I suppose this is something of the beginning a tradition- I wrote one of these last year with the exact title, save for the year. To paraphrase my previous year-ending blog post: In January, I was a contractor at RR Donnelley; as the year comes to a close, I am an employee.
Stranger still, I got a friend request on Google+ from a friend/employee I haven't seen in years- hi, Mike!
Anyway, this is the year-end blog. I'd been thinking about this for a bit, debating whether a year-in-review would make for a good theme, or something more tech related... one idea I had (which I may still do) was to write a short story with computer languages hidden in it and offer some sort of virtual prize for the reader who found all or most of them.
So, what's new this year? Well, in looking back at the 'State' of 2012, I'm still working on my database. Its come a long way, and still has a long way to go. The big difference is that it is about to make the big jump to 2010/2013 Access. I installed Office 2013 on the laptop with only one small glitch: my Lenovo came with a trial version of Office 2013. So, as the installation was almost complete, it suddenly aborted with a message something like, "You already have Office 2013 installed". Egad. Crash course in Windows 8.1 uninstalling!
So, with the pre-installed version of Office uninstalled, I reinstalled my "real" version of Office and was in for more surprises. As I did not immediately see any new icons... er, tiles, I searched for "Microsoft Office". Nothing. Zilch. Nada. Sometimes the operator needs to be smarter than the machine. I closed the search and scrolled to the right, and there were all of my freshly installed applications. Huzzah! I moved Excel and Access all the way to the left, and I was in business. I opened Excel and registered Office with my product key, then closed Excel and opened Access. I plugged the flash drive in that has the working copy of my database, and got my next surprise. While saving, I learned that the file format for 2013 is the same as the 2007 and 2010 versions of Access. I didn't do a great deal of exploring, so I have no insights to share in comparison with 2007 (and I have yet to look at 2010). The only thing I notice is that the interface appears to be "squarer".
"Squarer" is all I've got for a first impression. As far as data goes, I finally got around to adding a column to the media_title table. I had initially envisioned the column to be no/partial/complete, but went instead for a yes/no check box. I think with this refinement I'm done with design for the present- now its time to get back to the arduous task of data entry.
That's all for now from the Secret Underground Lair. Wishing the best for you and yours in the new year.
As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.
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