Right after I hit the "PUBLISH" button on my last blog, I realized that I wasn't done. I know I had the option at that point to pull the piece back and add the other thoughts, but I don't like to throw out a wall of words just because I'm not done... I'd much rather give the reader a break and come back another day, and so here we are today with a continuation of sorts, taking a closer look at microdata.
But first, an update from the home front.
Sunday the 17th was the third Sunday that Jennifer had spent in the Dallas area. Our older son was off at a convention, leaving Mr. T and I a very quiet weekend. That's a good thing, too, as I still managed to rack up a sleep deficit. I've mentioned a few times that I'm a programmer that works nontraditional hours. I refer to my band of coworkers and myself as Nightstalkers. The big plus and big drawback of being a Nightstalker is that one often gets to stay at work until the job is done, which can sometimes mean a fairly long day, but the plus is that we are compensated for that time. Saturday ended up being a late day for me- nearly eleven hours, and then a technician was coming over to the house for the Spring air conditioning checkup at noon. At some point before noon I decided that I could not stay awake, so I asked Mr. T to wake me up when the tech arrived. The tech arrived and did his thing. I wrote a check for his service, and then went back to bed, getting up some time around 2030. Looking back, I really don't remember too much of what I did except for a bit of work on the Lego database. I was back in bed ~0430, and up Sunday a little after 1230.
Sunday was warm and the humidity was palpable. I opted for some breathable training attire to cut the grass. I have to say that I am perfectly capable of wearing some pretty nice-looking clothing combos, but fashion has little place in my workout or working outdoors clothing choices. As it was both sunny and windy, I had an Aussie-inspired wide-brimmed hat with a chinstrap. The short sleeved shirt and shorts were both black sweat wicking workout attire, and the footware: orange sneakers. Blood orange red, actually. New Balance all terrain running shoes. Peer reviewed, double blind studies utilizing FLOOS and LRBL have verified that these shoes allow me to cut the grass 19.3% faster than the average suburbanite. You read it on the Internet- it's got to be true!
After cutting the grass, I figured I'd take a walk. One would think I'd have learned my lesson from the last time I did this (two weeks ago, actually). No. No I didn't. I grabbed a fanny pack (these workout shorts don't have pockets) and headed out. Approximately an hour later I walked back into the house, drenched in sweat carrying an empty half liter water bottle.
All of that is a great segue to microdata. Why? Well, for starters, I have an Omron pedometer. I have the option of publishing my workout data to their website- in which case, my data would be a part on Omron's small data, and quite possibly, fitness big data. My choice, though, is to upload the data to the Omron tracking program on my computer, making it MY microdata. In the FWIW category, I logged 6.2 miles (13.64km) today- my best day in nearly two months of tracking.
The Lego database is growing slowly. I'm using Excel 2007, and having to relearn some things. I'm sometimes asked what should someone learn in Excel to be useful on the job. Well, it depends on the job. Every place where I've used Excel I've needed at least a few things that no one else asked for- and none of these were financial or statistical environments (which tend to be a lot more predictable in terms of desired skills). The Lego counts stand as follows: Basic bricks- 1 part number, 12 colors, 1666 elements. Plates- no counts as yet. Technic- 3 part numbers, 3 colors, 1049 elements. Total elements (pieces)- 2715.
As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.
No comments:
Post a Comment