Seven

Back in the early Eighties, there was a somewhat local band I liked called the Lamont Cranston Band. They played a really nice rock-blues fusion, and had some regional hits, but never went on to the big time. One of the more interesting songs from their Upper Mississippi Shakedown LP was something of a novelty called "Seven". In this tune, the singer laments that seven used to be his lucky number, but now everything associated with seven was bad.

Its not really that way with me. I don't believe in "lucky" numbers. If you would ask, I would tell you that my favorite numbers are five and four (in that order)- not that it means anything.

But... seven is a fairly special number for me, as far as this blog goes: its like the ceiling, a barrier to be broken through. With the hours and times that I work, I've found that getting more that seven blogs per month is challenging. And, when those times hit when I've got absolutely nothing in the idea tank, well... I really have nothing.

Today, though... today is a first: I literally just finished the post Drivers, and immediately started this one. As I was waking up this afternoon after a longer than expected Friday night at work, I was thinking about finishing and publishing the previously mentioned blog when it occurred to me that on most months if I publish seven blogs that's quite an achievement. And Drivers is #7 for the month of March, 2014. So , this has the potential of being #8.

                                                       ******WE*INTERRUPT*THIS*BLOG*FOR*AN IMPORTANT*ANNOUNCEMENT******

Up. And. Running. 5.30.14 (30.5.14)

It took nearly a month, but Jennifer's new rig is operational and has been deployed! The machine was complete around a month ago, but then I decided to install an additional top mounted cooling fan. We had the box open today, and I casually mentioned to Mr. T that I had two 120mm fans, so he said we might as well use both, so we side mounted the second one (the blue ones are the ones we installed today). Windows 7 is mounted on an SSD- it boots incredibly quickly.

The only real issue I had was getting the PC online; I get a pass on this, though, because its actually the very first PC I've built from the ground up. We were watching a few episodes of the Big Bang Theory and having some incredible turkey that Jennifer had baked. I think we watched three episodes before the answer came to me: I had not installed the drivers from the motherboard utilities CD. Once I did that, we were good to go. I discovered an interesting quirk about this PC: the two front panel mounted USB ports are only for I/O... this is something new. Mr. T and I had prepared for taking the PC online for the first time by downloading some of our favorite utilities (Avast, CCleaner and Defraggler) onto a USB stick.Strangely, though, the PC did not acknowledge the existence of the stick. Odd, as I had the transceiver for the mouse in the next port over. I pulled the stick out, and swapped places with the transceiver. Mouse worked fine, but not the stick.  Oh, well, on to Plan B- I went to each site and downloaded the software. Suspecting a possible issue with the drive, I plugged it into a top mounted USB port, and there it was! So the rule for this PC is: Front for I/O, top for data.

After the Chrome installation (this is the standard 1st download here at the SUL), I downloaded the Amazon Player. If you purchase music on Amazon, you really owe it to yourself to download the player, as most music purchased on Amazon becomes part of your Amazon personal cloud. So, even though I hadn't loaded my personal music library to Windows Media Player, I had access to a few hundred songs. I fired up Axe's Rock 'N' Roll Party In The Streets and then Night's Hot Summer Nights- classic late 70's rock which are probably unfamiliar to many. I played these two tracks as I downloaded the Steam client.

I think that's all for now. No data news or updates today, but I should have some speeds and feeds in the next blog or so.

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

Drivers

I'm something of a fan of words that have multiple meanings. Being involved with technology for some time has made me cognizant of the idea that just because one hears a word like "scanner", one doesn't necessarily know what is going on, unless one has a bit more contextual evidence. A regular reader may recall I've used the scanner example before, so today I'd like to relate an epiphany I had while driving to work recently, and another one of "those" words- namely, "driver".

Let me, for starters, say that I know that a driver is a golf club of some sort. This should tell you immediately that I have very little understanding of and absolutely no interest in playing or watching golf, so I may have suddenly become a pariah to some. In fact, my indifference towards golf is so great (is it even possible to have "great indifference") that I didn't even Google this club. The game itself has a fairly rich history, but I've often wondered which came first, the game or scotch whisky* (Scotland being famous for both). Per wikipedia, whisky came first. This helps me understand why a game would be known for eagles, birdies, sand traps, water hazards, mulligans, plaid shorts, and Bill Murray. Another sort of driver is a tool, of course- screw drivers, nut drivers and pile drivers come immediately to mind. And then, there are the big wheels on a steam locomotive which actually move a train- these are also called drivers.

*For American readers: apparently in most parts of the world, this beverage is not spelled with an "e". For readers outside of the United States, we spell it thusly: whiskey.

Yet another sort of driver is a business term-  a factor to be considered, I suppose, when analyzing a situation, such as, "Recent unrest in the Semiautonomous People's Democratic Republic of Somethingorother has been a driver in the sudden spike of organic widget prices".

Something more familiar to my "tech-savvy" readers would be a software driver- that piece of software which tells a computer how a particular piece of hardware should operate. Printers are a good example of hardware that needs special drivers, dependent upon the manufacturer, model, etc.

But- as is my custom- all of those were teasers to allow me to present you with the definition which I'd like to discuss: the driver- as in, the person who operates a vehicle. Even here, though, we're going to run into some variety. For example, I believe in British English, the person who operates a railway locomotive is called a driver. However, I digress.

It seems that we're pretty much done with snow for this season, so I've started driving the Escort again. At one time, this vehicle was the most popular car in the world, mainly because it was relatively inexpensive. Being inexpensive, there are seemingly lots of things not to like about the Ford Escort, but the longer that we've owned this particular vehicle, the more I've come to like it... even some of the things which were initially negatives. For starters, this car is NOT quiet- the driver hears and feels everything from the outside (and underside). After a number of years of watching televised motorsports, I have decided that this superficial negative is actually a positive... what some might call noise or vibration I now count as feedback (data). The manual transmission is also very smooth; 1st gear is especially long (I can typically hit 30 mph [48kph] without having to upshift; I think when accelerating quickly, 2nd is optional and can be skipped entirely). Its also pretty low to the ground, and therefore railroad crossings and potholes need to be gingerly negotiated. The upside of this is that, because the car also ha a pretty low center of gravity and a decent height to width ratio, it takes corners with a confident nimbleness; the short wheelbase also contributes to the overall feeling of maneuverability.

And all of this car talk brings brings me back to the idea of "driver". My commute to work is not a long one- according to an article I read today, Chicago has the second-highest average commute time in the United States, at around 34.1 minutes (one way). My usual one way time is generally around eight minutes; if all the traffic signals are in my favor and traffic is light, its generally closer to seven minutes. What's interesting to me, though, is the type of person I encounter on the trip. Going to work in the evening, I encounter more drivers, that is, folks behind the wheel who operate with skill and enjoy their vehicles; to them, the drive is not merely what happens between home and wherever they're going, its an enjoyable part of the day. More importantly, they're skilled- and predictable. The morning drive, conversely, is not pleasant. There are easily 4-5X more vehicles on the road, lots of large trucks and, if I get out really late, school buses.  Most of the commuters are thinking about getting to work on time, their work schedule, and often talking on the phone (which is illegal in Illinois)- in short, they should NOT be driving. As I work in what is thought to be the largest industrial park in the United States, there are lots of loading docks and trucks making deliveries or picking up loads. I have the utmost respect for what these folks do and their skill, but they do block traffic. Schoolbuses... a thankless job performed by ladies (typically) who normally get around in minivans. Schoolbuses in the United States do not have seatbelts for the children, so the driver is also a part-time baby sitter. And buses stop everywhere.

I love driving... not so much commuting.

Hardly any data today, and nothing new to report on the database. I've actually done a small bit of data entry- I got some new music this week. All of the album titles and tracks have been entered, but the Music Recordings table has yet to be updated, partly because of an issue with the PC I usually use for this task. The Secret Underground Lair also welcome a new member into the family this week- an Asus netbook with Windows 7 Starter and Microsoft Office Pro.

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

C and 10x10

Welcome to my 100th blog post celebration! Help yourself to some virtual cake and ice cream!!

To commemorate this event, I'm going to take everyone a bit deeper into the Secret Underground Lair, share a few speeds and feeds, post some Top Ten lists (10, to be precise), and hopefully have a little bit of fun.

Well, I started with the Secret Underground Lair, so we might as well go there first. In case you were wondering, yes, it really is underground. We currently have a roster of nine PCs which more or less permanently reside in the SUL with us. Of these, one is an ancient laptop, two are Raspberry Pi's, one is a much more recent laptop, and the remainder are desktops. The Pi's and two of the desktops run Linux; the others run Win7. I have a laptop which I occasionally use down here, and there are another 6+ PCs in various states of repair. We've got one functional inkjet printer hooked up, and a few other printers with questionable functionality. The SUL is also our NOC (network operations center), which includes our router and a couple of wired gigabit switches. It should be noted that although the SUL as a rule does not utilize wireless (with the exception of my cell phone and occasionally my laptop), on any given day most of the rest of the Hovel may access our internet service wirelessly. In case you were wondering, the Hovel is our home- our humble abode. The SUL is also home to some of our video collection, my Lego collection, and a good part of my technical (I.T.) library, our music collection, and various and sundry other references and some fiction. It has be noted that the SUL is pretty small; we don't have room for a fuβball table, but we do have the Lego Soccer Championship Challenge set (#3409). Speaking of Lego Soccer, here's the first list- my Top Ten toys: 1. Lego 2. Wooden blocks (including dominoes) 3. Teddy bears (and plush animals in general) 4. cardboard boxes 5. Electric trains 6. Your Dad's tools 7. Walkie-talkies 8.Flashlights 9. Rubber bands/string/rope 10. Magnifying glass

Other SUL highlights... the lair is rectangular and fairly cat-proofed, in that cats cannot enter at will. Also, as Schwarz is a typical Bombay, the primary egress point has a cat bell for his use. Mr. T and I sit at opposite ends of the SUL and we both have a telephone with intercom. When the Zombie Apocalypse happens, we'll know about it. If I had only one word to describe the SUL, it should come as no surprise to anyone that the word would be "cluttered". Second list: Top Ten things found in the SUL: 1. Legos 2. Music CDs 3. VHS movies 4. Books 5. Software 6. Playstation/PS2 games 7. computer components 8. Shelves and racks 9. Cat5 cabling 10. a shredder

The Dungeon is another story. Adjacent to the SUL, it is where our workout equipment resides, as well as being a holding place for the SUL's overflow. The main attractions of the Dungeon are a weight bench and an elliptical. There are also three rectangular lidded clear plastic storage boxes in front of the weight bench right now; these contain primarily I.T.-related books which used to be stacked in the SUL. Third list (no- not the contents of the Dungeon!): speaking of I.T. stuff, my Top Ten websites: 1. Google+ 2. LinkedIn 3. Twitter 4.Facebook 5. Portal.pixelfederation.com/Trainstation 6. Steam 7. Tech Republic 8. How To Geek 9. Wikipedia 10. IMDB.com

In all honesty, I was a bit concerned when I first came up with the idea of ten Top Ten lists- after all, ten lists can be rather boring, and I don't work all that much with the formatting or HTML on blogger to make some neat, bulleted lists. I tried the segue+bolding at the end of a paragraph, and I think it works- if anyone has any thoughts, please post a comment! And now for something completely random, Ten Vehicles we have owned: 1.'03 Chevy S10 pickup 2. '99 Ford Escort 3. '94 Chevy S10 Blazer 4. '89 Honda Civic 5. Ford Crown Victoria 7. Chevy Suburban 8. Opel Ascona 9. Honda Civic hatchback 10. Plymouth Volare wagon. The funny thing about the Volare is that we're not sure if we ever even legally owned it...we sold it to a scrapyard for $50 bucks.  I also did not include the He-Man Beemer.

Well, back to the Dungeon, I suppose. The Dungeon is our workout/training area when we cannot get to the gym- theoretically. Apart from the elliptical, most of the equipment is inaccessible, save for some kettlebells, dumbbells and medicine balls.

We also have something of a pantry next to the Dungeon. This area does not have a name, but it does have a Top Ten list (#5) of things you'll find: 1. Ramen 2. Noodle mixes 3. Noodles 4. Cereal 5. Vitamins 6. Chocolate 7. Coffee 8. Tea 9. Toilet paper 10. Facial tissue.

List #6 is my current Top Ten list of albums- the only list presented in order of popularity (so far!): 1. Beatles For Sale 2. The Blues Brothers soundtrack 3. Help! (The Beatles) 4.Revolver (The Beatles) 5. Rubber Soul (The Beatles) 6. Different Light (Bangles) 7. The Transformers Movie soundtrack (the original cartoon) 8. Songs (Rich Mullins) 9. A Hard Day's Night (The Beatles) 10. A Maze Of Grace (Avalon). The interesting thing about this last list is that while it is the most accurate (it actualy comes out of a database), it is also fairly inaccurate because the data is incomplete! However, for the thirty-four albums currently represented  in the database, it is accurate.

List #7 is thematically related to List #4 in that both are automotive. #7 is ten of my favorite vehicles: 1. '71 Chevelle SS 396 2. '69 American Motors AMX 3. Mercedes Unimog 4. '77 Chevy Blazer 5. SDKFZ7 6. SDKFZ250 7. '70 Plymouth Roadrunner 8. Subaru Impreza WRX STi  8. '67 Mustang Shelby Cobra 9. Porsche 928 10. Volvo 940GL wagon. Now, that's an eclectic list of vehicles!

List #8 is my Top Ten list of board games. 1. France 1940 2. Risk 3. Monopoly 4. Chess 5. Checkers 6. Panzer Blitz 7. Squad Leader 8. Trivial Pursuit 9. Othello 10. Axis and Allies.

List #9 is a bit quirky. I have a backpack I take to work every day, and it has some work things in it and some zombie apocalypse-type things as well. So, here are ten things that are in my work backpack on any given day: 1. Logitech Marble Mouse 2. 2x .5L bottles of water 3. small Leatherman-type tool 4. Bluetooth enabled speaker 5. iPod 6. Triangular extruded aluminium ruler 7. Plastic ruler with magnifier 8. Wind up flashlight 9. HP 11c programmable RPN calculator 10. elastic wrap

List Ten is probably THE list  It is the list of my Top Ten blogs. I suppose that isn't too impressive when the blog count is only 100, but I never really thought I'd hit 100 posts when I started this... and for it to have an international following amazes me even further.And with that, here are the Top Ten blogs, in order of reader popularity:

http://hochspeyer.blogspot.com/2013/05/why-2k.html

http://hochspeyer.blogspot.com/2012/12/a-free-night.html

http://hochspeyer.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-final-frontier.html

http://hochspeyer.blogspot.com/2013/01/who-does-that-anyway.html

http://hochspeyer.blogspot.com/2012/12/december-31-2012-state-of-blog.html

http://hochspeyer.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-official-end-of-winter.html

http://hochspeyer.blogspot.com/2012/12/an-it-christmas-whole-lotta-cliches-in.html

http://hochspeyer.blogspot.com/2013/06/spinning-wheel.html

http://hochspeyer.blogspot.com/2013/01/like-data-we-are-in-it-sense-fully.html

http://hochspeyer.blogspot.com/2013/02/normal-is-town-in-illinois.html I think I've written enough for now. I hope some of it, at least, has been enjoyable. Happy 100th! As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.

  

Titles

One of my goals in writing this blog is simplicity. Like any (aspiring) writer, I desire to have a large base of readers, but in any given month roughly 25-30% of my readership reads my musings outside of North America. After the United States, the next ten countries where I have readers are (in order of gross blog views per country):

• Russia                               
• Japan
• Germany
• United Kingdom
• Ukraine
• the Netherlands
• France
• Indonesia
• China
• Canada

What's interesting to me is that Canada and the United Kingdom combined equal about 2% of the total readership; these are the only countries (in my Top Ten outside of the United States) which recognize English as at least one of their official languages. Of the remainder, nearly all who are able to read English most likely are more comfortable with the version they learned in school, namely the Queen's English, or British English. This poses some interesting challenges to me as a writer, because while some words are distinctly American or British English (truck or lorry, [rail]car or wagon, wrench or spanner [yes, I know all of those and more being both a history and railroad buff]), many other words are homophones- which differ only in spelling (and even homophone may not properly describe these words). I am well-versed in these as well, but choose to stick to the American spelling for the sake of consistency and familiarity. For weights and measures, though, I present English and metric whenever possible.

So, given that the title of today's post is "Titles", what does any of this have to do with anything?

Well, the titles of my blogs are important to me; I strive to make them attention-getting, in tune with the text I'm presenting, and fun. In the context of today's blog, I had an idea for the title, and then came up with another, but in the end rejected both- and in that process, a new subject was born.  My original title for this blog was going to be "Willpower", and then "Sturm und Drang" came to mind, along with a few other variants on "struggle" and "will". In the end, though, "Titles" won out, simply because it best articulated what had become the theme of the blog.

The whole "will" theme actually came about from my recent burst of writing activity. The main reason I've been writing more is that I've had more time for writing, and I've had more time for writing primarily because I have not played a single game on Facebook for SEVEN days. I have not even played my VERY favorite online game, TrainStation, for seven days. This is a fairly good indication of just how much time I spend online, and how much of that is, in many ways, wasted.

In the end, I have no way of quantifying any of this, so I'll just let it go. I just got done putting updated counts into my spreadsheet, and there's not enough of a change to post numbers, but one of my current targets is Music Recordings, and that has increased by four in three days. That may not seem like much, but that table has relationships with five other tables; the only data that I manually enter is the Last_Played field, which is a date field. This means that every time I enter a new piece of music into the Music Recordings table, I first have to make sure that the name of the group, the name of the album, and the names of each of the songs is already listed in the corresponding table; if not, I need to do that first. Its a bit tedious doing it in this manner, but in the end I am assured of having no data duplication- and that is the goal of this database design.

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

Data and Deep Thinking

I've a confession to make: I could not make a living at writing. Even if I had contracts and paying customers, I have two heretofore undiagnosed maladies that impact my writing life. The first is PBCS, or Prolonged Brain Cramp Syndrome. It's similar to writer's block, except that while blocks are generally small things, PBCS is more like an aircraft revetment (per wikipedia, "In military aviation, a revetment is a parking area for one or more aircraft that is protected by blast walls."). The other condition is burstitus (not to be confused with bursitis, which is a medical condition); this is the opposite of PBCS, and is sometimes referred to by its more technical name, neurodiarrhea. As these conditions are present only in a small niche of any population, the American Psychological Association (APA) has yet to recognize them as valid psychological conditions, and given their recent proclamations about ASD (autism spectrum disorders) in general and Asperger's Syndrome in particular, its unlikely that either of the writers' maladies will ever grace the pages of the DSM (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). That's okay, I suppose- maybe it will be considered in DSM XIV (but even that is up in the air, as the latest edition is DSM 5). Then again, I don't have anything nice to say about either the APA or the DSM, so they won't even get search engine labels.

As I think I've mentioned, the database is picking up steam again.and I've gotten back into the habit of doing daily data entry as well as some development. Which brings me to the inspiration for the preceding paragraph.

A few days ago, Jennifer observed (not an exact quote, but the general spirit), "Why are you wasting your time on inputting the time of individual songs?" My initial, unvoiced answer was, "Because its included on the liner or CD notes or media player information". At first, I did not have any answer. After much thought, I came up with a somewhat lame but nonetheless valid explanation: times are useful for creating mixes. As I said, lame but valid.

I had to dig so deep for that, though, that I was reminded of the briefly famous American humorist Jack Handey, and his Deep Thoughts. In the midst of the randomness of Handey, the invention of the fakey psychological conditions of the first paragraph and Jennifer's slightly snarky question, a valid question- nearly an epiphany- popped into my already crowded cranium: at what point does data stop being and start being trivia?

Hmmm. Excellent question, Dude (imagine that in the Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure voice). As the owner and consumer of the database, as well as the designer/DBA, I need to ask this question and make the call. Minutes and seconds (Time) was one of the original tables I created, and I did it specifically for movies and music. The use in music pretty much only makes sense to me- to Jennifer, it is trivial. For movies, though, this information can be very useful to both of us. On Sunday evenings it is common for us to have a "Dinner and a Movie" night.We often agonize over a movie to watch, and if dinner is later in the evening, the choices are usually a TV episode or two. However, on those nights when we do have time, we'll watch a movie. Time comes into play because on more than one occasion we've selected a DVD to watch, only to realize that it is a real long feature. So, in this situation, being able to scan the collection by time is not trivial- it's a useful piece of data. I also have a year table, which was initially intended primarily to be bibliographical data for books, but it is also useful for audio and video recordings. A very recently created table has place names, and right now I envision this as primarily being used as bibliographic data.          

I think that's going to be a wrap for today, because its time for Dinner and a Movie!

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

It's alive! Alive, I tell you!

How's that for drama?

At last, this past Sunday, Mr. T and I finally had the time and all of the components to assemble Jennifer's new PC. In the previous blog I put down all of the hardware that went into the box, so I won't bore any with the details [*again!!]). We had enough time to get it up and running, and get Win7 Pro installed on the SSD. We have one more component to install, a third 120mm cooling fan that will exhaust directly over the CPU. At that time, we'll also hook up the HDD (which was not playing nicely with the SSD during the build), and take care of cable management, as well as installing Microsoft Office and the usual suite of security applications.  

The fan.

Mr. T  secures the mobo.

A funny anecdote from the office: one of my coworkers- Frank- is also a dyed-in-the-wool geek gearhead and gamer. When I showed him these pics and told him the speeds and feeds, his reaction was quite precious- "Dude- don't even try to tell me you built a gaming rig... for your wife!"

Well, yes we actually did. On the day I announced that she was getting a new box, she was quite concerned- the last couple of refurbs we purchased have been real duds. When I told her that we were going to build it, she seemed somewhat relieved, especially since it would be up to date. And, she wouldn't have to hack any more cases to install a power supply to support a video card that is needed to play Civilization V!

We all were very pleased with the lack of noise output from the ThermalTake NiC F4. According to the manufacturer's website, the dual 120mm fans will move up to 79.283 cfm (cubic feet per minute- sorry, I don't have a metric equivalent for cfm); fan speeds can be firmware controlled, and noise is 18.0/30.2 dBa. According to Industrialnoisecontrol.com, 30dBa is really quiet. From my very limited experience, this box is stealthy quiet. I'm guessing that even after we install the final 120mm exhaust fan that this is going to be one quiet machine. Apart from the previously mentioned software installs, HDD hookup and burn-in, this box is locked, cocked and ready to rock! Pi Day update- I had hoped to deploy this box on Sunday, March 16, but I just checked the tracking and it most likely the fan won't arrive until Monday at the very earliest. We've discovered that when we order things, we usually get them very late in the day, so if it does arrive on Monday, it won't get installed until Tuesday (I work nights, as you may recall). And- I still have software to install!

In other news, I've taken a break from Facebook games and am using the time saved to work on the database. I think March 11 was the "official" start of my break, so that makes this Day 5. I'm not off of Facebook completely, just skipping the games (which probably accounted for 90+% of the time I spent there). I'm a bit excited about the upcoming 100th post- when I started this I didn't really think I had the discipline or tenacity to carry it this far. I guess when that happens I'll finally be able to publish a Top 10 list of posts.

That's all for now- speeds and feeds will probably be updated on or about blog entry #100.

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

The (Official) End of Winter

March 8, 2014.

As I write this, it is officially the last day of winter here in North America. As I stepped out of my workplace around 0630 this morning- just over an hour ago- there was a chill breeze and snow was flying in every direction. And while the snow really was light, and the temperature was not mind-numbingly frigid, I still had to chuckle to myself as I brushed some snow off of my vehicle, "Last day of winter? Right."

For those who are faithful followers of this blog, I offer my sincerest apologies for the lack of recent posts. I believe I have addressed this at least once recently, bemoaning the fact that a day has no more than twenty-four hours: when one works the overtime hours such as I have been blessed with lately, some sacrifices have to be made. In my case, the blog is one of my sacrifices.

Before I get on to data, I wanted to relate something that made me chuckle. About two weeks ago, Ryan was doing some cleaning in the office. Jennifer had made some borscht, and I was heating it up in the microwave. As Ryan is something of a foodie, he stopped what he was doing and sniffed the air. "Hmm, I'm not sure what that is, but it smells red- do you have tomato soup?"

To be fair, neither Ryan, Jennifer or I is Russian, so none of us can vouch for the "authenticity" of the recipe that Jennifer found online, but I have to say that it was delicious. Ryan may have been faked out by the spices, herbs and vegetables in the soup. I just found his comment, well- tasty.

"No, it's borscht," I said. "And I think that you think that you can smell a what a color smells like is pretty funny."  I then told him about Chris Rice's "Smell The Color 9" song, and we both had a good chuckle.

And with that, we proceed down the rabbit hole into to the wonderful world of I.T. and data....

For starters, I learned a new application this week. It's proprietary to a couple of other systems which we use that are also proprietary to my company, but the tool itself is all about data and is somewhat cool. Generally speaking, it's a viewer for print output. The programmer plugs in some instruction files, adds a small data file, and is able to see what the imaging heads will lay down onto paper.

Mr. T and I have a Sunday afternoon project. After what seems like a month, we have all of the necessary components, and are planning on building Jennifer a new computer. We bought a bundled "bare bones" kit from Newegg, and it contains the following components: Rosewill Galaxy (black) case- not really big or high end, but pretty nicely designed with a pair of 120mm fans and bottom mounted PSU space. And both side panels are removable, making for some nice cable management possibilities. The PSU is also from Rosewill, a modular 650W Hive unit that is 80 Plus Bronze certified for energy efficiency. Mobo is an ASUS A88XM Plus; this board is designed for the AMD FM2 APU. This is our first "modern" AMD processor, and I am pretty excited to see how it will perform. Mr. T and I had consulted extensively before choosing this bundle- the APU was the deciding factor for us. It's a 3.5GHz (overclockable to 3.8GHz) Kaveri quad core processor with a Radeon 7700 integrated in the same processor package. We are planning on replacing the stock AMD fan and heatsink with a dual fan, four pipe (direct contact) cooler from Thermaltake, the NiC F4. When we got this, Mr. T said it was huge. Jennifer said the same thing. When I saw it, I had to agree: it is huge. However, I really like it, and the reviews I have read all agree that this is a pretty quiet fan. So, if it doesn't fit in the case, we may be getting a different case. The reason for this is that it is memory friendly; that is, it is tall enough to clear the tops of the memory heat sinks. Storage and memory: the bundle had some nice parts here. We have a pair of G.Skill Ripjaws X series 4GB DDR3 (PC3 12800), a Crucial 120GB SSD and a 1TB Seagate Barracuda 7200RPM HDD with 64MB cache. This will be a Win7 system.

Pretty sweet, but slightly incomplete.

While we were waiting for this techo wonderland to arrive at our doorstep, Mr. T casually mentioned that we might need an adapter for the SSD. Frack! He was right. I researched these, and found a nice one from Icy Dock- their EZ Fit MB082SP PRO- which has room for another SSD, should the need arise. The other missing item from the Newegg bundle was an optical drive. So, I ordered a SATA LG Blu Ray burner. I've had good results from LG optical drives in the past, so I thought this would be a good fit with the rest of the system.

Design philosophy: Jennifer uses her PC primarily for two things- surfing and video. I'm hoping that the APU will be able to handle the Chrome activity (Chrome is quite the memory hog, and she likes to have lots of tabs open). Additionally, because of where the PC is physically located in our home, I often use it for a bit of surfing, opening up a Pale Moon browser and or a database or spreadsheet- often all three.

The Blu Ray is more for playback than recording.

Finally, I've gotten back to work on the database. The last time I updated the database statistics was way back in August, 2013. That's a long time, but also an indicator as to how busy I've been! In that time, one new table was added, and the database grew by a total of only 253 pieces of unique data- this is pretty sad and weak. On the other hand, normalization is the standard for this database, and as nearly everything except for date fields is table driven, the database is actually much larger- it lives up to that truism, "The total is greater than the sum of the parts." For example, the Music Recordings table currently has fourteen entries, but apart from the Last Played (date) fields, every single field in the table (including the Plays_# fields) pulls data from another table. It is truly a thing of beauty.

That's all for now from the Secret Underground Lair. My next entry should detail the adventures of PC building, and hopefully more data!

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

Happy Pi month!

For the past ten days or so, I have been privately lamenting the fact that the number of my blog posts in 2014 has been fairly low. In a previous post, I had lamented upon how New Year's  resolutions should be repurposed as goals, and that maybe in this light they might be more attainable. Well, as noble and as forward-thinking as this may be, I still need to deal with the intersection of Reality and Life.

This blog, for example. I had hoped to have a few more posts by this time, but Life (in general) and work (specifically) have taken their toll and conspired to keep me away from writing. I think that the folks who regularly follow this blog have known me to wax on about the hours I sometimes work. Well, this week, I put in 21.25 hours of overtime... mind you, I'm not complaining about having work- I'm merely documenting the challenges one sometimes faces when blogging.

And this impacts the Secret Underground Lair as well. As detailed in some previous blogs ( Cliches &
Who Does That?), even though Jennifer has a relatively new computer, I've longed to set her up with a computer that is actually new. For some time, Mr. T. and I have been discussing building a new PC (for him). He has a very capable machine that he is using right now, but feels the need to upgrade. However, he's holding out for DDR4 memory, so there's no telling when he'll be able to build a new system.

But, for Jennifer, I decided that we would build her new. Travis and I scoured the internet, and finally settled on what looks to be a nice AMD/ASUS powered system from newegg.com. We received all of the parts last week, but after looking at the AMD-supplied cooling, I decided that an upgrade would be nice. Why?

Honestly, we're in uncharted territory here. The processor that came in the barebones kit we ordered was an AMD APU  (microprocessor[cpu}+graphics processor [AMD Radeon 7700] on one package [APU]). So, we don't need a graphics card- because its colocated with the CPU-- but I'm guessing that more cooling is not a bad idea (as a GPU tends to generate a lot of heat).

So,... everything should be here by Tuesday, and then the Secret Underground Lair will step into action, creating a computing beast~!

In the wonderful world of data, things are starting to happen. I've gotten back to some data entry in the database,  but it looks like my stats were blown out in the last crash.  So, there's one more spreadsheet that needs to be built.

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