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!")