Dude, you're getting a Dell, or, Resistance is futile.

We don't have many Dell computers in our home. Longtime readers may nod in agreement at this statement, but for the benefit of the uninitiated, we have many computers in our home. And while not all are in service, all ARE serviceable; that is, with just a bit of TLC, I believe we could have no fewer than thirteen PCs online simultaneously.

Granted, I would NOT do this for a number of reasons.

Firstly, most of these boxes were "designed for Windows XP". Now, I have nothing against XP- I have one machine that is an XP machine- and it's physically OFFLINE.

Next, most do not have green power supplies. Although all of the monitors in the SUL are now energy-efficient flat panels, the power supplies aren't really worth upgrading, as most of the PCs that are not in service are pretty much waiting to be cannibalized.

Finally, it's just not practical. Four individuals running 13 PCs in a SOHO environment?

The reason Dell came up is that a certain Dell PC crashed one of my external HDDs recently. I know for certain that it's a particular Dell because every time I plug the external drive into this Dell, it asks if I want to repair the drive. Mind you, this drive normally is hooked up to another Dell or a Lenovo or an HP or Compaq machine with no problems. This particular Dell has issues, though, and the last time I use the drive, I ignored the repair message, and in turn it made the drive unusable. I don't know why or how, but this machine is now persona non grata.

End of story.

Lego data news-

I'd been using Peeron's database for some time, but recently it came to my attention that BrickLink has a more complete database. Not only does it seem more complete, but the part numbers are properly formatted, they are already in a separate column and the descriptions do not succinct and do not seem to require editing. The data will still require a bit of formatting to fit my particular usage. That's the good news.

The bad news is that unlike Peeron's single page text file format, BrickLink displays its data on webpages. Not bad, as its still copy-and-paste. What's really from my perspective is that each page displays fifty part numbers.

There are 837 pages... a relatively small price to pay for superior data.

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

Here is the news

In the event that I have not mentioned this before, I am a huge music fan. I have all sorts of music in my collection, which was one of the earliest drivers for creating the database. In fact, in prehistoric times (when I was in high school [gymnasium]), my music database was on paper. At one point, I even conducted a few music polls. I got many folks to vote for their favorite song, group and album, but no one liked the results or my methodology. Oh, well, I guess you can't please everyone.

The title of today's blog is a song from Electric Light Orchestra's most excellent 1981 release, Time. Time is one of those albums you can just sit and listen to. That probably sounds a bit odd, but its a concept album, and the songs tell a story- try it, you just might like it.

In the wonderful world of data, I've been schlepping along in my Bricklink powered Excel spreadsheet that will be the home to all of my Lego data. I have around 32% of what will be my primary key field filled in, or about another 165 days of work assuming 100 records are done per day. Once the primary key fields are all filled in, there's a lot more work, but it may be ready for export into the database.

Since the last entry, I haven't really done much with the actual database. Most of my "serious" computer time has been spent on getting the Lego spreadsheet ready to export to the database, and on HTML. Speaking of HTML, I'm trying out a new text editor, PSPad. I found it on Majorgeeks.  Well, its new for me at least- it was first released in 2001. As I just downloaded it today, I have very little to say about it, as I haven't really had time to play with it. One feature that it does have that I had been looking for is line numbers. I'm not certain if anyone else cares about line numbers, but there are times when one is writing code that this simple little feature can be a life saver!

That's all of the news for now.

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

Timehack 1725 062113 (1)