On subject matter 05.28.14

I'm currently writing two blogs, one here and one on Wordpress (hochspeyer.wordpress.com). It's days like today that tend to drive a writer just a bit sideways, because even though there is nothing in the way of compensation involved in these writing projects, I still feel a certain compulsion to get a certain volume of work out each calendar month... because even thought we might hate to admit it, at its heart blogging is a numbers game.

And that's a problem when you're trying to write for a blog which has a theme, but for which you have absolutely no pertinent subject matter for your post. However, in the frenzied world of publish or perish- which is the internet as many bloggers may know it-publishing something can sometimes be better than nothing.

So, here I sit in the Secret Underground Lair. To my right, a single-player game of Civilization V is being played. My phone has the mobile version of Words with Friends going, Windows Media Player has just finished sorting songs (in descending order) according to number of plays (James Brown's The Old Landmark from The Blues Brothers movie is currently playing). 

The casual reader might infer from the photograph that right now I'm doing more photography than data, and honestly, the reader would be correct. Still, as long as I'm writing, there's data to be had. While my Wordpress blog is still in its infancy and slowly gaining something of a following, the blog you are reading right now has expanded its international presence, adding readership in India and Lithuania. This gives the blog readers in forty-three countries!

So that's going to be a wrap for my Blogspot posts for the month.

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

Data in the blogosphere

I had to take a look at my blog dashboard tools to make sure I had introduced my photography blog. It seems like forever, but it was only last week in my Training, Interrupted blog that the new blog was introduced. I've been fairly busy in the intervening week, mounting photographic adventures and then recapping them at hochspeyer.wordpress.com.

While visiting Wordpress this morning, I ran across a featured blog that spoke to me-
http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2014/05/20/stats-to-check/

That blog is all about stats. Specifically, stats that Wordpress provides to members of its blogging community. The piece was short and to the point but it brought me back here, because here is where I talk data, and there is where I talk photography.

What I find most interesting about Wordpress analytics is while they are fairly deep, they are free. Now, despite the fact that their analytics rock, I'm not suggesting anyone abandon Google Blogger. If you're reading this, its possible that you, also, have a Google blog. I've got some regular readers all over the globe- I can't see myself moving away from Blogger for that reason alone.

Another interesting concept of the blogosphere is that YOU (or, more specifically, your digital output) is YOUR brand. A long time ago (in internet time), I chose "hochspeyer" to be my internet persona, or brand. Apart from the Steam community, online I am hochspeyer wherever I go. I have created a brand and a presence that far outreaches the village where Jennifer and I lived in Germany. Its been so good to me I have established it as both my Google+ and Wordpress identity.

The picture above is what got me back into photography. The water droplets on top of the grass are actually being secreted by the grass. I took the shot with a cell phone, and remember after taking it thinking, "I can take pictures- I just need a real camera."

That's all for now. As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.

*...and for those who like a good photo or two, please visit my Wordpress boog, hochspeyer.wordpress.com ,,, one f-stop short of a six-pack.

Training, Interrupted

One of my greatest fears when I began blogging was what might be called "churn factor," or writer's block. I've written things on and off for some time. In high school, I wanted to write a Great Space Opera- a grand, expansive science fiction tour de force. I started countless stories, first with a ballpoint pen, then typewriter and finally computer, but for any number of reasons I never managed to write more than a chapter or two. As recently as 2012 I started one (that one has a bit of a chance of getting finished).

But here I sit, more than slightly astonished that my count of entries is over one hundred, and just last week launched a second blog (about my new adventures in digital photography) at http://hochspeyer.wordpress.com/.

I started this on Monday, May the 12th. This particular title owes its inspiration to our failed attempt to hit the gym. In weightlifting circles, its pretty much a given that when one is training, one is lifting. The converse does not seem to hold true, though- just because you're lifting, it doesn't mean that you're training.

I won't belabor all of the nuances.

The reason we didn't go to the gym was really quite simple: a massive rain storm had rolled through the area. Hail, reduced visibility, high winds, and lots of rain... the rain was so heavy....

How heavy was it?

The rain was so heavy, there were bubbles coming out from under our street. Which, when one considers it, is fairly odd. After all, one does not walk out to the street and to see it bubbling and hear it gurgling.

The rains came in two or three waves. The first wave featured hail and torrents. When the first wave had mostly abated, I picked up our older son from work, and then I went to work. During lulls at the office, I watched the storms roll through on the computer, and occasionally heard thunder above the noise of the plant and saw some lightning through the window, but the worst of it seems to have been the first wave.

No real news on the data front. Well, not entirely true. I recently downloaded Omron's pedometer software (astute followers of my Adventures in the Secret Underground Lair [SUL] will recall that I had previously posted a blog describing a catastrophic HDD failure which resulted in the loss of over a year's pedometer data [One simply does not RAID the SUL]). This time I plan to beef up my data security a bit- by actually backing it up!

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

Please try the other flavor of hochspeyer- digital photography! http://hochspeyer.wordpress.com/

Imagination

I've always had a very vivid imagination, and have a moderately strong "artsy" side. I enjoyed comic books in high school, and was a regular reader of some of the readily available (but not necessarily mainstream titles) such as Howard The Duck, Conan the Barbarian (the large format, black-and white one) and Heavy Metal. I had wanted to draw in the style of the Conan comics, and after much practice had become underwhelmingly mediocre at drawing some body parts, so I abandoned that venture. I wanted to paint for the longest time, but just never got around to putting down cash  for paints, brushes, easel, etc; the closest I ever got to this was painting 25mm miniature wargaming figures (soldiers), 1/32 scale military models and 1/700 scale WWII waterline warship models. The "25's" I was not bad at, the 1/32 scale stuff was pretty hit-or-miss, but I was pretty good at the waterline models. My favorites were Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) destroyers- I had a book that had a detailed history of the IJN which gave brief unit histories of nearly every ship from the Meiji Restoration until the end of the Second World War. The book was a British publication with very high quality paper and lots of photographs- I used it as my painting guide (I loved painting Japanese characters on the ships' sides) and for modelling some of the ships' rigging (the wires or ropes which stretch from mast to mast on a ship); it's quite amazing what just a few pieces of rigging do for a ship. This book was also my main data source for creating ship data cards for Fletcher Pratt's Naval Wargame. In short, I was one of "those" kids who had weird hobbies and not a ton of friends who wanted share in the hobbies and games.

Oh, and I am an only child.

I mentioned I have a pretty vivid imagination. Not always having playmates available, it was not uncommon for me to play a game of Monopoly or Risk by myself... with the maximum number of players! I also starting writing stories in high school, generally science fiction; most didn't get past a chapter or two. My enjoyment of writing has carried on into adulthood, and this blog is it's latest manifestation.

The other "artsy" thing I've always enjoyed was photography. Before anyone knew what a "selfie" was, I took one in my Dad's 1965 Chevy Impala wagon. I had to be around ten years old, and it was on a trip to visit relatives in Minnesota. (It should be noted that this was truly "back in the day"- the car had seatbelts, but their use was not required). I was in the back seat where the green Coleman cooler was. I put my head over the front bench seat and looked down- there was the camera. Unable to resist, I grabbed the camera and took a picture of... ME! It's a great picture, and we have it in a photo album somewhere.

That was the first picture I remember taking. I've taken many more since then. At one point, I even took Photo Tech classes- long before digital. I've shot 126, 35mm and even Kodak disk. This past week, though, I entered the digital age with our acquisition of a Nikon D3200.

Back in my 35mm days, I owned Minolta XG-M and X-700 camera bodies; I still have the X-700, along with a 50mm, 35-70mm and the prize of my old lens collection: a 250mm catadiaptropic lens! The "cat" is a special telephoto lens that is much smaller and lighter than a typical 35mm lens. It is unique in that the aperture is fixed, and that it uses a pair of mirrors inside the lens to attain the greater focal length. When I took the hood off of my cat, it had pretty much the same dimensions as a standard 50mm lens; to the casual observer, I was using a standard lens- the weight ( and therefore balance) were also similar. The downsides are twofold. First, the lens is slow- mine was an f5.6, and could be further stepped down by a rear-mounted, screw-in gray filter to f11. The second downside can also be exploited as an in-camera effect: the doughnuts.

This is my lens on a later-model body with a motor drive.

The doughnuts were formed by the back mirror, as I recall. If you look closely at the picture, you'll see something at the front of the lens that looks like a new moon- that is the front mirror. If you were looking at the lens head-on, there would be a large red circle (the back of the front mirror) surrounded by the silver of the rear mirror. The rear mirror has a hole in it which accomodates the image gathered by the rear mirror and reflected by the front mirror. When looked at through the rear of the lens, the front mirror is tiny. These lenses are also more delicate than a standard SLR lens, because the position of the front mirror is critical, and any hard handling can make these lenses useless.  

That's all for now. No cool photos to post or data to report... but hopefully I should have some soon!

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

May the Fourth

Happy Unofficial Star Wars Day.

When our oldest son was born in Germany in the late 80's, we had no way of knowing that he would have a fan-generated holiday associated with his birthday. If he had his choice, I believe he would much rather had been born on November 5th (a red letter date in history, according to Doc Brown).

Today was the official start of Spring at our house. Much like the existence of an astronomical 1st day of a season and a meteorological 1st day of Spring, we mark the start of a new season at our house by a different sort of accounting. Our mark of the beginning of Spring is the first grass cutting.

Saturday (yesterday), Jennifer and I had gotten out of the car and one of us had remarked, "I can hear the grass growing." This, of course, was a reference to my Air Force days in Germany. I worked in the Pavements and Grounds section of a Civil Engineering Squadron. During the cooler months we all functioned as one shop, but during the growing season part of the year our shop was split into  pavements, and Grounds... essentially, some of us became uniformed groundskeepers. When the French built this airbase in the 50's, there were flocks of sheep that performed this function. When the U.S. Air Force assumed control of the airbase, at some point the sheep departed and the lawnmowers took over (as late as 1968 sheep still patrolled the flightline). Grounds was generally not considered a primo assignment, and the troops in grounds were generally razzed on a daily basis about their duties, and part of the razzing was the expression, "I can hear the grass growing". In other words, get out of the truck bay. And grab a weedeater! The real, unspoken truth about Grounds was this: we liked it. Our mission was clear: cut grass wherever we found it. We were the Masters of our own Destiny. There was but One Rule: never let your tractor run out of fuel. Let me explain.

If I recall correctly, it took two tractors two days to cut the flightline. Our flightline was not short- we could land a C-5 Galaxy in an emergency. I say "in an emergency" because our flightline had this dip, and although a C-5 could land there, it could never take off because of the dip. The tractors we had were Ford New Holland diesels that pulled 15' (~5M) mowers powered by the PTO (power-take off). We fueled up in the morning, and cut grass until 1700 rolled around or we ran low on fuel. The shop superintendent always warned us about running out of fuel- these were fuel-injected industrial tractors, and apparently it was quite the chore to get them going again once air got into the fuel supply. Needless to say, I don't think anyone ever ran out of fuel.

That was then, and this is now. It takes me roughly 30-45 minutes to do our lawn. It's a nice workout, too- I even have an entry in urbandictionary.com for "yardio"- stop by when you have a minute and give my definition a "thumbs up"!

Data- haven't had much of this lately. I need to rebuild the relationships, as well as a few tables.

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

The Rabbit Hole

In my Google+ feed the other day I found a link to a hot-off-the-e-press blog that my e-buddy Lee Baker (that's DR Lee to those of you who are not in our intimate Google+ circle!) had just published. Lee, who is coiffed similarly to Thor, is a data scientist and CEO of Chi-Squared Innovations, and we became connected either through a group in LinkedIn or one or both of our blogs. Lee's latest blog is a delightful romp through data types, and I highly encourage all to read it (*spoiler alert: there's a quiz at the end. If you don't want to take the quiz, don't read this spoiler alert). Yours truly, on the other hand, does not have Thor-like hair, and is also not a data scientist. However, as we're both interested in data....

*Warning: Rabbit hole 2m ahead.

Lee's blogs to date have included very nice infographics, presented at the speed of "Git along, little dogie," rather than, "A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse!" He got me on this one, though. Please note: he's the data scientist; I'm just a regular guy trying to build my version of 42.

*Warning: You are standing on the Rabbit Hole, which has a ©Acme Industries tag.

...and down the rabbit hole we go. I'm reading the blog, and it is making sense and is easily digestible. I get to the bottom of the first infographic, and there is a row called "MEANINGFUL ZERO" Now, I may not be a data scientist, or have any training in statistics or quantitative analysis, but I do know a thing or two about Google, Bing, boolean search and the interwebz. I searched for at least fifteen minutes, which as everyone knows is a long time in internet time. My best attempts yielded...

"Nothing." "Result not found." "Term not understood." "Are you kidding?" "Everyone knows that...."

Ha ha- some of those results are quite obviously fabricated, but the lack of results are what prompted me to name this The Rabbit Hole. Being a moderately resourceful dude, I took some stabs in the dark. First, I tried stastics.com; cool site, but my search returned "No results found".Another stab in the dark- data.com. This site is the home of Salesforce, one of the dominant players in CRM software. I tried WolframAlpha, the publishers of Mathematica, and turned up nothing  *ahem* meaningful. Mathwords.com had nothing, but they did have a Google search widget, so I typed in "meaningful+zero". You guessed it- zilch. I tried actuary.org, home to the American Academy of Actuaries- no luck. A stab in the dark... I searched "data analysis vocabulary" in Google and got a hit on quizlet.com, which had twenty-seven DA terms... none of which was meaningfiul zero.  As a last resort, I tried about.com, and got nothing. 

I think I will, at this point, consult with a human or multiple humans.

There are no data updates; this entire blog has been dedicated to data and it's acquisition. I feel very much like Johnny 5 at this point: Need INPUT!"  Well, correction to that: we are M-270 on the Outback!

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

Tuddi Toots redux and waitress errata

Mark and I had been trading emails regarding the latest blog post, and I mentioned to him what I had related in a previous post- that my brain is like Swiss cheese; specifically, my memory is somewhat holey, and sometimes the facts get lost in the holes (the holes in Swiss cheese are formed by carbon dioxide; I think mine are formed by laughing gas [nitrous oxide]; apparently this is the same stuff used in high performance motors... there may be some correlation there). So, without further ado, I present Mark's errata.

For starters, Dave (a.k.a Wiz- which is another story altogether) had his back to the audience to symbolize Stu Sutcliffe who played bass with the Beatles during their very years. As Stu tragically died of a brain aneurism, Wiz symbolized this by spending our entire short set with his back to the audience. Another Wreakles oversite: Mark played lead guitar, and I played rhythm (partly because I'm not sure Mark- who is highly educated- probably still doesn't know how to spell rhythm); Matt "sang", Jimbo- who was completely without rhythm- played drums, and Wiz strummed with his back to the audience.

Then, there's Tuddi Toots/Wreakles facts.

As a rule, we were pretty predictable, with Mark and I arriving around 2100, Dr. Dave around 2115, and Matt arriving after Dallas (the T.V. show) concluded, usually around 2130 (all times -0600 GMT). We usually sat at a table in the main part of the establishment, in the main floor area- pretty much kitty-corner to the bar and about as far back from the dance floor as one could get without being in the dining area along the wall.

As mentioned in the title, I have some (a lot) of waitress errata, courtesy of Mark. For starters, Terri, the owner of the subliminal earrings, was tipped by Mark and thanked Matt. Along with Terri, our "regular" servers were Renee, Wanda, Cindy Lou, Jeannie, and Jody. We're not 100% sure, but agree that Jeannie (a good friend of Cindy Lou) was the server that was "deported" back to Tennessee for being underage (to serve alcohol).

In other news, the odometer countdown is M-300- in other words, Road Trip time! We're getting close to Memorial Day (May 26th this year), a holiday which is generally considered the unofficial start of summer here in the United States. It was actually created to honor and remember the war dead of the American Civil War. It was once known as Decoration Day, because folks would visit cemeteries and decorate tombstones. Today it honors all U.S. war dead.

Today is the 1st of May, and for once I remembered to flip the page over on my Lego calendar, and this month's featured Lego creation is a scale model of the famed WW1 Sopwith Camel.

Finally, from the Wonderful World of Data (yes, I typed that with a straight face), I have no news and some good news. As far as "no news" goes, I've been pretty busy at work, and Jennifer and I have started making more regular visits to the gym. Good news? I've had the opportunity to do a bit more with data at work, using a program called FirstPrep. It's a pretty nifty utility- I'd link some information about it, but I can't find much that is useful.

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