Happy birthday, Meerkat! (*and: my Bacon number!)

I haven't mentioned Meerkat, our trusty Subaru Outback, in some time. It's a good time, though, as Meerkat's 2nd birthday was the 2nd of April. Granted, she's a bit older than that... but not much- that's the day we brought her home. And for those who may be wondering why I refer to our car with a feminine pronoun, it's merely borrowing from the naval tradition of referring to ships with a feminine pronoun.  And Jennifer reminded me that much like that day two years ago, it snowed. So, Happy Birthday, Meerkat!

Oh, and we just turned 11,000 miles (17,600 km) on the odometer. Now, that doesn't sound like a lot, and in truth it really isn't. According to http://project.wnyc.org/, the average commute for my ZIP (postal) code is around 28 minutes, which is above the national average of 25.4 minutes. My average commute is under eight minutes; on a bad day, getting caught by a train, my commute time will still be under twelve minutes.

In an effort to keep this from becoming a database changelog, I'm just going to say that work on the Lego datasaet is proceeding nicely. I haven't done anything with Forty-Two lately, but that's okay as my time has gone into the dataset.

Lastly, I'd like to introduce you to a term I use quite often IRL: "my good e-buddy". I use this most often when I'm referring to someone whom I've never met except for online contact, or someone I do know IRL, but who is more of an acquaintance than anything else. The reason I mention this is my good e-buddy @lindaregber had an interesting tweet the other day which I liked well enough to RT. She posted a study from Research at Facebook which states that there is an average separation of 3.57 for Facebook users; in other words, you are only separated from ANY Facebook user by <4 persons. That's pretty cool; I'd like to see something along the lines of The Oracle of Bacon for "ordinary folks". Although I'm not a famous person, and I have never acted, I have a Bacon number of 3, which means I'm closer to Kevin Bacon than I am to any random Facebook user! How? Alex Trebec was in Dying Young  with Vincent D'Onofrio, who was in JFK with Kevin Bacon. So, how do I get the 3? Alex has a Bacon number of 2; I met Alex in Frankfurt a.M. after trying out for Jeopardy in a Stars & Stripes sponsored event.

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