot of people, failure is a negative experience and something to avoid at all cost. Is there a better way to think about failure?

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What To Do After Graduation‬

Be sure and show this to your recent college graduate

Meagan Fisher, “Users Are People Too”

Boon Sheridan, “Rules, Hunches, and Coin Flips”

The Business of Beacons

Mike Monteiro: Let Us Now Praise Ordinary People

IBM Bluemix Weather Company API with Python

Here is a simple example of calling the IBM Weather Company REST API using Python. The program asks for a US ZIP code and then displays some of the data. A perfect program for an intro to programming class. Also, on GitHub.


# Using the IBM Bluemix Weather Company API
# Bruce Elgort
# July 9, 2016
# Version 1.0
# IBM Weather Company Docs: https://console.ng.bluemix.net/docs/services/Weather/weather_rest_apis.html#rest_apis

import requests
import json

def get_weather(zip):
    username = 'your username'
    password = 'your password'

    watsonUrl = 'https://twcservice.mybluemix.net/api/weather/v1/location/' + zip + ':4:US' + '/observations.json?language=en-US'

    try:
        r = requests.get(watsonUrl,auth=(username,password))
        return r.text
    except:
        return False

def display_weather(results):
    print()
    print('Here is the weather for {0}'.format(results['observation']['obs_name']))
    print('{0:20} {1:&lt;10}'.format('Current Temperature:',str(results['observation']['temp']) + '° and ' + results['observation']['wx_phrase']))
    print('{0:20} {1:&lt;10}'.format('Feels Like: ',str(results['observation']['feels_like']) + '°'))
    print('{0:20} {1:&lt;10}'.format('Low Temp: ',str(results['observation']['min_temp']) + '°'))
    print('{0:20} {1:&lt;10}'.format('High Temp: ',str(results['observation']['max_temp']) + '°'))
    print('{0:20} {1:&lt;10}'.format('Winds:',str(results['observation']['wspd']) + ' mph coming from the ' + results['observation']['wdir_cardinal']))

def get_weather():
    zip = input('Enter US ZIP code to get weather for:\n')
    results = get_weather(zip)
    if results != False:
        results = json.loads(str(results))
        display_weather(results)
    else:
        print('Something went wrong :-(')

if __name__ == '__main__':
    get_weather()

Learn to Program with Python

Sometimes You Go Back To Bed

In this week’s episode of Getting Work To Work, Chris Martin talks about owning your schedule and the importance of taking care of your physical and mental health. As creative professionals, it can be easy to push your needs aside for the sake of the work, but sometimes you go back to bed to hit the reset switch.

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