Tools of the trade

Quite some time ago (about 1.5 parsecs, to paraphrase Han Solo), I worked at an "action sports" company as a data analyst. In the case of this company, action sports == paintball. I don't believe I was compensated at the rate which I thought I "deserved", but that's just a bit of human nature, I suppose... like the famous quip about how much money is enough?

"Just a little more."

Right. I was doing a bit of data entry/collation early one morning this week, and had a flashback to that company and my tasks there. The flashback involved my Monday morning routine, and it was triggered by my mouse. The mouse I currently use for nearly everything is a Logitech Optical Trackman wired mouse. This mouse, or variants of it, have been around for ten years or more. Quite honestly, this mouse can be a data professional's (or dictator's) best friend.

Third World Communist Dictators also love the Logitech Marbleman Mouse

To the best of my knowledge, this is an unretouched (propoganda) photo of North Korea's glorious leader Kim Jung Un being shown the finer details of battlefield missile control. Ignore the guys in the Castro hats, they are political appointments- the true revolutionary is the guy in the Mao hat, pointing to the screen and indoctrinating the Glorious Leader in the use of the People's Sparc V7 clone. He is making sure that the Glorious Leader destroys Pinky three times before Uncle Sam is spawned. The guy in the background is the hacker that put the system together.

Back to my flashback... the mouse directly in front of the Glorious Leader is a Logitech Marbleman- my preferred weapon of choice for data work. I use it almost daily. 

One more flashback that might explain why this mouse is so valuable (I own four of them). Back when I was at Pursuit Marketing Inc., one of my tasks was to grab the Monday morning numbers from WalMart's RetailLink database. The problem I experienced at that time was that I could not always get all of my data on one Excel 2003 spreadsheet, which was artificially capped by Microsoft at 65,536 rows. Wal Mart data often exceeded this, so to compensate, I downloaded the data into an Access database, and then queried it out into the data I needed. As a final measure of email economy and job security, I made the files I emailed to the VP smaller by stripping out all of the formulae from the worksheets. 

At PMI, I had a Fellowes mousepad with an attached gel wristwrest. One of my coworkers insisted on jabbing this with her fingernail, which effectively destroyed it. I am in the process of replacing it- after all these years.

My last entry into Tools of the Trade is my Logitech G105 keyboard. A while ago, I was in search of a backlit keyboard. Amazon was having a closeout on the Call of Duty MW3-themed Logitech G105, and I grabbed a few. I'm not really a gamer, but this is a great keyboard for what I do! The action is nice, and it has a green backlight (the standard G105 has blue backlighting).

Data-

I've been hard at work getting up  to speed with the BrickLink database. I'm near the halfway point in my cut and paste operation, and I hope to be finished by month's end. At that point, I hope to start cleaning the data, and have a usable spreadsheet by the beginning of September. Time will tell.

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