Richard Strauss, and Data.

This past week, I've managed to get in to work fairly early almost every day so far (Monday- Thursday); I think Wednesday was the only day I came in later, and that was intentional. I've also been getting up earlier, and the time before work has been used to work on the database. I've made some good progress on the few boxed sets of audio CDs that we own, which is where Richard Strauss comes into the picture.

Before I go any further, I should give you a bit of my musical backstory, kind reader. You may have surmised from previous posts (especially the most recent one, Axl Rose, and Data,) that I'm more Rocker than Opera-Goer. This is 100% correct. However, my musical tastes are fairly diverse... Yo-Yo Ma, The Beatles, Chevelle, C.W. McCall, Air Supply, Deep Purple, Newsboys, Sibelius, 80's hair bands, choral, etc. I firmly believe that any music that is good should be played loud when possible.  I like some blues, classic Motown, and a smattering of jazz. I'm okay with the various forms of trance, and dance music- if it's something that catches my ear. I can even deal with disco these days. Things I pretty much have no interest in are rap, hip hop, opera and death metal.

So, what's with Strauss?

Well, the album pictured above is a boxed set I picked up at a library sale for a solitary U.S. dollar. Cheap-value-SCORE! It's a three disc set, with a booklet nearly as thick as the CD case. The 330 page "booklet" has all sorts of details, not merely about this opera, but about this particular recording, its cast and conductor. It also has the complete text and lyrics of the opera in French, English and German. When I purchased it, I had decided that the weight of the boxed set alone made it a good buy... little did I know that this was a "reference" recording, one by which all others are to be judged. Its also conducted by Herbert von Karajan, a legendary conductor.

Still, what's with Strauss?

Data entry, pure and simple. As this past week has seen a renaissance of Forty-Two, I decided to tackled boxed CD sets. The problem is that this particular set has sixty-two tracks, all of which have German titles. I'm slow enough at data entry without having to import special characters, so I did what any reasonable human being would do: I looked up the recording on Amazon, copied the track list and pasted it into Excel. From there, I copied and pasted each track into Access. That's where I stopped with music- I still have three boxed sets to go, and then it's on to albums.

In other data news, I've got what appears to be a workable solution for my internal Lego part number. It's fairly lengthy at seventeen characters, and from all appearances, this should be sufficient. I've begun the data entry on this, and tried a few trial sorts. So far, everything looks good, and this is officially stage 2 of the Peeron normalization. I still need to add dimensions and clean up the text descriptions before importing it into a table.

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