MMXVII

I've always liked Roman numerals.For those unfamiliar, I'll save you a few seconds of searching: this post is titled "2017" in Roman numerals.

So, this is my first "official" post of 2017, and as I was looking at my blog stats earlier, I noted with pleasure and amazement that I had acquired a reader in... MONGOLIA! It ranked up there in amazement with my first African reader!

Now, I hope no one is thinking that I'm some... I'm not sure- fill-in-the-blank person from North America. Quite the opposite- I'm a casual writer who has, over the course of a few short years, had the privilege to have his stuff read in ~50 countries around the globe. And a fair percentage- if not an outright majority- do not claim English as their native tongue. So to all of my readers, old and new, I wish you a Happy New Year, Thank You and WELCOME to my blog... my little corner of the internet!

For those completely new to this blog, it has more of a "unifying theme" rather than a plot, theme or storyline. I try to keep it a safe place- no vulgarity or situations requiring the reader to agree or disagree with any political, moral or religious opinion. It sounds a bit like milk toast, but honestly, this blog is nothing more than my attempt to tell a few stories, chronicle some events and just communicate what Life looks like through my eyes... and the unifying theme is the Secret Underground Lair (SUL).

I'll reveal what is surely a pretty poorly kept secret: the SUL is a room in the basement of a modest home in the NW suburbs of Chicago (GO CUBS!). Our home is also the location of the Dungeon. our physical fitness training area- currently overrun by clutter. The rest of the basement is not named, with the exception of the Pantry, which currently is home to some chicken stock, canned tomatoes and a few other edible sundries.

The SUL is an office area, walled off from the rest of the basement and accessible by a door which has a bell on a string (we have four cats- three have learned how to use the bell. The 4th doesn't care). During our waking hours, Mr. T and I conduct business here. We pretty much sit kitty corner and back to back of each other. Both of our areas of control are in a fair amount of disarray, although the office is starting to come together. I'm not one of those folks who makes New Year's Resolutions, but I'm thinking that this will be the year when we FINALLY get the office in shape. We've made a few small steps already, discarding a few things and doing some organizing.

On the negative side, we're 18 months (at least) behind on this project.

I've noticed that Life seems to be a project, and the SUL is a great microcosm of this concept. I've already replaced some older Cat 5e cabling which was throttling network performance- I have one more switch on the way which will take care of a few other issues. I also have two older PCs which I'm thinking of adding a second gigabit NIC (network interface card)- which would theoretically double available bandwidth and throughput to the PCs. That's a question for later.

The last paragraph is a good example of my unifying theme. I shoot for data, but as I'm a hands-on SOHO I.T. guy, you'll often seen see speeds and feeds here. I hope everyone reading this will continue, possibly looking at some of my previous posts, and hopefully returning for more!

Lastly, I'm hoping we can dye the elephant this week.

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A year or so ago, I bought a plush elephant from a local retailer. I eventually also purchased a bottle of yellow dye. Why? Hadoop, of course! The unifying theme of this blog really is DATA... well, it tries.

It's time to put this to bed. I've read lots of articles, posts and blogs that were difficult to read, simply because they were presented as the dreaded "walls of text". No fear here- I try to keep my paragraphs short. I hope you've enjoyed this overview/review- please come back again!

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