Time to enter the data

Before the advent of memes on the internet- in fact, long before the internet was commonly available- there were radio and television commercials. Well, there were commercials in the parts of the world where private companies, as opposed to the State, owned broadcasting companies... I'm not sure how State-owned and operated media operate(d). But, where private enterprise ruled, these commercials were the memes of their day. They had memorable taglines that everyone seemed to know.

"Plop, plop, fizz, fizz. Oh what a relief it is."

"I can't believe I ate the whole thing,"

"Where's the beef?"

"Have you any Grey Poupon?"

"Time to make the donuts."

There's a metric s***-tonne more, but the Dunkin' Donuts one resonates most with me when it comes to nostalgia and data entry. There were a few different commercials with this theme, but they all had one thing in common: a haggard, sleep-deprived, middle-aged man in pajamas rousing himself from desperately needed sleep to go to the store to make donuts at an unspeakable hour just so that you, the hungry consumer, could enjoy a fresh pastry for breakfast or your morning coffee break. In forcing himself to provide a (*ahem) "much-needed service" (selling us donuts), the character in the commercial was sympathetic and appreciated.

Mind you- this is an analogy, not a direct comparison. The only thing that the character in the commercial and I have in common is that we have to force ourselves to perform a task. In my case, that task is data entry. My end product, on the other hand, is pretty much purely intended for my own consumption: after all, no one has a desire to know any of the specifics of my database.

So. Even though I'm not known to be a great goal-setter, on Friday I made myself a simple one: set aside one hour for some data entry Saturday evening. I'm happy to report I accomplished this. However, there are caveats,

For starters, although I enjoy working with data, data entry is not my cup of tea. I do not type rapidly- the last time I was clocked I came in at around 32WPM- but I'm pretty accurate. Jennifer made a wonderful impromptu dinner, and over the course of that dinner (about an hour) I managed to enter an "impressive" thirty-six movie titles into a table! (The curse of owning your data is that you're responsible for your data!) So, where do we go from here?  

Well, "Forty-two" is back up and running- even though it may be the laughing stock of data bases on the internet. Currently one table with thirty-six entries... but yes, it's a database. Not searchable or relational, but still a nascent database.

I had also intended to start my Lego spreadsheet, but that's another project for another day. My blog spreadsheet is up to date, and with that I think all of my data news s covered.

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