You said this was about data analysis!

Regular readers are familiar with the tagline that ends every one of my posts, "As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to." There's a bit of truth there, as well as a bit of attempted humor.

For starters, I've been using "hochspeyer" as my online persona for years. "Hochspeyer" (upper cased H) is a village in Germany where Jennifer and I lived for a few years.  My online name (hochspeyer, lower cased h) is something I've been using for years. And although the topic of data doesn't come up as frequently as I'd like, I do try to feature it when possible. One problem I have is that I don't do as much analysis as, say, when I was actually employed as an analyst... for 15 USD/hr.

Pregnant pause for effect.

Yes, I once made only $15/hr working as a data analyst (this might be lots of money in some parts of the world, but in the greater Chicago area, its not- especially when you're feeding, clothing and providing housing for five persons). According to payscale.com, it should have been (at a minimum) 39K per year. According to an inflation calculator, the USD inflation rate between then and now is ~17.6%, so I was roughly 2K under the base salary for an analyst, or roughly 5%. However, at that point in my life, it was the only gig I could score, and the plus side was I learned quite a bit about basic data analysis, Excel, Access, customers, internal and external deadlines, and adding value to both your output and your position.

As a temp, I did analysis for $12/hr. My boss there was a lady who was the Quality Manager. The plant was a contract manufacturer of aluminum die castings for the automotive industry. Although they produced products for all three of the "Big 3" (General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler), their main customer was General Motors (GM). This was when Saturn was an exciting GM product line. The company had made a significant investment in equipment that was specifically designed for small cars, such as the Saturn line. Unfortunately, the Saturn line had disappointing sales for GM, and was ultimately scrapped. I apparently was doing a good job there, however: there were two rounds of layoffs in the company before I was let go. My value add there wasn't special- I integrated Excel data into an existing Access database. I also had the temerity to give reasons when they asked why I couldn't extrapolate results (when one has neither data or experience, one is up the creek without a paddle in terms of validity!)

With overtime, computer crashes and life in general, I haven't had much time to think about data as of late, much less do any analysis. However, the further I get from 10K blog viewers, the stronger the pull is to do a bit of analysis on blog hits to date.

So, here we go: blog speeds and feeds.

I started writing this blog in December of 2012. As of January 2016, I've published 196 posts to this blog- roughly five posts per month. As I'm no professional writer, I've got to say that this paltry volume is a challenge to maintain.

I've been tracking numbers from Day One, and they break down like this:

As far as continents go, only Antarctica has zero readers- Antarctica is 7th.

South America comes in 6th. With the limited amount of data I get back from Google (it's free, so I'm not complaining), I can only guess that language may be a factor in the readership here.

In terms of continents, Australia has the fewest number of countries... 1, and it is predictably 5th in the ranking. However, I think a few more countries could probably be considered a part of Australia for statistical purposes- New Zealand comes to mind immediately, but that's about it. If anyone has any ideas, please comment. The rest of the continents are as follows:

Africa (4th) is actually tied with Australia in terms of total readers, but these readers are distributed among a few countries, so I have to award the spot to Africa.

Europe comes in 3rd, which is slightly surprising because of the widespread use of English there. Twenty-seven countries represent Europe.

Asia is represented by seventeen countries and comes in 2nd, mainly because of Chinese readers.

My top market, again not a surprise, is North America, with a bit over 75% of my global total in readership. 

That's it from here for now. Before signing off, I'd like to extend special e Day (2/7) greetings to Prof. Diego Kuonen!

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



 

Adventures in Direct mail

I think I may have mentioned before, or at least alluded to, the fact that I am employed in the direct mail industry... colloquially referred to as junk mail. And, as the firm I work for is heavily involved in the production of direct mail, if you live in the United States there's a very good chance you've actually touched some of my company's handiwork.

And promptly recycled it.

Well, at least you were responsible enough to recycle it. After all, our plant outputs millions of pieces of mail for our clients.  Every month. And we are typically just one channel of their marketing plans. And our division has several plants.

According to my job title, I'm a programmer (actually, my title sounds way more impressive- in fact, it doesn't really say "programmer"at all). The cold hard fact is I do a lot more quality control work than programming. And as boring as both of those functions may sound, quality control is way more boring than programming.

And, as sad as this may sound, I'm something of an expert at quality control.

So, as I look at a lot of mail,  I have a few pieces of advice for those of you in business who are trying to sell to the general public.

#1. Actually, this is the only piece of advice I have for you. In fact, if you cannot understand this, you are hopeless, your business offers no value to anyone, and you are completely lacking in imagination and have nothing to offer to your prospective clients. I should charge $10,000 for this, but for you- today- its free.

GET A REAL BUSINESS EMAIL ACCOUNT.

Period. Pay me $10K right now, and everyone will be happy.

Seriously, how many of you expect someone to respond to your ad when the reply email is jonniebubbles@hotmail.com or edzachary89557@aol.com?

Bueller? Bueller? Does anyone else hear the echo of the buterflies' wings?

Insurance agents, car salespersons, realtors, ANYONE with a product or service: GET A REAL, BUSINESS EMAIL ADDRESS. Here's a hint: your business email address should not end in aol.com, hotmail.com or yahoo.com... some folks even have issues with gmail.com. This list is not all-inclusive, but should be a good starting point.

Spend a few bucks and get a domain: sandy@realty.biz, george@hugeinscompany.com, or fname.lastname@agreatbusiness.com.

To be honest, most of the world that has money is at least a little internet-savvy, and while hotmail, gmail, and yahoo are all valid email addresses, none of them are typically the best choices for the business world. Why? Because they are free, and if you use them in your business, then you may be perceived as being a shoestring business operator.

In other words, you could be a cheap, fly-by-night operator to a prospect.

Now, I'm sure bubbleslovesbucky@hotmail really is a great sales rep, but as soon as I see that email, I immediately assume that her reputation might be for something other than sales. So, do yourself a favor and separate your professional email from your personal email.

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

Technology, at home

This is probably only the third post out of almost two hundred that I have scrapped completely and started afresh. While the title is still valid and likewise the topic, what follows will be a world away from the original.

Let's face it: in some of our quiet moments, the only voice we hear is our own. And it is not necessarily the voice of reason. To be perfectly clear, the old post was honest and told of my experience with one well-known manufacturer of computer motherboards. And although their tech support is legendary with well-documented internet tales of fail, I will neither name or accuse them.

Reason?

It's all about the internet, which is as close as we have come to eternity as mortals to date. In simple terms, what one posts online does not go away.

Ever.

So, I try to keep my online musings fact-based, as well as my complaints. One never knows who will be looking at a particular post, blog, tweet or review.

And, what does all of this cryptic musing mean?

Jennifer is once again having some issues with her PC that Mr. T and I built for her a while ago. It was fantastic at first, but then she started experiencing mobo USB bus failures. We RMA'ed the board, and after a few months the same problems cropped up in the replacement board. Lately, she's been having a number of audio problems.

To make a long story a bit less painful, the plan is to scrap my planned gaming rig in favor of a multimedia rig for her, and I get her current headache until we're ready to get me a new PC. It's actually a win all around, because her PC is very new compared to anything I'm currently using- except for my laptop, which is another story. And, my audio and USB requirements are rather light in comparison to hers.

The laptop is currently DOA, waiting for an operating system. I've completed the hardware replacements and upgrades. All that remains is a fresh Win 8.1 install. I was originally going to downgrade the machine to Win7, but ran into a brick wall with the BIOS. So, I will try to reinstall Win8.1 and should have a report on that (complete with some pretty cool pictures [the heatsink on the the primary videocard is a thing of copper beauty]).

There's not much else in the works. Mr. T is getting tired of the state of the Secret Underground Lair so much that he has taken it upon himself to learn the basics of Microsoft Visio. He's made some progress, but to be totally honest, we still need to move some stuff out of the office.

Lastly, I'd like to share a picture of something that Mr. T and I came up with. I got a Lego Friends set for dirt cheap at Sam's Club, and it had some neat parts. However, it also had these two girls (Emma and Natasha, I think) who seemed like great zombie hunter role models, so we humbly present the Zombie Hunter Lego Friends of 2015.

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

Welcome to #194

And this post will close out 2015 and welcome in 2016.

I'd like to start off by saying this is (was) the Monday before New Year's Eve/Day... so it's the end of the year for those of us who use the Gregorian calendar. I'm going to admit a bit of ignorance here, as it took me a little bit of internet searching to come up with the Gregorian calendar. I'm not sure how it is where you live, but in my neck of the woods, "Gregorian calendar" is not really an everyday household term.

Having said that, it's now the second week of 2016.

For the long-suffering readers of this blog, this means that the author has been fairly busy. So busy, in fact, that even the participation in his favorite MMO, Rail-Nation, has suffered.

Not to worry, though, as my e-life takes second place to my IRL life.

So, what's up IRL in 2016?

Well, for starters, Mr.T. and I had a meeting about the SUL, and came up with a goal: to finish the basic remodel of the SUL by May 30.  I like this goal; however, the problem is this:  every time we make a goal like this, overtime sets in.

Now, don't get me wrong- overtime pays for these upgrades. It's just that when I put in overtime, there's less time to do projects at home.

In the interest of publishing something, I'll close here. I hope the next post will be more interesting!

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

06.04.16 update: the remodel is still nowhere near done!

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.

More "Pause" than "End"

Some years back, on a particularly busy night, a new hire rubbed eyes and blearily asked the Nightstalker crew, "Just how long DO you work?"

I answered in the only possible way: "Until the job is done."

That, truly, is what makes the overnight hours in Data Services interesting. I say "overnight" because my hours can be a bit fuzzy- and this is true for everyone in our department. Some folks come in fairly early, some come in around the traditional office start time of 0800, and some come in at 2200 or even later. We have one person who works a traditional second shift, and the remainder of the crew work something of a hybrid 3rd shift, starting anywhere from 1800 to almost 2300. I don't believe there's anything like an official policy regarding this; it's more of a rule of thumb: as long as one works one's 40 hours, everyone is happy. But, back to "until the job is done."

I think I may have previously mentioned that our plant can be considered a "job shop" or "contract manufacturer." In other words, the product that we manufacture- direct mail- does not "belong" to us. You will typically not see our name on it anywhere. We may have some involvement in the design process, and we are often involved in the postal and logistics components of a job, but at the end of the day, we're simply the folks who manufacture something for someone else.

Sometimes...

Sometimes things just need to get done. One of our top clients has a job that runs every month, and it keeps the programmer pretty busy for around a week. However, once the client approves the job, yours truly ("me") typically swings into action. This particular job requires a lot of hard copy:  proofs for press and prepress, and tray tags for press. Printing, collating and marking up of this takes ~12 hours, and is best done when the office is empty. Why? Because one simply needs a lot of space to do the job correctly and efficiently, as well as tying up two printers.

So, the Friday before last, I came in with the expectation that I would be working on this job. I had put a dent in it when I left Saturday morning, and came back Saturday evening. I got home around midnight, and everything was done.

In a nutshell, my weekend was more of a pause than an actual end to the week. The obvious downside to weekends like this is that they are short. Jennifer and I got in a nice walk on the following Sunday- almost three miles. I did a bit of work in the Secret Underground Lair, as did Mr. T, and great progress has been made. My plan for the weekend, though, had been to get to the unused desk and hook up my Raspberry Pi. That hadn't happened yet, but we're on the cusp of it!

One other huge thing that happened the previous week was the Great Book Cull, during which time a few hundred books were donated to our local library. Although both Jennifer and I hate getting rid of actual paper books, there were a few compelling reasons for eliminating these particular volumes from our collection:

1) They were classics (Shakespeare, Tolstoi, etc)- these are readily available online and downloadable as plain text files

2) Cold War fiction- entertaining reading when it was written, but no longer plausible.

3) Out of date software texts- bye, bye, Windows 95 For Dummies, etc... I  kid you not.

So that was the two weekends ago. I visited the opthamologist for the last post surgery follow up for my right eye. (all is good- come back in a year). Don't get me wrong- if you're in the Des Plaines area, Dr. Winkler is the best. I'm just ready to get on with my life!

Pause, continued... this past weekend (Dec 19-20): I got out on time on Saturday morning for a change, but I knew I'd be coming back on Saturday evening. I figured a few hours would take care of a few quick production QC's- boy was I wrong.

The first job went smoothly, and it was done fairly quickly. The second, though, took much longer, as some paperwork was missing. It's not unusual for this to happen with this particular job, though. The third job was unexpected, but pretty easy- especially since the lead programmer was also in the office to explain a few things. The last job, though.

In a nutshell, it was programmed correctly but the output was set up incorrectly, and consequently compiled incorrectly, and the output was just plain wrong. As it was late and hadn't brought my meds to the office, I remade the files and recompiled the job, but did not perform the production QC.  

Finally, data.

I need to say something about my writing process, which will eventually relate to data. I promise.

When I write a blog, I generally have an idea of where I want it to go. Sometimes it goes there, sometimes it doesn't. This blog is a case of: IT DOESN'T CARE WHERE I WANT TO GO.

Point: my idea for this blog actually had to do with a concept for music opinion data analysis.

Way back when, in my college days, I started my music database. It was on looseleaf paper, and it was unwieldy and incredibly difficult to update or edit. At some point, I decided I'd create something of a personal "Top 40". Only looking at my stats was somewhat biased, I quickly surmised.  Undaunted, I expanded my pursuit to include what others were interested in. When I shared my results, however, some (many) of the participants were upset when I told them the results were weighted. That is, their top votes received 10 points, and their bottom votes received one point. Huh?

Participants in the survey were asked to vote for up to 10 of their favorite albums, and 10 of their favorite songs. I asked that they please put them in order of preference. When the results had been tabulated, I shared them. In my circle of friends and acquaintances, no one could believe that "Bread's Greatest Hits"  was more popular than "Barry Manilow Live" (joke).

I did it this way for a couple of (what I thought) were very good reasons. First: everyone probably has a favorite song. Hey, if its YOUR fave, why not weight it? Second, I wanted to be able to track which songs were actually more popular than which songs were most often voted for. Taking the two most "popular" songs of this era (from my polls), the hands-down winners were The Beatles' "Hey Jude" and Led Zepplin's "Stairway To Heaven". As my survey was quite small, let's say I had 10 voters: 4 went with the Beatles, and 4 with Led Zepplin. Let's say the other two went with Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Freebird" as their favorite. If Hey Jude == 1, and Stairway == 1 and Freebird == 1, then we have 4 to 4 to 2. What matters next is what is the next greatest song.  So, two of the "Beatles" guys vote for  "I Saw Her Standing There", and a couple of Zepplin fans vote for "Rock and Roll". After that, each of the other Beatles and Zepplin fans votes for Hey Jude and Stairway, furthering the tie. Then, we factor in the Skynyrd fans, who generally might like the Zep guitars, but can sing to Hey Jude. So, the final score ends up being Beatles: 5.8 (among Beatles fans), Zep: 5.8 (among Zepplin fans). The two Skynyrd fans, though, both vote Hey Jude #2, and Stairway #3, giving the Beatles a total of 6.6 and Led Zep 5.8. Therefore, in this tiny, theoretical sample, "Hey Jude" is the greatest rock and roll song of all time.

Sorry about the length of this... I told you all of that to tell you this: I have a new data project which is based on my previous data project.

I know what songs I like and those which I don't like. I plan to quantify this data and publish my findings in a new format.

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

The State of the Blog, v.03

If it's December, then it must be time to...

Celebrate. Commemorate. Conjugate...?

Well, maybe not conjugate, but it's the THIRD anniversary of this blog! I'm somewhat e-excited about this. I can honestly say I never expected it to go this long, or have so many entries. Here's the quick recap, from the 1st blog The Final Frontier to the still strangely most popular one Why, 2K to the one that slipped through the proverbial e-cracks A Red Letter Day In History.

The unifying theme of this blog is data. A casual observer might not notice this, but I did say "unifying theme". So, if you're looking for the golden data nuggets of wisdom check out the twitters or websites of my good e-buddies Kirk Borne Ph.D. Lee Baker Ph.D. or Gregory Piatesky Ph.D.

For  those who think my data science is a bit sexist, please check out my good e-buddies Diego Kuonen Ph.D., Carla Gentry and Carol Lynn Curchoe Ph.D.

(In the FWIW column, these folks are some of my followers on Twitter). Not to drop names, of course! :)

In any event, I did drop a few names there, so I should probably clarify things a bit. Some of my more recent posts have been of a somewhat personal nature, and not much data was presented. For the (I'm sure this is a very small percentage of my) readers who were expecting some data in those posts, I apologize.

In actuality, most of my "data" occurs on Twitter, with some on Pinterest. To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure what my most impactful social medium is these days... Twitter is the easiest, Blogspot is the deepest, and Pinterest is the broadest. And, most importantly, it's hobby, so I'm not paying for analytics!

I suppose I enjoy blogging the most, as it is the most creative. Pinterest is lots of fun- and easy. However, there's very little original content. Twitter is fun, but once again, not much original content, as I'm generally more of a repeater rather than an original content contributor. Blogger... this is my "original" e-home. To quote AC/DC- "No stop signs, speed limits...." Not that I'm an AC/DC fan.

An update on the SUL (Secret Underground Lair)....

This is my corner of the SUL. If you're curious, the two leftmost PCs are Win7 machines, and the other is an HP workstation running Ubuntu 12.10, I think. There's actually a 4th screen (which is off camera to the right) for Raspberry Pi use and testing), and there are two additional PCs- one of which is another Win7 box, and the last one is an offline XP machine. In fairly big SUL news, we've been getting rid of old tech boxes (those of the cardboard variety, to clarify), and have reclaimed nearly a square meter of floor space.

That's all for now. Oh... still hoping someone in Antarctica will pick this up!

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