Darth Anna, Defiler of Planets

The HVAC in our office is challenged. That is the most polite thing I can say about it. You're probably wondering how my meek coworker from Russia came to be Darth Anna, Defiler of Planets and Mistress of the Dual Tailed Optical Mouse and Yours Truly became Darth Chris, Consumer of Comets and Sneezer of Asteroid Belts.

HVAC is industry shorthand for Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning. So, in other words, when it should be hot in the office, its cold. And when it should be cold, its hot in our office. Please note: I'm using EXTREMELY polite terms as I prattle on about our HVAC.

The rumor that's been going around for some time is this: when the office was first designed, the air conditioner that was ordered was too large (powerful) for the size of the office. Consequently, a vicious, rapid cycle of heating and cooling is the norm. Adding insult to injury, the thermostat used to be located directly under a vent in the ceiling. I'm not an HVAC expert, so I don't know the purpose of the vent. All I do know is that cold air generally wafted down from it, onto the thermostat, adding more drama to the hot cold cycle. At some point in 2012, the thermostat was moved to a more central part of the office, and even though there is a remarkable improvement, Anna and I still don and remove our hoodies several times each night... and when I say "don our hoodies", I mean deploy the hoods as well. Hence, we look like a pair of dark Jedi acolytes.

So, how did the #hourofcode go? I had hoped to start programming on a Raspberry Pi last week, but the Pi I ordered may not arrive until after Christmas. I finally gave up and installed Python on Jennifer's PC, and took the plunge this morning. I found a very nice tutorial on daniweb  which I highly recommend to anyone interested in programming in Python.

Not much news on the database front. I was at the gym yesterday and as I was updating my training log, I got to thinking about 'average' and 'mean' numbers, and how I cannot do averages for walking times, as my phone's stopwatch doesn't really store lap data... my log entries are confined to total laps, total time, fastest and slowest laps. So, I'm pretty sure I understand 'mean', and I think it's how I will quantify things. Here's a site that does a pretty technical job of explaining average vs mean.

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