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.
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