May the Fourth

Happy Unofficial Star Wars Day.

When our oldest son was born in Germany in the late 80's, we had no way of knowing that he would have a fan-generated holiday associated with his birthday. If he had his choice, I believe he would much rather had been born on November 5th (a red letter date in history, according to Doc Brown).

Today was the official start of Spring at our house. Much like the existence of an astronomical 1st day of a season and a meteorological 1st day of Spring, we mark the start of a new season at our house by a different sort of accounting. Our mark of the beginning of Spring is the first grass cutting.

Saturday (yesterday), Jennifer and I had gotten out of the car and one of us had remarked, "I can hear the grass growing." This, of course, was a reference to my Air Force days in Germany. I worked in the Pavements and Grounds section of a Civil Engineering Squadron. During the cooler months we all functioned as one shop, but during the growing season part of the year our shop was split into  pavements, and Grounds... essentially, some of us became uniformed groundskeepers. When the French built this airbase in the 50's, there were flocks of sheep that performed this function. When the U.S. Air Force assumed control of the airbase, at some point the sheep departed and the lawnmowers took over (as late as 1968 sheep still patrolled the flightline). Grounds was generally not considered a primo assignment, and the troops in grounds were generally razzed on a daily basis about their duties, and part of the razzing was the expression, "I can hear the grass growing". In other words, get out of the truck bay. And grab a weedeater! The real, unspoken truth about Grounds was this: we liked it. Our mission was clear: cut grass wherever we found it. We were the Masters of our own Destiny. There was but One Rule: never let your tractor run out of fuel. Let me explain.

If I recall correctly, it took two tractors two days to cut the flightline. Our flightline was not short- we could land a C-5 Galaxy in an emergency. I say "in an emergency" because our flightline had this dip, and although a C-5 could land there, it could never take off because of the dip. The tractors we had were Ford New Holland diesels that pulled 15' (~5M) mowers powered by the PTO (power-take off). We fueled up in the morning, and cut grass until 1700 rolled around or we ran low on fuel. The shop superintendent always warned us about running out of fuel- these were fuel-injected industrial tractors, and apparently it was quite the chore to get them going again once air got into the fuel supply. Needless to say, I don't think anyone ever ran out of fuel.

That was then, and this is now. It takes me roughly 30-45 minutes to do our lawn. It's a nice workout, too- I even have an entry in urbandictionary.com for "yardio"- stop by when you have a minute and give my definition a "thumbs up"!

Data- haven't had much of this lately. I need to rebuild the relationships, as well as a few tables.

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

A Red Letter Day In History

No, not November 5, 1955, which of course, is the day Doc banged his head on the sink and came up with the idea for the flux capacitor. No, in fact my red letter day in history ( as far as this blog is concerned, anyway) is March 13, 2011- the day Forty-Two was born.

In two+ years, this database hasn't grown a great deal, but it sure has matured.  It started out with a simple basis of some basic tables, and, as experience grew and normalization was constantly (I hope) applied, it grew to where it is today. As I am the chief cook and bottlewasher of this database, it's been grown slowly and hopefully with a great deal of precision. I am completely responsible for garbage in/garbage out.

I took a look today, and was surprised to see t was over two years old! In that time it has actually shrank, as one of the tables with fixed data was cut down by ~84%. This is good and bad- good, in that the database is smaller and more efficient; bad, in that I  have a smaller dataset to brag about!

So, today's blog is pretty much all database... what a concept for a blog based upon a database!  I spent about ninety minutes on data entry today, concentrating on updating Blu Ray movies which we own. In the ninety minutes I counted as data entry, I was able to enter twelve movies into the database. Let's see, that's one movie every 7.5 minutes. For what it's worth, I do type quicker than that. There was more than one reason for the high average input time. Access gave me some fits on some data that had been previously entered, but which was now not recognized. Two or three of the records experienced this glitch, where a value (record) in one table was not recognized in another table. This was disconcerting, as I could open the originating table and clearly see the value, but when I tried to enter it into target table, it did not show up as a valid value. I do not know how I fixed this, however, as I rapidly deleted, closed, opened, saved, etc. until something worked. The only thing the "problem" records had in common was spelling similarity. I was updating movies, and the two that gave me issues were "Red" and "Paul". Both of these were entered after similar titles, "Red Dawn" and "Paulie".  I think in the end I deleted all of the problem records and reentered them. I think I've seen a glitch similar to this in Excel before, but it was a first in Access.

My main table now has 843 records, which is twelve more than my last count. I'm not a huge fan of (doing) inventory or data entry, but today's work was quite satisfying. Additionally, I've added a URL field to one of the tables, which looks to be quite the promising addition.

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