Y'all know that the unifying theme of this blog is data. It's my data primarily, with occasional nods to Big Data and the Internet of Things (IoT). Meerkat, our Subaru Outback, and Ziggy, our Garmin GPS, are members of the Internet of Things. But don't say that near them... they're people, as M*A*S*H*'s Radar O'Reilly might say.
Since Merkat is bigger and older than Ziggy, I've decided to turn the keyboard over to him (I think Meerkat is a him...), and let him revisit our trip. Take it away, Meerkat....
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Okay... so there we were,
With 1.9 miles on the tripmeter, we departed the SUL. Ziggy immediately started chirping instructions. It was Monday morning- 0738 local, and we found ourselves enmeshed in rush hour traffic. If the pilot had any common sense, we would have been moving through traffic at least fifteen minutes earlier. As it was, we found ourselves ensconced in a "popular" intersection, with nothing to do but wait our turn at the left arrow.
We finally got our turn and proceeded south.
To make this story more interesting, we drove south and west for a long time and arrived in Texas. I sat in the driveway for a day, and the rest of the time I slept in the street, while Ziggy got to go inside.
Afterwards, things got interesting.
The humans did all of their "visiting" and had all of their meetings, and then it was time to go home. Because of all of the unrest in Ferguson, MO, we decided to spend our tourism dollars in safer areas and avoided the St.Louis area entirely.
As we approached Oklahoma City, I sensed a irregularity in one of the mechanical systems, and promptly alerted the pilot. Not long after that, help arrived. A squad of shock troops deployed, led by a dude that could only be described as a cowboy: while the rest of the unit was in full battle dress armor, there he was in cowboy boots and denims, 9mm strapped to his side as if he did this every day.
In any event, he got us to where we needed to be, barked some orders, and in a few hours we were back on the road.
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I promise that's the last time I will EVER let Meerkat write a blog entry! Well, I'll never let ANY individual that can be classified as a member of the IoT guest write in my blog. I really thought Meerkat was going to make it really interesting... I was wrong- sorry.
In the wonderful world of data, I FINALLY backed up my Omron pedometer data. Some of you might recall that in February (One simply does not raid the SUL) I lamented the loss of fifteen months worth of pedometer data due to a HDD crash. Well, even some us "old hands" are a little slow at times, but tonight I FINALLY downloaded the data to the desktop. I'll back it up to the external HDD once I clean it up a bit.
Clean?
Yes, the data- specifically the dates- are improperly formatted for my use. When I downloaded the software from the Omron site, I got the European version rather than the American version of the software. It doesn't really matter too much as I'm okay with kilometers and the energy expenditure is shown in kcal's rather than joules, but even though I'm okay with European dating, my copy of Excel sorts American style (for the unaware, Euro=day/month/year, American=month/day/year) So, the dates need to be edited before being backed up. There's a funny story about those dates... well, it's funny now, anyway.
Back when I was in high school, I was introduced to Fletcher Pratt's Naval Wargame (see "Imagination"). The resources I used for this game were all published in England, so I became accustomed to the Euro dating system, so much so that when I got my driver's license, I entered my birthday Euro style without thinking, and when I received my license, my birthmonth was listed as May rather than September. I had to go back to the license facility, explain what had happened and get them to issue a new license.
There may be some "big" data news in the next blog... probably. There may be a Christmas blog as well.
As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to
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