Another look at resolutions

I don't know how things are in your world, but in my world there seem to be a lot of "gotchas". A "gotcha!" is something like, "the other guy blinked" or, "I should've seen that coming". Today's gotcha was the latter. It happened at The Bridge this evening.

I had experienced a fairly fitful sleep Saturday, which was to be expected, I suppose, after being off for two days and then coming to work for one. This time of the year can be something of a sleep challenge for shift workers such as myself. I normally start work around 2000, and am generally done before 0500 the following morning. Our company gives us Dec 24th and 25th, as well as Dec 31st and Jan 1st as holidays. The problem is that this year the 24th fell on Wednesday, and the 25th on Thursday.

As best as I can figure, for the two day holiday, I actually net about a day and a half-after all, I've gotta sleep sometime!

So there I was, short of sleep on Saturday afternoon. I got up, bathed quickly and had a bit of tea. Then I poured a can of Monster into a plastic bottle, we piled into Meerkat, and were off. We arrived at the Bridge and sat down on one of the padded benches in the vestiblue where we usually wait for the doors to the auditorium to open. Tonight's wait was a bit longer than usual, and there were none of the customary sound checks. I overheard someone saying that some technical difficulties had been exerienced. Not long after, however, the doors opened and we funneled in. As we headed toward our seats, I noticed Karl Clauson with a microphone. It was going to be a great service.

I think I've mentioned Karl once or twice before in this blog. His life can only be described as "amazing".

Here's where everything sort of hits the proverbial fan, though. This blog is entitled, "Another look at resolutions".

I don't really recall if it was Friday or Saturday, but Jennifer and I had briefly discussed resolutions. I've never been a fan of resolutions (see Resolutions and other useless things), and Jennifer and I agreed on this point.

Karl spoke on resolutions. Gotcha!

I don't know what it is about our church, but the "gotchas" seem to happen all of the time! Karl's teaching should be up on The Bridge's website in a few days- click on the "Watch or listen to last week's sermon" link to see/hear it.

No data today. The floor of the Secret Underground Lair is covered in the confetti that is the byproduct of shredding old paperwork.  I took that picture about an hour ago- it looks worse now! I think that shredder manufacturers really need to come up with a more user friendly way of transferring shredded paper into one's recycle or trash. Each and every "consumer/SOHO" shredder I've ever used has had this challenge- and this is only a small part of the mess.

I stopped not long after bag #3 was almost full. Tomorrow is Sunday, and I tentatively have three things on my agenda: to finish the shredding and clean up the mess, to put the new motherboard in Jennifer's computer, and to test my new monitor. I guess that's actually four.

At some point in time, I need to get back to working on my database, and to resume my adventures in programming in Python. I suppose that those are worthy tekkie resolutions for 2015.


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

Meerkat's first snow

As you may have surmised, it's been a slow news month here in the Secret Underground Lair. In the Chicago area, we had our first snowflakes on Halloween. For the record, there was no measurable accumulation. Tonight, however, I think we have a "real" snowfall".  Back up a few steps....

As I was crossing the street to go to church earlier Saturday evening, a thought came to me that "maybe a good idea for a blog might be a comparison and contrast piece between churchgoing now and when I was a kid". I'm not certain how this might be received in my little corner of the blogosphere though, as well over 25% of my readers are reading this somewhere outside of North America. However, I'll give you the short version.

I had parked Meerkat (our trusty Subaru Outback) across the street from The Bridge Community Church. I locked the doors and set the alarm, and Jennifer, Mr. T and I walked across the street. I was wearing a layered combo of a Scottevest hoodie and vest.  The Bible I currently use is the English Standard Version (ESV) and it was in the right pocket of my vest on my Amazon Kindle Fire. In my left hand I held a Monster in a nondescript Rubbermaid container.

Okay- the "commercial" is over. The point is this: none of this stuff even existed when I was a kid. In fact, none of it even existed when our kids were... kids.

But, I digress. Tonight was Meerkat's first official snow.  And for those out of the loop, there's a difference between "snow" and "official snow". I googled "recordable snow" and found a link from NOAA to Chicago snowfall statistics. Mmmmmm.... DATA! The problem is- it did not answer my question: what is an officially recordable snowfall (from the FWIW department, I think it is one inch [2.54 CM]). NOAA seems to categorize snowfall as being either "trace", "measureable" or "1 inch or more". This year's first snowfall occurred on October 31, and it was definitely a trace. Tonight's snowfall (November 15) has not ended as far as I know, but is definitely at least an inch... by any standard, this is a "recordable" snowfall!

While I'm on the topic of data, I'd like to share an epiphany (from my FWIW department, a few years back, IBM did a few television commercials with the theme "epiphany", and the whole concept of epiphany stuck from that point on). Several months ago, my cell phone died. However, in the nature of cell phones, it did not loose all of its functionality- it just could not make or receive telephone calls. So, being a modern day Renaissance Man, I repurposed it as an MP3 player. It seems to be happy in the role of an MP3 player, but its software needed a bit of figuring out.

When it comes to music, I'm all about the music, of course- but after that, there's the data. The music player software on the phone is pretty user-friendly (BASIC!), and it does what it should do- play music. A cool feature for me, though, is "playlists". Even though I have less than 400 songs in my library, there are some that I listen to more than others. I like the Top 50 played songs playlist more than all of the others, and I had been using it for a few weeks before I realized that no matter how much I played with it, the order of the songs on the list did not change. So, I had pretty much wasted those weeks, trying to influence something which turned out to be static. In order to change the order of the songs ( and eliminate some from that list), I had to go back to the library (library= all songs) to influence the Top 50.

That's all for now. As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.