Data, evolving

Quick- fill in the blank: I do some of my best work in ______________________.

If you filled that blank with "the bathroom" congratulations! You, Freddie Mercury and I think alike. I believe Freddie Mercury claimed to have come up with the idea and melody for "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" in ten minutes while soaking in the bathtub in Műnchen (Munich), Germany, and the same thing happened to me Thursday evening!

Well, sort of... I didn't actually come up with a #1 U.S. Billboard chart single for a supergroup in a hotel in the Black Forest in Germany, but I think I've come up with the way I want to get my Lego data into Access.

A few years back, I had designed a flat database for my Lego collection in Microsoft Excel 2003. It was pretty nice and fit my needs at the time quite nicely. It was composed of several pages where the data was entered, and then a couple of pages which gave some bird's eye level analysis via links to the data pages. The project was scrapped mainly due to my impatience with data entry and my inability to actually get an accurate count of all of those elements- besides, they are much more fun to build with than count.

So, my plan is to go back to that format, but instead of merely having links within the workbook, have links from the Excel 2007 workbook to the Access 2007 database. And why 2007 rather than 2010 or 2013? Expediency: the Legos are close to a machine in the Secret Underground Lair (SUL) which runs 2007. The SUL redo is going very slowly, but if I am successful in liberating space for my laptop in my corner of the SUL, then it will be done on the 2013 versions of Excel and Access.

I'd like to get started on this first- creating the spreadsheet with the data, and then importing the data into an Access table and then (hopefully!) linking each data cell in Excel to its corresponding Access field so that the database can be updated via Excel. Its been some time since I did this, and it was on the "pre-ribbon" interface, so it looks like I'm going to be relearning some Excel tricks.

In other data news, Jennifer and I have been walking more as the weather has become a bit more pleasant. My replacement pedometer (identical to my expired Omron model) is chugging along, but its going to be at least another month before I have daily month-to-month data available.

As to my new glasses: the lady who fitted me for frames was slightly surprised as to how quickly I adjusted to my new spectacles, although I think I'm still breaking them in. She also said something that caught me off-guard: I wear my lenses lower than most folks.

 I've never worn gradient lenses before- I've worn reading glasses since the age of eighteen and I'm now 50+; my new specs have three prescriptions per lens: top for distance, middle for computer work and bottom for reading. Although the glasses really do a good job (especially while driving), they are singularly ineffective in the place where I need them the most: computer. Here's the deal: before I went in for the exam, I had made some careful observations and mental notes about my work environment and how I typically used glasses, as well as my concerns about night driving. The gradient lenses the optometrist came up with (pretty much six prescriptions- three per lens!) are fantastic for general purpose applications (life!). My hope in getting this type of lens would be avoiding a second pair of glasses. To quote "Mad Dog" Tannen, "You thought wrong, dude." (*BLAM*) I was very quickly able to pick up the reading area of the lenses, and the distance area (which I don't really need but seems to be beneficial in low light/nighttime conditions) also "snapped" into place pretty quickly.  I really need the computer part, though, and this is where I'm experiencing issues. Simply put: the lens cannot focus on the whole screen- even when I push the frame up tight to my face for the best focus. In the "good ole" 15" CRT days, these glasses would have been miraculous; with the 23" CRT's I have at work and at home, the lenses are just not up to it. And honestly, at home it really doesn't matter, because I'm generally not looking at the whole screen. At work, though- I do a lot of page layout and composition, and I generally NEED to take in the whole 23" diagonal screen at a glance- and more often than not, at a 90 degree offset. So, after only two days, I was back getting fitted for single vision computer glasses! (Just a hint here: when your livelihood depends upon a durable medical appliance- even if your employer or insurance doesn't pay for it: BUY IT!) The good news is that the second par of specs was massively discounted, and I should have them in time for my return from vacation.   

One final note before I call it a night: my twitter account @CjoelHarrison grew 10% in twenty-four hours!

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

Spice, Spice, Baby

*It's been rather busy for me on Ye Olde Blogsphere, it seems: I started this on 15 June 2013.

Sorry to disappoint, but this is not about the Spice Girls getting back together (the world will heave a collective sigh of relief, secure in the knowledge that this is NOT happening), and as far as I know, Vanilla Ice is not coming back, either. The title? Well, Vanilla sampled Queen, so I'm sampling Vanilla!

I thought I'd share some of my favorite I.T. related sites here.

So, what's it all about, Alfie... sorry, I'm stuck in cliches and trivia, it seems. Actually, it's more along the lines of what's I.T. been all about lately, to me? In a word, Spiceworks. I've wracked my brain about this, and at first was not sure if it was TechRepublic, How-To-Geek or CRN, but I backtracked a bit and the ad was in a Daniweb email I read recently. At the very top of the email was an ad for free help desk software. Since I know nothing about the care and feeding of help desks, I decided to give it a try. After all, my network presently has ten nodes, and more than likely it will grow.

I'm starting off with Spiceworks, because Spiceworks was the inspiration for this blog. Spiceworks has a very active user community, but what first brought me there was their help desk software. I downloaded the application but it was a very long download and after it was done, it would not run. So, I posted a question on the forums, and was pleasantly surprised at how quickly my problem was solved. I haven't spent a bunch of time on this site, but I do like it quite a bit.

Next up in my world is the granddaddy of I.T. sites, TechRepublic. I'm not sure how long they've been around, but its a long time.They have all sorts of features, discussions, and email notifications one can subscribe to. I especially like Bill Detweiler's TR Dojo feature. 

When I need software, my first choice is not tucows or cnet, but rather majorgeeks . I'm not sure when I found this site or what prompted me to search here, but this is another tried-and-true site, full of good stuff.

Daniweb is a really neat I.T. help site- I was looking for an answer to a driver question and this is where the answer came from.  This is also where I learned about Spiceworks.

Can't forget howtogeek .How to Geek is another email subscription I have, and they have everything a geek could want, from cartoons and trivia to practical how to information.

W3schools is the place to go if you want to learn internet code- specifically, HTML 4/5, CSS/CSS3, javaScript, Query, JSON, Ajax and ASP.NET. What I particularly like about this site is their live training sessions- you're given a window to type code, and can execute the code and see the results (and modify them) immediately.

Last but not least, there's Dream In Code . Not surprisingly, Dream In Code is a forum devoted to all things code.

There are a few other email subscriptions I have, but the listed site are the ones I visit the most. I hope this was informative and pegged your geekmeter at 11. And, if you've never pegged a VU meter, you're missing out!

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

Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon

I like the concept of leading off with an appropriate song title, a la "Here Is the News", and so I present another today. I'm fairly confident that this has all the signs of becoming a regular blog feature, so today's cut is from Queen's A Night at the Opera, which also includes the perhaps more well-known (even renowned) "Bohemian Rhapsody". While fact-checking this, I also ran across two other Queen (if we're talking Queen here, "favourite" must be spelled in Freddie and Brian's native English) favourites which I haven't heard in sometime: " '39" and "I'm in Love with My Car", both of which were on my personal heavy rotation back in the day.

So, how and why does one laze on a Sunday afternoon?

Well, for one, the temperature was predicted to be about 90F (~32C) today. As Jennifer and I are not fans of humidity or hot weather-- and these two are mates here in the Greater Chicago area-- we were pleased to see the temps pretty much sticking to the low 80's (~26-29C) with a slight breeze. There was not a hint of rain in the sky, although the forecast included a 30% chance and so we decided to do a bit of shopping.

The first stop was our local pet store. We've been doing a bit of searching for a second cat carrier, as Schwarz and Tinka need to be in a carrier when they have their annual veterinarian's exam- and the one we've been using for the past several years is just too small. We had both done a bit of looking on Amazon for something similar to the one we currently own, but nothing struck our fancy. At the store, we saw a few of the carriers which we had seen online, and decided to keep on searching.

The next stop was the Goodwill store. Sundays and Mondays, Goodwill has half-price specials, so we visit a few times per month on the weekends. Our final stop was Aldi (yes, that Aldi!) We picked up a few things, and then headed home.

*******

I've had this "thing" laying around for a while, so long I've forgotten exactly what it is. It was part of a printer at one time, and I had thought it might be interesting to disassemble some day. Today was that day. I gathered several screwdrivers, needle-nosed pliers and a few other tools and began to disassemble the thing. I did this outside at the picnic table, as I didn't know if it had any residual toner in it. Fortunately it didn't, and after about half an hour of disconnecting, unscrewing and sweating in place, I had a pile of parts- plastic, sheet metal pieces, screws and springs. Apart from the plastic, everything went into our spare parts collection; the plastic, unfortunately, was not recyclable, so it went into the trash.

By the time I had finished, it had gotten noticeably cooler and the breeze had picked up... perfect for cutting grass!

Except that the breeze was developing into a wind, the light was fading as the clouds expanded, and it looked like the 30% prediction was going to turn into 100%. As the passing seconds became passing minutes, the clouds became darker and more ominous, and the grass seemed to heave with the mounting winds. And there was thunder... thunder, but no lightning. By this time, I had decided that the grass could wait another day. Jennifer was making what would be a supremely delicious curry by now, so I just messed around a bit on the computer. When the rain finally arrived, it was incredibly underwhelming, evaporating almost as soon as it came down. By the time the thunder had passed out of earshot, you couldn't tell there had been any precipitation whatsoever. And we ate.

And that is how we were found to be Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon. In the wonderful world of Not-So-Big-Data, all that happened was a bit more work on the Lego spreadsheet. I haven't even set a deadline for the completion of this part of the project as yet, because data entry is just one part of the Lego component of the database. I still need to design the other Lego look up tables before importing it into the database.

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

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