It isn't data entry. Exactly.

Well, we got what I consider our first real snowfall of the year today. As I compose this, the second wave of snow from this storm system is falling; the prognosticators have said that the second is to be greater than the first. So far, that does not seem to be the case, which doesn't bother me in the slightest (on the plus side, the snow that is falling is providing a nice cover over the wet spots, adding a bit of natural traction control). Jennifer and I spent over two hours shoveling patio, sidewalks, driveway and apron earlier in the evening. We stopped for two reasons: 1) we were done, and 2) we were hot. The snow that fell was of the "heart attack" variety- really heavy, and as the ground still isn't all that cold, there was some melting going on underneath as well. We were suited up for the worst, having layered insulating layers and wind/waterproof stuff... all very lightweight, of course. Still, over the course of two hours at just below freezing temperatures, we were drenched in sweat when our task was done.

The library

Looking north from our front door

The snow started during our dash to Office Depot and the library. There were a few things that needed to get taken care of at the library tomorrow, but we surmised the roads would be better today before the snow hit, so we dashed out. We got gas first, and then headed off to Office Depot to pick up a USB hub. Jennifer's computer has decided that the USB ports are going to work intermittently, and as we had confirmed at least one is working properly, we decided to utilize that port and plug up a powered USB hub into it. We found a reasonably-priced Ativa-branded one and went to the checkout. As we were standing there, we were drawn to some flash drives that were on sale. One of the boys had said they needed one, so we grabbed a 32GB drive for just under $15 USD! I remember the first time I purchased RAM for a computer- $78 USD for 2x4MB!!! And that was about $20 USD under the going rate- yep, got'em at Sam's Club. As we paid for our purchase, we saw that the flurries that had been gently wafting from the heavens had transformed into a full-blown snow assault. We packed up, and headed off to the library. There were no parking spots on the main level of the municipal garage, so we headed up to the 3rd level, which is uncovered and has a nice view of downtown. We braved the gusting winds and snapped off a few photos before retreating to the safety of the truck and  heading back  to find a parking spot on the main level. We took care of business at the library and headed home where we enjoyed an impromptu lunch mashup of chicken, cabbage and ramen.

I was able to finally get  what I hope is the last piece of the normalization puzzle in place between last night and tonight. I cheated a bit. I had considered doing a make table query, but wanted to cleanse the data. So, rather than creating the query, I exported the whole table into Excel, and got rid all of the data except for the column which would become the new table. Unfortunately, last night I neglected to dedupe the data before I created the new Access table, so that had to be done manually today. It was not a complete goof-up, though: as I manually purged the data, I found a few dozen records that would not have been caught by Excel's dedupe, and I fixed these as I went along. Fortunately, the table currently holds only 831 records, so the process was relatively painless.

Normalization in progress

Now the table is in place and the dropdowns are functioning normally. I've had to make corrections here and there... I don't know if I've ever mentioned this before, but data entry isn't exactly one of my strong points. Of course, when one selects from a dropdown, it isn't exactly data entry- is it? On the plus side, all of the tables look like they are working as planned- I have updated 120 out of 831 records. When this process is complete,  the existing "Title" field will be deleted from that table, and then I can get back to the bane of my existence- data entry.

Nota bene- I've always loved that phrase, "nota bene" but seldom have cause to use it. The reason for the N.B. today has to do with proofreading. As I write this, I'm on at least my twelfth preview/save cycle. Although I proofread professionally, I still find that proofreading one's own text is much more difficult that proofing the copy of others. And for me, the issues is generally a typographical error more often than not, and almost always (infuriatingly) something that the built-in spellchecker/grammar nanny doesn't catch!

As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.