...and I THOUGHT I was a basement A+ man....

It seems that my Dad and I, even though he passed away several years ago, share an affinity for hardware. The difference is that while his hardware was measured in cubic inches, MPH and RPMs, mine is measured CPU, GHz and FLOPS.

He was a back alley mechanic that learned it on the fly, and became a master of the craft. Me? Not so much of an expert, although I've built enough computers, spreadsheets and databases from scratch to be quite confident when opening something up, and I couldn't say how many PCs I've upgraded, rebuilt, etc.

Last Sunday night, though, I ran into something I'd never experienced before.

I'm quite familiar with the care and feeding (and installing) of hard drives (HDD's), and I had one that was way overdue for installing in Great White- my computer, not the 80's hair band. The project  started, though, with speakers. I had decided a while ago to do a peripheral upgrade to the PC prior to the (ouch) MOBO + processor + memory upgrade, so a few peripherals trickled in over the course of several months- HDD, mechanical keyboard, and finally speakers. The keyboard went on the weekend before last, although I still need drivers. I untangled all of the wires, prepared a place and installed the speakers; and cut some antiskid foam to keep everything from sliding all over the place. Mr. T had actually installed the HDD a few weeks ago, so I was all set to visit R-Stats and download the latest version of R, and then download Processing for the Arduino, and maybe start copying a clean- no dupes- version of my music library.

But, first I had to initialize my HDD... initialize? Yup, that was a new one on me. I've wiped, partitioned, formatted, repartitioned, reformatted and even used a hacksaw to remove a HDD from an oddly-configured case. But, I'm not certain that I've ever initialized a drive.

So on a Sunday night, I initialized a drive. Mind you, it wasn't difficult. Just new. Next, the printer. I finally got around to getting a fairly old HP all-in one tested and running again. Well- it prints every color EXCEPT cyan, and wouldn't you JUST know that I'm fresh out of cyan. I empathize with Rowdy Roddy Piper, as I came to print, and chew bubblegum, but I'm all out of ink... yes, yes the reference is pretty weak, but this is a mostly G-rated blog. I also got my social media accounts which had been in hibernation for some time back up and running, but the really big news is...

I found a Lego Master database. It's quite good, but not 100% complete. Then again, even Lego does not have a complete database of their own parts. However, I can get back to the inventory and database.

Now all I have to do is find and organize all of my Lego elements.

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

Meerkat's Greatest Adventure (of 2014), Part 2

Y'all know that the unifying theme of this blog is data. It's my data primarily, with occasional nods to Big Data and the Internet of Things (IoT). Meerkat, our Subaru Outback, and Ziggy, our Garmin GPS, are members of the Internet of Things. But don't say that near them... they're people, as M*A*S*H*'s Radar O'Reilly might say.

Since Merkat is bigger and older than Ziggy, I've decided to turn the keyboard over to him (I think Meerkat is a him...), and let him revisit our trip. Take it away, Meerkat....

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Okay... so there we were,

With 1.9 miles on the tripmeter, we departed the SUL. Ziggy immediately started chirping instructions. It was Monday morning- 0738 local, and we found ourselves enmeshed in rush hour traffic. If the pilot had any common sense, we would have been moving through traffic at least fifteen minutes earlier. As it was, we found ourselves ensconced in a "popular" intersection, with nothing to do but wait our turn at the left arrow.

We finally got our turn and proceeded south.

To make this story more interesting, we drove south and west for a long time and arrived in Texas. I sat in the driveway for a day, and the rest of the time I slept in the street, while Ziggy got to go inside.

Afterwards, things got interesting.

The humans did all of their "visiting" and had all of their meetings, and then it was time to go home. Because of all of the unrest in Ferguson, MO, we decided to spend our tourism dollars in safer areas and avoided the St.Louis area entirely.

As we approached Oklahoma City, I sensed a irregularity in one of the mechanical systems, and promptly alerted the pilot. Not long after that, help arrived. A squad of shock troops deployed, led by a dude that could only be described as a cowboy: while the rest of the unit was in full battle dress armor, there he was in cowboy boots and denims, 9mm strapped to his side as if he did this every day.

In any event, he got us to where we needed to be, barked some orders, and in a few hours we were back on the road.

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I promise that's the last time I will EVER let Meerkat write a blog entry! Well, I'll never let ANY individual that can be classified as a member of the IoT guest write in my blog. I really thought Meerkat was going to make it really interesting... I was wrong- sorry.

In the wonderful world of data, I FINALLY backed up my Omron pedometer data. Some of you might recall that in February (One simply does not raid the SUL) I lamented the loss of fifteen months worth of pedometer data due to a HDD crash. Well, even some us "old hands" are a little slow at times, but tonight I FINALLY downloaded the data to the desktop. I'll back it up to the external HDD once I clean it up a bit.

Clean?

Yes, the data- specifically the dates- are improperly formatted for my use. When I downloaded the software from the Omron site, I got the European version rather than the American version of the software. It doesn't really matter too much as I'm okay with kilometers and the energy expenditure is shown in kcal's rather than joules, but even though I'm okay with European dating, my copy of Excel sorts American style (for the unaware, Euro=day/month/year, American=month/day/year) So, the dates need to be edited before being backed up. There's a funny story about those dates... well, it's funny now, anyway.

Back when I was in high school, I was introduced to Fletcher Pratt's Naval Wargame (see "Imagination"). The resources I used for this game were all published in England, so I became accustomed to the Euro dating system, so much so that when I got my driver's license, I entered my birthday Euro style without thinking, and when I received my license, my birthmonth was listed as May rather than September. I had to go back to the license facility, explain what had happened and get them to issue a new license.

There may be some "big" data news in the next blog... probably. There may be a Christmas blog as  well.

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

Friday night in the Secret Underground Lair

Well, here it is Friday night. Getting ready to go to work, doing my part to save Western Civilization as we know it by ensuring that you receive the highest quality junk direct mail. Yes sir, I do quality control on a product that most folks don't seem to want. Today has been odd, to say the least. I finally got around to replacing an energy-sucking, ancient 21" Samsung monitor with a nice 17" Compaq in preparation for deploying our Linux box. That'll have to wait until  tomorrow, though.

Right now, no updates for the database, as the external HDD that holds that data is being used by our two sons to do a HDD upgrade on a PS3. Our younger son just got up on his soapbox and waxed long and eloquently about the horrendous transfer rate for the data backup- approximately five hours  for ~160GB of data. And, since our cats love cables, the entire process is going to be babysat. It's going to be a long weekend....

Time to head out. At this time tomorrow evening I should be sitting here working on a Linux install.