Normal is a town in Illinois

I'm opening this with a shout-out to Normal, Illinois. Normal has a population of 52,497, according to the 2010 United States census. And what does this have to do with databases? Well, if one were to move to Normal, one would not become Normalized. This deserves a rimshot, but embedding didn't quite work the way I wanted. So just imagine it.

I've waxed eloquently before (well, sort of) about how my database is pristine and pure as driven snow. I'm going to say that's about 95% true: I found a field that I need to change from its current text entry value to a lookup field. This is one of the very original tables of the database, and right now pretty much the primary one, so I must step lightly. In actuality, it doesn't really need to be changed, as any dupes would only be occurring in that one field, and there probably wouldn't be many, but with my luck....

A tangential illustration is needed here to explain how things work in my life.

Its winter where I live, and it gets below freezing quite often. I have a vehicle that is kept outside on most days, so that when I go somewhere during the day, it needs to be warmed up a bit and the windows defrosted. Over the past two to three months, the engine started making a clicking noise and the rpm's would also drop momentarily every time I turned the defroster on. I had a mechanic look at it in conjunction with some other service, and he could not figure out what the problem was. I lived with it for some time, and it was not getting any better. Snookums suggest taking a look under the hood, which was a reasonable suggestion. So, I pulled the hood release, and- yeah, absolutely nothing.

Great- time to visit the bodyshop, so that they can fix the hood release so I can maybe get a mechanic to fix whatever-it-is that's making my truck run strangely. "It's probably frozen," she suggested. Hood releases don't normally freeze. There's that word again. They don't NORMALLY freeze for most normal folks, but us, ... yup. We had a period of relative warmth the past few days, and sure enough, when I pulled on the catch, it popped right up. I propped the hood up, started the truck and turned on the defroster. Click. I looked at the engine. Click. Spotted it- the air conditioner clutch (in the picture its the round thing with the three silver bolts) was engaging approximately every five seconds. I had learned that the defroster uses the air conditioner to remove moisture from the air. However, when the a/c is low on freon (coolant), the compressor cycles madly. So, we went to one of our local auto parts stores, and picked up a very nice all-in-one reusable recharge kit. With snookums' assistance, I got some freon in the system this afternoon, and no more clicking. And probably saved over 100 USD by doing it ourselves.

I told that story so that I can say this: I'm going to fix that table and bring a bit of normalcy into my life.

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