For whatever its worth, I usually take note of "special" number days- maybe its the geek in me, but I usually wish someone a hearty "Happy (fill in the number) Day!" It makes me geek-sad to realize that they don't always get it. For example, although it is nearly universally known (at least among my circle of family and friends), not everyone celebrates or is even aware that March 14th is Pi Day... I think even in parts of the world where this is rendered as 14.3 rather than 3.14, in the spirit of Pi the day is celebrated.
Of course, there wasn't much time for celebrating or even well-wishing as today was a work and a workout day. I got in relatively late Tuesday morning, and for some reason did not fall asleep too quickly. This may have been related to the pain in my knee, which does not takes sudden drops in temperature gracefully. A few days ago the temperatures had been in the mid- to high-fifties F (~11-15 C), but the past two days saw a sudden, dramatic drop- at one point the weather service on my phone said eighteen F (~ -8 C)! I had taken some of my over the counter medication in the morning two days in a row, but I still had a fair amount of tightness and discomfort. So today, after we got gas in the truck, we headed off to the gym. I spent about fifty minutes on the upstairs track, getting in nearly three miles (~4.8km). This did more than the drugs, and my knee felt nearly normal when I went to work this evening.
In the wonderful world of data, I finally pulled myself away from a few online distractions and added the check field to the Media_Title table. After such a (relatively) long lapse in development, I was glad to finally be able to get a little bit back on track. However, I ran into a problem right from the start: I had to keep switching between the two tables in order to synchronize my activity. I'm sure there's a way to automate this, but even if I knew how to do that, it would not work in this situation.
You see, to the best of my ability I've striven to keep the database as near to normalized as possible right from the start, and the existence of a Media table and a Media_Title table is a reflection of this. While each recording or publication may be unique, titles are often shared. In fact, as media has evolved, titles of the same work have been duplicated even in our small collection- to the point that we might now have even a print title in hardcover, softcover, audio, Kindle or .txt format. Ditto Music- vinyl, cassette, CD, mp3. And then there's video- VHS, DVD, Blu-ray and probably a few others. The whole point of the little parade of formats is this: in order to normalize, the title must come from another table... it saves a lot of brain pain.
One little bit of progress was made just moments ago- I discovered that even on my relatively small LCD display on the computer I usually use in the Secret Underground Lair, I am able to display downsized windowed versions of the two tables side-by-side, so this may speed the process somewhat. I may also have the opportunity to use a PC with a larger monitor to expedite the process. We'll just have to wait and see.
Until then, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.
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