"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."
As noted over a year ago in this space, No plan of battle survives first contact with the enemy, the best plans often don't get past the first round or two of testing. It's unfortunately true, and I'm referring here to the Lego portion of Forty-Two. I'm sitting on a challenge right now that's more conundrum than impasse.
With only sixty-five entries, I ran into one of the proverbial "straw that broke the camel's back" records. My format had been "ANNNNNNNN.XXXXXXX", where A=alpha character, N=numeric character, the "."is a placeholder, and X=alpha or numeric character. It's large and unwieldy, but that doesn't matter, as I only need it to force order onto the Peeron data. So, I need to add a few more characters to the right of the "." placeholder. Still, I hate to redo stuff I've already done. So now, it appears that I'm up to nineteen bytes for the primary key. Hopefully, it doesn't grow more than that.
Before I forget, the Men Without Hats reference is, of course, to The Safety Dance, which I was humming when it looked like nineteen would, indeed, be a safe number. I just skimmed the entire list, and I'm fairly certain I can stick with nineteen.
As far as the rest of the database is concerned, I've been pounding away at my least favorite activity- data entry. It's still a really small database, and not even relational as yet. Three tables, containing in total 753 records.
I think that's a wrap. The internal issue I always have when doing these types of updates is keeping this more blog than change log. Oh well, speeds and feeds are gonna be speeds and feeds....
Lastly, a big shout out to my friends in Russia and Portugal- I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoy writing it.
As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.
Showing posts with label Russia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Russia. Show all posts
Monday, May 23, 2016
Sunday, December 27, 2015
Merry Christmas, Happy Christmas
Merry Christmas or Happy Christmas or whatever you might say in your neighborhood. Or not.
Those of us here in the United States have a way of assuming that folks everywhere do things in the same fashion that we do. And then we beat ourselves up for this notion. However, I'm thinking that this might just be simply human nature rather than American stupidity, because I think as a rule, we probably believe that everyone is going through the same stuff that we are.
For example, I have a couple of coworkers that (obviously) live in the same area that I do, except that they live to the south of me. We generally experience the same weather.
Last year, though.... One of our coworkers is originally from Russia. North of the Arctic Circle. Bloody ******* cold Russia. Chicago had experienced one of the worst cold winters on record. So cold, in fact, that it was warmer north of the Arctic Circle- where our coworker hails from.
Perceptions and your reality are not universal truth.
As John Lennon said, "So this is Christmas".
Christmas is most likely unknown in some parts of the world, and misunderstood or maligned where it is known. In the United States, which is probably the "Christmas Capitol of the World" (I just made that up, but it's probably accurate), Christmas has become so secularized and commercialized that, like Halloween and Easter, not much seems to be left of its real meaning.
Therefore, I've decided to make a sort of peace with the two versions of Christmas: the secular and the sacred.
The secular: I enjoy this simply because it is so joyful and peaceful on a number of levels. For starters, it's about winter in the northern hemisphere- something that is quite familiar to me. The scent of pine has always been pleasant to me, and the effect is compounded in the brisk, wintry air. I also love the music of Christmas- a great deal of it. There have been some real stinkers that have come out (Santa Baby, and The Most Wonderful Time of the Year come to mind immediately).
Folks tend to be a bit more divided about movies, though, because although its generally pretty easy to tell that a song is a Christmas song, the criteria for Christmas movies is pretty much a grey area. For example, apart from movies which actually feature the story of the birth of Jesus, we're left with a pretty large collection of movies which either deal with the secular version of Christmas, or merely occur around Christmas. I'm not a real movie fan, but two of my favorite movies fit into the latter category- they occur around Christmas: Die Hard, and Lethal Weapon. And for the record, I do NOT like Elf.
As for the real "reason for the season," I think the Bible explains it better than I can.
As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.
Those of us here in the United States have a way of assuming that folks everywhere do things in the same fashion that we do. And then we beat ourselves up for this notion. However, I'm thinking that this might just be simply human nature rather than American stupidity, because I think as a rule, we probably believe that everyone is going through the same stuff that we are.
For example, I have a couple of coworkers that (obviously) live in the same area that I do, except that they live to the south of me. We generally experience the same weather.
Last year, though.... One of our coworkers is originally from Russia. North of the Arctic Circle. Bloody ******* cold Russia. Chicago had experienced one of the worst cold winters on record. So cold, in fact, that it was warmer north of the Arctic Circle- where our coworker hails from.
Perceptions and your reality are not universal truth.
As John Lennon said, "So this is Christmas".
Christmas is most likely unknown in some parts of the world, and misunderstood or maligned where it is known. In the United States, which is probably the "Christmas Capitol of the World" (I just made that up, but it's probably accurate), Christmas has become so secularized and commercialized that, like Halloween and Easter, not much seems to be left of its real meaning.
Therefore, I've decided to make a sort of peace with the two versions of Christmas: the secular and the sacred.
The secular: I enjoy this simply because it is so joyful and peaceful on a number of levels. For starters, it's about winter in the northern hemisphere- something that is quite familiar to me. The scent of pine has always been pleasant to me, and the effect is compounded in the brisk, wintry air. I also love the music of Christmas- a great deal of it. There have been some real stinkers that have come out (Santa Baby, and The Most Wonderful Time of the Year come to mind immediately).
Folks tend to be a bit more divided about movies, though, because although its generally pretty easy to tell that a song is a Christmas song, the criteria for Christmas movies is pretty much a grey area. For example, apart from movies which actually feature the story of the birth of Jesus, we're left with a pretty large collection of movies which either deal with the secular version of Christmas, or merely occur around Christmas. I'm not a real movie fan, but two of my favorite movies fit into the latter category- they occur around Christmas: Die Hard, and Lethal Weapon. And for the record, I do NOT like Elf.
As for the real "reason for the season," I think the Bible explains it better than I can.
As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.
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