Where the streets have no names

As with many other places, roadways in this part of the world more often than not have names. Some in particular - notably State Routes, U.S. Highways and Interstate Highways- are generally identified by numerals. In our little corner though, we often have roads that change names as one travels from town to town, or suburb to suburb. What's interesting about the particular road the title refers to is that while their names may change, their numbers do not.

To illustrate, I had interviews at a pair of staffing agencies this past week, one to the south and one to the northwest. The one to the south (and slightly west) was ~15.2 miles (33.4 km) according to Google Maps, and the one to the northwest was about 16.6 miles (36.5 km), also according to Google Maps. What makes these trips related are the purposes and the streets involved. On Tuesday, I used Higgins Road (Illinois Route 83), traveling south to Butterfield Road (Illinois Route 56), which I took to my destination near the intersection of Butterfield and 22nd St (which is also known both as Illinois Route 38 and Cermak Road). On Wednesday, I took Higgins north all the way to my destination.

What I find most fascinating about all of this is the relatively illogical naming conventions of roadways. Here is where Jennifer and I often have discussions about Chicago, where I grew up. These discussions generally end up with her saying something to the effect of, "Streets in Chicago don't make any sense." Which I don't really understand... then again, she didn't grow up in a big city. The thing that makes it all so interesting is that neither of us gets what the other one doesn't get... and we've been married for over twenty-five years!

I was going to wax eloquently and at great length here about the Chicago grid system, but in truth the information I found would be boring- even by my standards. So, I'll just leave it alone, save for this explanation: to tell someone ( a fellow Chicagoan) where I used to live in Chicago would have taken (at most) seven words: twenty-five hundred north and fifty-six hundred west. Where I currently live, a short paragraph would work... IF you knew the neighborhood. 'Nuff said.

I started writing this several days ago, and have been trying to publish it all week. I think I've mentioned before that my sporadic work hours can be bursty at times- this week, I had an unexpected Tuesday night, followed by consecutive ten hour nights when I came home at 0500 on Wednesday, and 0600 on Thursday (*actually 0500 Thursday and 0600 Friday morning!)

I've been looking for a foundational database design book, and the one pictured I found at our library. It's ancient as far as I.T. books go (copyright 1987). I'm fairly certain that I will not finish it: even though it has some pretty good design information, the terminology is not up to current standards (the author seemed to like the term "enterprise", but it does not seem to mean what "enterprise" means in the twenty-first century.

I need to wrap this up- it's nearly a week past due, even by my lax standards. I took a picture of our roses of sharon in our yard this past week... they're a poor substitute for data, but they look nice.  

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

A word, in any language...

I had this thought the other day. It's a thought one only really has after having studied another language for some time. Even having said that, I think I need to back up just a bit.

I'm not sure how things work in the rest of the world, but here in the United States of America, foreign language instruction can be somewhat challenging. For example, in most parts of Western Europe, English is taught- mainly because of business requirements... I believe this is also true of Japan. In the U.S.A., Spanish is more likely to be taught than any other language, primarily because of cultural reasons (and, because of the perceived ease of learning Spanish).

When I was in high school (gymnasium), I elected to take four years of German.  This was slightly odd, but pretty much fit in with my character. Prior to that, I had a couple years of Polish in grade school. In college, I was exposed to Russian and French. Courtesy of the United States Air Force, I met Czech, Jennifer and Slovak. I have studied a few other languages more casually, as well as working on some computer languages.

So, today I'm writing this- not so much as a polyglot, but as someone who has studied a number of languages and survived.

My original thought was "words in another language" that were memorable. I have a short list of these, and they make me laugh- not because of their definitions, but just because of the way they sound to this particular English speaker.

My very favorite German word is "zusammengestossen". Like many German words, its a compound and pretty long. "Stau" is another great German word- it essentially means "a freakishly long traffic jam involving multiple wrecks". You won't find that definition in the dictionary, but that's pretty much what it is. Also, another long-time favorite German word is "ausgezeichnet". One word almost got me in trouble in Germany, and I can laugh about it now. I had to find an apartment "on the economy" before Jennifer could join me in Europe, so one of the guys in the squadron who was married to a German woman took me to a German realtor. His knowledge of colloquial German was pretty good, but I had studied it in high school, so my German knowledge was a little different than his. We were talking to the realtor, and my new friend was trying to explain the paperwork process back at the base. There are a good number of words that are cognates in the two languages, but in this instance he picked a false cognate, saying "der Prozess" for "the process". Before the realtor had the opportunity to inquire further, I quickly interjected, "Kein Prozess! Kein Prozess!", because, of course, anyone who has taken more than a few years of German would immediately remember that "Der Prozess" is the title of one of Franz Kafka's most famous works, which in English is "The Trial"- as in, a trial in a court of law!

"Merde" is my favorite French word. It's so portable, and quite down-to-earth. (I really can't think of "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" without the scene of Napoleon in the bowling alley popping up!). "Roi" and "Rue" are also favorites. They're a few of the first words I encountered that were used to instruct the correct pronounciation of the French "r". 

пожалуйста is my favorite Russian word (yes, I took a semester of Russian!) It's quite a complicated word to a native English speaker, but it embodies Russian-ness. нравиться is another favorite. I should make note here why these particular words are favorites: in Russian, these words are fairly complex sounding to the ear accustomed to English sounds. And, their English equivalents are fairly simple in comparison.

Lastly, there's a Czech word that brings back fond memories- "potřebovat". It's a very basic word, and not particularly funny, except I had this one classmate who absolutely could not pronounce this word, and every time he tried it sounded like some lost in love wildebeest howling in bewilderment after eating a jar of pickled hot peppers. He would turn red, and everyone would laugh! 

So that's a short version of some of my language experiences.

Not much to report on the database front, but I had something of an epiphany at an employment agency today which is data related. During the interview, I was asked what sort of position I was seeking. I replied, "I'm more of a generalist than a specialist," and proceeded to explain some of my job background. As I was doing this, I suddenly realized that I had more data analysis experience than I had given myself credit for.

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

Quantuum leaping for non-physicists

Working the hours and days that I do, I quite often find my mind is set to the wrong day of the week. This is occasionally an issue. For example, this past Thursday I was getting ready for work and I told Jennifer that I'd probably park in front of our neighbor's house when I got done. She reminded me that there was still construction going on. No problem, I said- tomorrow's Saturday. No, she replied- tomorrow's Friday. Yes, these conversations really do happen in our house. It's like an endless loop of the original Terminator movie, the scene where Reese is asking the cop what the date is. Except instead of the cop being startled by the demand for the year, in our house, its the day.

It was the Tuesday evening, and I had the night off. I'd promised myself that if it was a no-work night, I'd spend some quality time with the database- which I'm quite happy to report I did. Some ground rules were needed though, because as I think I've mentioned earlier, while I don't really hate data entry... I'm just not horribly fast. So I came up with a system to make the process move forward and not be horribly tedious: modified carrot and stick. The "stick" is the actual work: I grabbed six CDs, and then checked the Name table, entering the missing ones where necessary. Next, I checked the Media_Title table, once again entering  new album titles where necessary. After that came the "carrot"- a round of Civilization V (henceforth, Civ V). Now there's a bit of a catch here: more often than not, Jennifer is quite underimpressed with my self-discipline, especially when unsupervised, and doubly so when computers are involved. On this night, however, I had my "A" game on, and things went quite well. As mentioned, first all of the artists were checked and updated, then the album names, and finally the songs. For the songs, though, the rules change slightly: after every two albums, I get a turn on Civ V. The other caveat is this: as I consider myself a Civ V neophyte, the game I'm playing is a twelve-player hotseat game, with yours truly playing each player (in other words, no AI or NPC players except for city states, so each turn is actually twelve turns). And yes, the data entry is being done on one PC while the game is happening on another machine.

I just did a guesstimate of how much work I have ahead of me. Considering just A/V titles (including games), I think I'm going to have ~2K titles to enter. This does NOT include books, .mp3s and downloads- and the last two I hadn't even thought about until just now.

Oh, well, I like a good project!

*From the IN-CASE-YOU-MISSED-IT Department- some handy links to older blog posts. This will be an occasional feature- any thoughts about my shameless self-promotion are quite welcome!

http://hochspeyer.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-final-frontier.html

http://hochspeyer.blogspot.com/2012/12/a-free-night.html

http://hochspeyer.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-tilde-hero-for-everyone.html

http://hochspeyer.blogspot.com/2012/12/an-it-christmas-whole-lotta-cliches-in.html

http://hochspeyer.blogspot.com/2012/12/december-31-2012-state-of-blog.html

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

Pop! Goes the ... CD?

In doing the background for this post, I discovered that the song Pop! Goes the Weasel has a bit more history than I was aware. It originated in England sometime prior to 1850, and started out as a folk tune, complete with an associated dance. And I'll bet you thought it was all about a jack in the box!

As mentioned in my earlier blog A tale of two PC's , I spent the two day Fourth of July holiday helping Daniel get a new PC and getting it set up. Saturday and Sunday were scheduled work days for me (I knew this weekend was going to be an adventure, because although the presses were shut down on Friday, our customer was open for business). On Saturday, I got to the office at noon. I had told a coworker that I'd try to be in a bit earlier, but I was still dragging from three consecutive VERY late work nights and then the two days of PC adventures. I met the new guy, and we talked and I showed him some things, but owing to some software issues, I could not work on the actual jobs I was there to work on until about 1400. Once my other coworker was able to finally get some jobs compiled, I started in. I don't know when the new guy left, but Javier and I were there until 0400 on Sunday morning. We came back later on Sunday- he at 1230 and me ~1330- and we completed our epic, Herculean tasks of the weekend.

The sad thing is, this was not the first sixteen hour day I've worked.

Pop! Goes the CD happened as I was leaving work on Sunday morning. When I left at 0400, the sky was a predawn blue with a slight breeze moving the humid air about. I removed my yellow foam hearing protectors as I stepped out of the plant, and I heard the happy chirps and calls of the birds which were apparently busy getting breakfast. I put my lunch bag and backpack into the passenger seat of the pickup, got in the driver's side and started the engine. I had not even got out of the parking lot when Pop! Goes the CD happened.

Several months ago I had borrowed a CD from Daniel, Tenchi Muyo in Love. I popped the CD into the player in the truck, and all was good (I think the soundtrack is excellent). When I was done listening to the music, I went to eject the CD. The blue eject light and button were no longer lit, and did not work. Over the next several months we tried to no avail to eject the CD.

Flash forward to Sunday morning, 0400ish. I am ready to pull out onto the street when without any warning or intervention on my part, the display panel opens up, the blue lights light up and out comes the CD! I am both flabbergasted and pleased, and quickly grab the disc, put it in the console and drive home.

Now that the midsummer holiday has come and gone, I should have more time to devote to working on the database and HTML, CSS3 and Javascript. Emphasis on should.

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

A tale of two PC's

There comes a time in most everyone's life when they must acquire a new PC. For some, its a matter of staying on the bleeding edge of technology. For others, its an environmental requirement- being forced by job or school to move from Windows to Mac, or vice-versa. For many others, its a tech refresh, where they have an older system, and feel a need to move from Windows XP to Windows 7 or 8 or something like that. For a hearty few that are tired of the expense and rat-race nature of updates and upgrades, something like Linux may be in their immediate future. Lastly, there are those who have found themselves in the midst of a catastrophic hardware failure.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I've experienced catastrophic hardware failure once or twice. Have you ever heard the phrase, " Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger"? (I had to look this up- it was Kelly Clarkson, not Pink, who did a song with this theme). Speaking for myself, much of what I've learned about the care and feeding of PCs has occurred in real time- that is, something failed, and the only tech support I had was me.

So flash forward a "few" years. It's a screwy week- the U.S.A.'s national holiday, Independence Day- the Fourth of July- falls on a Thursday this year. Jennifer and I had originally thought this week would be really short on work hours, but it turns out I would end up with a bunch of overtime- and a couple of days off! Of course, what happened did not exactly turn out this way.

On the Fourth, my sleep was disturbed by voices. I couldn't figure out what was going on, but after a little bit I dragged myself out of bed to find that Daniel's laptop had crashed most egregiously. After a great deal of discussion, Daniel announced that he wanted to purchase a new desktop. (Like the rest of his immediate family, his PC is his connection to the world.)  So, we ended up making a pilgrimage to Tiger Direct in Hoffman Estates. Mind you, this is day One of my supposed two days off.

So off we go to the store.  As he has not purchased a PC in some time, he's fairly clueless when we walk into the store. The sales folks at Tiger worked really hard to deliver a very nice PC within his budget, and after a while he got a PC configured, paid his money, and we left. Note that I said configured; this was a custom build, so we needed to return the following day to pick the machine up. When we got home, I cut the grass- mainly because it needed to be cut, but partly for a bit of stress relief.

The following day- Friday (Day Two of my supposed two days off) - Daniel worked, so we needed to wait until he was finished to pick up the PC. Thankfully, this was a holiday for many folks, so the rush hour traffic wasn't as bad as it normally would have been. We picked up the PC and came home. Life was good.

Until we discovered a slight problem. The new monitor had DVI and VGA inputs, but the video card had only HDMI outputs. We have no DVI or HDMI cables. Soooo......, a quick search on the web shows cables ranging from seven dollars to over thirty. We decided to see if we could find one at a local retail story. No luck at Office Depot. Ditto Target. We scored one at- of all places- Kmart. Cable= two hours.

Go figger. Data is way less painful than this.

As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you dont have to.

All Together Now

Okay, sometimes when one needs to get from here to there, one needs to utilise a Yellow Submarine. Hey, it worked for The Beatles! And to paraphrase Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant, "I'm not here to talk about The Beatles". However, as the song starts out, "One, two, three, four," I'd like to use it as my introduction to today's talk about Data. And Normalisation (sort of... I suppose that Standardisation is more appropriate).

Since I'm done with The Beatles, I'm reverting to more familiar spellings, like Normalization and Standardization (for all of my readers in the United States).

One of my pet peeves about our local library is the way in which the video collection (Blu Rays and DVDs) is shelved. In fairness, the library does a very good job at being an asset to the community, and is overall a very nice place to browse, study or meet. Close to the weekends, however, patrons pillage the video collections, and on most Fridays one finds this section in a shambles. It just happens. My peeve about cataloging and shelving, though, is about alphabetization.

I just did a cursory scan of our videos, and could not find a title that started with a number or number that was spelled out- all of them were numerals: 12:01, 300, 1941, etc. This, of course, is THE proper way to sort a list that contains numerals (if you're uncertain about this, sort something A-Z in Access or Excel). After these, the next titles are The A-Team, The Abyss, and Adventures In Babysitting- a moderately interesting assortment! You're probably wondering why they're sorted this way, and this brings me back to videos at the library... after a quick story about classical music.

I was listening to a classical radio station one day, and I heard the really cool medieval-sounding music that was used in the most excellent Excalibur (1981) movie. I had previously tried to find the soundtrack, but it was out of print and our library didn't have it. When the piece ended, I had pen and paper ready. The announcer said something like "karminabaranakarloff." That's what I wrote down and I headed off to Tower Records. I fortunately spoke with a gentleman in the classical music department there. He knew exactly the piece I was talking about, and handed me a CD. It was Carmina Burana, by Carl Orff.

I was in the ballpark, so to speak. And this is why, although I KNOW the library is wrong to shelve certain titles the way that they do, I tolerate it. You see, the gentleman who knew what I was talking about got me exactly what I wanted, despite- or maybe in spite of, my spelling. And so we go back to my reluctant tolerance of the library's shelving conventions. Although the library is technically wrong, they are wrong for the best of reasons: serving the needs of the public, the sans coulettes, the least common denominator of the public which they serve. If someone is unaware that 300 is a numeral, they will presumably seek the title out under "T"- a logical, but wrong assumption. So, I compromise. I do a bit of organizing whenever we're at the library, primarily because the video section is generally a mess: Dewey has never been applied here.

And that's all for now from here.

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

Verdancy

This word crossed my mind late this afternoon as I was finishing up some yardwork.  I wasn't even sure it was a word at first, but I looked it up online and sure enough, it is! After all, if it's on the interwebz, then it's got to be - it's the Law.

I've lost track of how many days in a row that it has rained here in Chicagoland, but it was at least six. Today (Sunday) was the first day that we didn't have any rain, and I made good on my promise to myself that I'd do some yardwork when the rain let up. In fact, it was a picture-perfect day for doing things outdoors, with a nice wind, sunshine and temperatures in the low 70's F (22-23C).

Before doing that, though, Jennifer and I spent some quality time playing Sid Meier's Civilization V. Civ V is the latest iteration of what is probably my favorite PC game ever. It's one of the first PC games we purchased- I'm pretty sure Space Quest III was the very first (I remember playing that on our Commodore Colt in CGA!), and after that we got A-10 Silent Thunder (this game prompted our very first video card purchase). After that, it was either Railroad Tycoon or Civilization. Strangely enough, the last two were both Sid Meier games.

We're not huge gamers, but we both really enjoy Civ V, and we played for about an hour. Jennifer announced that she needed to get the turkey in the oven, and that would take about two hours. This was perfect, as I was ready to tackle the yard. So, I saved the game, and she headed to the kitchen, and I got together my gardening gear.

Around here, we pass things down. When the kids were little, for example, clothes were often passed down from one sibling to another, and if they were really good quality, three kids got to wear them. As the kids have long since grown into adult sizes, we don't do that anymore, but when Jennifer's or my shoes become unserviceable or unpresentable in polite company, they become yard shoes.  So, I grabbed my official New Balance yard shoes, my wide-brimmed straw hat, and headed out the door. My first stop was the garage, where I grabbed some clippers, and then I was off. A liter of water and two hours later, my task was done. I almost forgot to mention my task. Normally, yardwork for me is cutting the grass, but today it was weeding and culling. Our sunflowers are coming up, but are competing with a lot of other foliage, most notably mints, weeds and wild morning glories. So, I did a lot of clipping where practical, and uprooting where necessary, to help the sunflowers grow.  

I haven't posted any pictures in some time, so I thought I'd share a few today. The first three are mainly sunflowers, and the last one is budding ornamental onions. The onions could have been props on the original 1960's Star Trek television series. Before the flowers bloom, they look like pods with needles attached. When they finally blossom, the white outer case splits and withers away, exposing a very delicate, fluffy flower ball. They also produce lots of easy to harvest seeds. In addition to the onions and sunflowers, we grow roses of sharon, hollyhocks, basil, ornamental parsley, sage, and dill. Dill is another 60's Star Trek prop plant wannabe. It's very wispy and alien-looking, and incredibly aromatic; a few years ago, it was plentiful in our yard, but has become rarer in recent times. This year, I'm letting the surviving plants go to seed .

Nothing new to report on the data front.

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