"How was your weekend?"

A typical Monday-at-work will often early on experience the "How was your weekend" question. It's pretty safe, really, and it's pretty much a soft question- there's almost NO way that this ice breaker can fail. Please note- I said ALMOST.

"Weekend" means the end of the workweek: no work, no school. Downtime. Sometimes, occasionally, it means that despite prior commitments, stuff that needs to get done at home, or an astronomical event that last occurred in 1982 and won't happen again until 2033, you have to work.

I'm trying really hard not to sound like I'm complaining, but the plain fact is this: I do not relish working on Sundays. Sunday has always been the quieter day of the week for me- relax, maybe catch a sporting event on TV, and do a bit of home-related stuff (grass mowing, etc.).

Not this weekend, though. This weekend was nonexistent for me.

I rolled into the office around 2230 on Friday night. It looked like a fairly busy night from the start; I had no way of knowing exactly HOW busy it would be. Busy ended up being NINE hours of overtime of Friday, and another SEVEN on Sunday. The downside to all of this was no weekend. The upside is overtime pay. We just had a few medical expenses (optometrist, veterinarian), so the extra buckazoids are much appreciated. Still, my "weekend" is shot. Gone. Nonexistent.

It's now Monday, approximately 1000. I had stuff I wanted to do that won't get done today because my sleep is totally hosed. Yes, the money is great- and needed- but the time lost to work cannot be recovered. Friday ended up being a 15 hour day, and Sunday was another seven hours (hmm, that sounds familiar!).

It is now Tuesday. We're so busy that I already have 21.5 hours on the clock, and only eight of these are "straight" time- the majority are overtime. And this week shows no promise of slowing down... I predict major overtime for at least the next three days.

Wednesday update- sixteen hours of straight time, and nineteen of overtime. Crazy night.

Thursday- I think the O.T. now is ~22 hours. And my supervisor has even more.

Friday- The week has officially ended with 29.5 hours of overtime. I am going in to work (tomorrow) for the second Sunday in a row.

So, here I sit on Saturday afternoon, decompressing. I'm in the Secret Underground Lair, trying to finish this blog on one computer and playing Railnation on another PC. I'm tired beyond words, but not exactly sleepy... I still have things on my mind. 

Sunday- One is not required to work overtime in my company, but as the reader can see, we've been busy. My supervisor has put in as much overtime as I have (and possibly more), so I went in to the office today. I had anticipated a "light" day- boy, oh boy, was I ever mistaken. I ended up working on three projects in addition to the one I was there for. Total time on Sunday? 13.5 hours. Adding insult to injury, Jennifer had a lovely roast for dinner which I missed out on. I had also planned on a nap- which obviously never happened. Lastly, as I had anticipated a "light", short day, I didn't bring a lunch. Fortunately, I am prepared for situations such as this, and grabbed a canned pasta meal from my emergency office supply.

The last day I had off was two Sundays ago. Not bragging. Not complaining- I get paid to do this. I'm just stating a fact.

That's all from the SUL (Secret Underground Lair) for now. No data news to report, no Arduino progress report, and no Raspberry Pi update.

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

Down and out on a Sunday.

My Arduino Uno is sitting on my desktop in the Secret Underground Lair. It mocks me, sitting there connected to the PC with a 1M USB cable, it's onboard LCD flashing amber every second per its programming. And I am responsible for the programming. Tomorrow, though, all of that changes. Tomorrow is the scheduled arrival of "official" Arduino bases, and another Arduino. Jennifer will be getting my current Arduino, and I will be getting the new Arduino. Why, one might wonder... why indeed?

Because, Mr. T's Arduino has an Atmel 328 chip in a DIP configuration, whilst my current one is in an SMT package. I'm hoping to be 100% compatible with his board as we journey through the programming adventure together.

So, Sunday....

The weekend officially began for me around 0600 on Saturday morning, as it usually does. I got a decent amount of sleep before Jennifer, Mr. T and I headed off to The Bridge Community Church later that afternoon.We came home and Jennifer made tamales. They were incredible- and they are gone.

Sunday rolled around. When I woke up, my head felt like a balloon. Sinuses were off the scale in mucus output. I felt (*bleh*). I felt so (*bleh*) that I drank copious amounts of water for around eight hours. Kenji, our black and white tuxedo snowshoe cat, hung out with me for the better part of the day (he likes TV and he likes human presence while watching or listening to TV). I watched three complete football games. Not only is this unheard of- it is unprecedented. I was a couch potato- this is also unheard of.

That's how crummy and run down I felt.

The good news is that most of that seems to have passed. The bad news is that the weekend turned out to pretty much be a complete wash. That is, all of my plans were for naught. I had planned on a good walk, cutting the grass, fixing Jennifer's computer, and some quality "alone" time with my spouse.

None of these things happened.

It's now almost 0200, and I'm feeling much better, but my weekend is essentially over. Monday promises to be an adventure- Kenji and Kaley have their first visit with the veterinarian. Joy. 

The Monday recap- almost time to get ready for work. The cats survived their visit to the vet. It turns out that Dr. Chris is also a huge Lego fan, so much Lego discussion occurred while the cats were being poked and prodded. The new Arduino arrived along with the bases. I mounted the base to my old board first, and gave it to Jennifer. Then, Mr. T and I mounted the other two. I tested my new board out, and the amber LED started blinking immediately... I guess Arduino tests boards out with the blink program. So, for me to test it, I would need another program. The serial monitor program is the perfect sketch (program) for testing the Arduino for a couple of reasons. First, it's short- only two lines. Secondly, it tests two way communication with the board: write the program, compile, and upload. Then, open the serial monitor, and you should have a short message... this is the Arduino equivalent of "Hello, world."

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

Father's Day 2015- a contrarian view

This past Sunday we observed Father's Day here in the United States. As I understand it, a very well-meaning young lady had an idea that Mothers should have a special day set aside for them, and Mother's Day came into being. After that, greeting card companies caught on, and then (I'm OVERSIMPLIFYING here and probably making a ton of assumptions)... and then came Father's Day, Grandparent's Day, Mother in Law Day and Law Day, just to highlight a few of the myriad of (fill in the blank) Days.

Now, before anyone gets all upset about my seemingly callous position, let me backtrack just a bit. If someone wishes me a happy Father's Day, I'll gladly accept it. I really think its neat to have a special day to honor Moms and Motherhood, and Fathers and Fatherhood, and you can probably extend that a bit in a lot of different directions. According to Wikipedia, though, Anna Jarvis, the founder of Mother's day was concerned about the commercialization of the holiday not long after it had become established- and I think she and I might have some similiar thoughts about what are now known as "greeting card" holidays. Jennifer and I have three kids, and I can't remember the last time I got a card from any of them. And honestly? I could care less. I think Jennifer feels pretty much the same way. We generally try to do a little something special on these days (meals, mostly), but its more about family time than spending money on cards and gifts.

I think one of the best gifts one can give is time. This past Sunday was hot AND humid, so Jennifer was in no mood for going outside to do much of anything.  On the other hand, it was not raining, so I thought it would be a great opportunity to go out and take some photos of the tollway expansion. I asked her to be polite, pretty much expecting what her response would be. She did not disappoint, but suggested Mr. T be invited.  Much to my surprise, when I told him where I planned to go, he cheerfully accepted. When the spare batteries for my trusty Nikon D3200 were charged, I grabbed the backpack and we were off.

Mr. T was quite interested in the construction. What's happening is somewhat out of the ordinary: this is not a new highway. It is the widening by one lane in each direction of an existing highway. We were probably out for two hours or less, but had a blast! He's not a photographer, but has a bit of graphic design experience, so he makes a great assistant. And, he was ready for a bit of adventure. As my gear is really lightweight and all fits neatly into a small backpack, I kept it with me on my back. There were one or two shots where the tripod would have been nice, but in the end I had ~140 frames, several of which were very nice.

We also had the opportunity to climb up hill and down dale, so to speak. 

And lastly, as I am fond of saying in this blog, we come to data. Except today, I don't want to talk about data per se, but rather data handling.

As frequent readers may be aware, the Secret Underground Lair (SUL) is in the midst of a major overhaul. Furniture has been moved out, and furniture has been moved in. Up until now it's been something of a minor disaster (think S.S. Minnow rather than R.M.S. Titanic). Still, it's been quite the challenge as displaced items seem to occupy more space than they used to. So, I suppose it isn't so much data handling even as it is data display: we've eliminated al of the CRTs in the SUL and now only have flat panels. This means we'll soon be goint to visit our local Goodwill donation center with eight monitors- the oldest one was manufactured in 1990!

I still need to hook up the Raspberry Pi- we might be back in programming mode soon! Also, with the new setup, I can easily jack my work laptop into one of the new monitors and work effectively from home. There's also room on the desktop for my personal laptop, so I can get back to the Arduino as well!

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

(Around) 2.5 years, or, my personal Interwebz v2.1

Around two and a half years ago, I posted my first blog- December 4th, 2012 (it's a pretty short post- even by my current blogging standards!). Even way back then (figuratively speaking) I strove to keep data in the mix as the unifying theme of this blog. And at the end of May, 2015, I'm still blogging about life in general with data as the underlying theme.

It's June of 2015 now, and I've been working on my Twitter account. I consider Twitter serious work primarily because it is an integral element of my online presence strategy- and two and a half years ago, I didn't even know what an online presence strategy was, let alone seeing the need for one. After all, Twitter is one of the places where this blogs posts, but more importantly, it's where I interact with the world of #bigdata and #IoT.

I'm a firm believer in cross-pollenization and shameless self-promotion when it comes to creating a larger presence on the internet, so here's an invitation: if you have an understanding of any of the following terms, have a personal or professional interest in them, or possibly have heard one or more of them before and would like to learn more about them... here's a sample of the topics I address on my (hochspeyer) account on twitter:

#bigdata, #notsobigdata, #smalldata, #microdata, #database, #analytics, #stats, #IoT (Internet of Things), #IoE (Internet of Everything), #M2M (machine to machine), #machinelearning and, of course, #hadoop and #python. I touch on a lot of related topics on that account, but if Big Data and the Internet of Things are topics which you are interested in, you may enjoy following.

My other twitter account (hochspeyer1) still has a tech focus, but has more of a personal touch, looking more at #maker and #programming topics, as well as life in general.

Whew!

The state of the state of my microdata projects: as of today (Jun 4, 2015), the SUL (Secret Underground Lair) is still theoretically experiencing remodeling; by this I mean that while all of the furniture and shelving are in their (probable) final positions, everything that came out and came from upstairs still is in need of homes. Forty-two. my database project, is currently on hold. The Lego database (currently an Excel 2007 workbook) is currently in a data entry phase, and will eventually be a part of Forty-two. Even the Raspberry Pi, Arduino and Python projects are all on hold pending the completion of the SUL upgrade/remodel.  Lastly, I'm building my media library, one song at a time. I'm using Windows Media Player, which I suppose is extremely lazy, but the interface is familiar and it does pretty much all that I want, so for now it suffices.

That's all from the SUL for now. As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.

Potpurri, 2

Blog titles are important to me: I feel they should generally be clever and succinct.  However, they don't necessarily need to be original, and sometimes redundancy is not a bad thing- and so, today's title was chosen. What surprised me most, though, was that it is only #2.

So, what's it all about?

As previously mentioned, my blogging has slacked off as of late, so I thought it would be nice to pick up the writing pace. There's also been a flurry of intellectual activity (of sorts) here at the Secret Underground Lair (SUL) of late that is also worth noting.

I'm not sure if I've mentioned this before, but here at the SUL we tend to be a bit like pack rats. Not in a huge way. For example, no one would think of saving the driver's door of a 1957 Chevy if we had one of those in the garage (we don't), Really- what are the chances of us ever needing something like that?  However, a broken condensate pump? Well, that's another story, and a candidate for saving.

This past week, Mr. T has once again broached the "ugly" subject of reorganizing the SUL. The subject is ugly not because it is without merit, but because of the logistics involved. According to a definition I found online, logistics is the detailed coordination of a complex operation involving many people, facilities, or supplies. And that is truly what we have here.

I'm happy that Mr. T has decided to move his desk. Really- it makes a great deal of sense in terms of overall office organization.To make room for this move, all I need to do is move a 6' rolltop desk upstairs, and then move a small bookshelf so that we can rotate his desk ninety degrees. The rolltop desk will displace an oddly shaped stereo cabinet upstairs which will move into the basement. All of this will happen after we fix Jennifer's desktop computer. 

On my personal list of thing to do, I have Mr. T's cirriculum and my personal list of things to do.

As I write this, Mr. T is officially an adult. He should be out in the economy making a living. However, as we all know, there are very few entry level jobs, and we don't bother him about work too much. So, we expect him to expand his brain. And so, we are embarking on a few Adventures. This past week, I picked up an Arduino kit and some additional components; I hope to stimulate his interest in things electronic with this, and hopefully integrate the Raspberry Pi as well.We'll see how that goes. On my personal plate, I'm working on learning the Python programming language, as well as getting my personal database built. 

That's it from the SUL today. As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data ananysis and management so yo don't have to.