Monday, February 23, 2015

CL

I try to make "milestone" post a little special; in this case, it is my 150th post, so I've decided to go with "CL" as the title... CL being 150 rendered in Roman numerals.

Big news on the technology homefront. Jennifer has been without a computer for nearly a year. Well, not actually without a computer- she has a very nice Lenovo laptop that she uses. Her desktop expired in May or June of 2014, however. We built her a desktop sometime in June or July, but we had a problem with the motherboard, so she's been using the laptop ever since then. Two Wednesdays ago, Mr. T decided that we should rectify the situation.

We replaced the motherboard.

Now, the odd part about those four words is this:

Mr. T and I were able to get together to get the job done... almost done, that is.  It didn't work- some of the fans spun up, but otherwise the PC was inert. Last Sunday, we took a fresh look at the machine. Mr. T suggested I take a look inside. I did. Much to his surprise, I started touching things- fans, jacks, cables, anything that we had attached. I may not have an A+ certification, but I know my way around a motherboard. And I actually saw the problem before I touched it: one of the memory sticks was not seated. I pushed it down until it clicked into place, and we were in business.

Everyone was happy.

Bouyed by his construction success, Mr. T called in a chit. A year or so ago, we had informally promised Mr. T a new computer after Jennifer got a new PC. With hers being nonfunctional for such a long time, we didn't have to make good on that promise. Now, though, having demonstrated his ability to build, it was time.

After a few configurations, he was finally able to put together a nice Intel-based I5 system and get everything through Newegg. Everything arrived on Friday. Mr. T got up early on Saturday, had a nice breakfast, and for six hours worked on the box.

No go.

As Bill Clinton once famously stated, "I worked harder than I did in my entire life".  Well, with apologies to the former president, its pretty close to what he said.

Frustrated, he asked me if I would look at it with him today (Sunday) Sure, that's what Dads are for.

We opened it up, and pretty much repeated the diagnostic process of the past Sunday. I had to laugh- Mr. T had admonished me for equipping Jennifer's CPU with a masive dual fan equipped heatsink; it turns out that his is just as huge! We poked and prodded for about an hour. The main issue with his box was that the main case fan would not power up.There was also a boot order issue, but we found a work around for that. After testing, we determined that there was a dead terminal on the motherboard. I have to say I was impressed with the quick response I received from Newegg. I went to their chat, entered my issue, and in about 10 minutes I had an RMA.

Jennifer's PC, on the other hand, required a bit of work. After a few days with a new motherboard, I realized that it had a problem: it would not install Windows updates. I finally figured out that Windows 7 needed to be reinstalled. Once that happened, the machine ran flawlessly.

Sorry, once again no data, but a lot of hardware- that's how I roll when I'm the I.T. guy! I did start working on a spreadsheet which will be imported as a table into the new database, and did a bit of Python work as well.

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


Sunday, February 15, 2015

Potpurri, 2

Blog titles are important to me: I feel they should generally be clever and succinct.  However, they don't necessarily need to be original, and sometimes redundancy is not a bad thing- and so, today's title was chosen. What surprised me most, though, was that it is only #2.

So, what's it all about?

As previously mentioned, my blogging has slacked off as of late, so I thought it would be nice to pick up the writing pace. There's also been a flurry of intellectual activity (of sorts) here at the Secret Underground Lair (SUL) of late that is also worth noting.

I'm not sure if I've mentioned this before, but here at the SUL we tend to be a bit like pack rats. Not in a huge way. For example, no one would think of saving the driver's door of a 1957 Chevy if we had one of those in the garage (we don't), Really- what are the chances of us ever needing something like that?  However, a broken condensate pump? Well, that's another story, and a candidate for saving.

This past week, Mr. T has once again broached the "ugly" subject of reorganizing the SUL. The subject is ugly not because it is without merit, but because of the logistics involved. According to a definition I found online, logistics is the detailed coordination of a complex operation involving many people, facilities, or supplies. And that is truly what we have here.

I'm happy that Mr. T has decided to move his desk. Really- it makes a great deal of sense in terms of overall office organization.To make room for this move, all I need to do is move a 6' rolltop desk upstairs, and then move a small bookshelf so that we can rotate his desk ninety degrees. The rolltop desk will displace an oddly shaped stereo cabinet upstairs which will move into the basement. All of this will happen after we fix Jennifer's desktop computer. 


On my personal list of thing to do, I have Mr. T's cirriculum and my personal list of things to do.


As I write this, Mr. T is officially an adult. He should be out in the economy making a living. However, as we all know, there are very few entry level jobs, and we don't bother him about work too much. So, we expect him to expand his brain. And so, we are embarking on a few Adventures. This past week, I picked up an Arduino kit and some additional components; I hope to stimulate his interest in things electronic with this, and hopefully integrate the Raspberry Pi as well.We'll see how that goes. On my personal plate, I'm working on learning the Python programming language, as well as getting my personal database built. 


That's it from the SUL today. As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data ananysis and management so yo don't have to.

Tuesday, February 10, 2015

Forty-Two, v7 (or so)

I've been spending a fair amount of time on Twitter (@CjoelHarrison) lately... so much, in fact, that other elements of my e-life have been suffering. Case in point: this blog. In January of 2015, while I was establishing my presence in the twittersphere, I did not post a single blog. Possibly even more tragic, my playing time on Rail Nation has suffered tremendously. And don't even get me started on my lack of quality Steam time... I'm not certain when the last time I played Sid Meier's Civilization V was.

In any event, here I am once more heralding the latest iteration of my pet database project, Forty-Two. This may indeed be Version Seven; then again, I've not kept track, so it could be any number greater than three. This iteration, though, is different from previous ones: it was not necessitated by a hardware crash or a software glitch. Rather, it is simply a fresh start with a few ideas to make a (relatively) large dataset more organized.

So, I suppose the logical question would be this: why would a home user with no database training want to even try to build an Access database in the first place?

I suppose I could just write it off as an Aspie thing- a project that goes on forever without a realistic chance of being completed (I'm not sure that's exactly an Aspie trait!) It could be that I haven't learned MySQL yet, or haven't even tried NoSQL, and let's not even bring Hadoop into the discussion!

The reality is a lot more pedestrian. And practical: I want to know what I don't know.

In plainer speech, I want to learn how to build a small relational database from the ground up. I want this database to be useful to my family. And, possibly the most important reason for building the database: should anything bad happen, I'd like to have it as a record for an insurance claim.

So there, that's what drives me to keep on trying to build Forty-Two, the database that answers the question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.

The other side projects that have been taking up my time are coding. Professionally, I'm a programmer. The interesting thing about that is that even if I spent the majority of my time programming, the world would probably not recognize me as a programmer, because the tools that I use are very specialized and are more related to composition and layout than programming- and when we DO actually write some code, there is absolutely no way it con be confused with a Turing complete language. Still, some of these tools DO have actual programming, and to help myself to better understand these areas, I've taken to studying the Python language.

Gasp- it's official now: yours truly is studying Python.

print("That's all for now folks!")

Saturday, February 7, 2015

Hello, 2015 (belatedly)

Well, better late than never, I suppose.

2015 has been for a few months, and I'm FINALLY getting down to publishing my first blog of the New Year.

Ha, ha- I actually wrote that in December of 2014- this is an indicator of how my year has been going so far.

I've written and rewritten the beginning of this blog several times, and for some reason I've never gotten past this paragraph. So far, 2015 has been the Year of Twitter for me, and not the year of Blog.

I've had a Twitter account for some time (@cjoelharrison) but hadn't been really active there. Jennifer had gotten started there sometime after I had, and currently has nearly 400 followers. Mind you, we don't compete at this online stuff (we really don't- its just not in us to!), I think that sometime around the New Year, though, I decided to make my Twitter account a more viable part of my "personal branding" strategy. I've focused my feed on the following: #data, #coding, #tech and #faith. And while I think this blog will still be an important of my "personal branding" strategy", I think Twitter will have a more prominent place in that strategy, simply because of its immediacy. After all, even though the blog is often a work of love and art (at least in my eyes), my Twitter feed is a work of NOW!, thanks in no small part to my smartphone.

Another huge draw of Twitter is its immediacy.With a blog, one develops a following. I've got to say my blog has really blown me away with its reach: in the space of a year, I managed to garner readers on six continents. In roughly a month on Twitter, though, I went from approximately 50 followers to a hundred. The interesting thing about the growth process is this: a typical blog takes ~3 hours to produce. This includes coming up with an idea for the blog, as well as the writing and possible inclusion of pictures. Then, even after the editing that goes on during the writing process, it needs to be proofed. Finally, it is published. With Twitter, I have very little original content- I'm more of a conduit for other content... I find something that's already been e-published, and merely retweet it for anyone who might find that particular hashtag interesting. Since I've followed this plan, my little corner of the twittersphere has expanded considerably.

That's all for now. Data is (yet again!) on hold, although I've been devoting some time to learning Python. 2015 is shaping up to be a fun year!