Tools of the trade

Quite some time ago (about 1.5 parsecs, to paraphrase Han Solo), I worked at an "action sports" company as a data analyst. In the case of this company, action sports == paintball. I don't believe I was compensated at the rate which I thought I "deserved", but that's just a bit of human nature, I suppose... like the famous quip about how much money is enough?

"Just a little more."

Right. I was doing a bit of data entry/collation early one morning this week, and had a flashback to that company and my tasks there. The flashback involved my Monday morning routine, and it was triggered by my mouse. The mouse I currently use for nearly everything is a Logitech Optical Trackman wired mouse. This mouse, or variants of it, have been around for ten years or more. Quite honestly, this mouse can be a data professional's (or dictator's) best friend.

Third World Communist Dictators also love the Logitech Marbleman Mouse

To the best of my knowledge, this is an unretouched (propoganda) photo of North Korea's glorious leader Kim Jung Un being shown the finer details of battlefield missile control. Ignore the guys in the Castro hats, they are political appointments- the true revolutionary is the guy in the Mao hat, pointing to the screen and indoctrinating the Glorious Leader in the use of the People's Sparc V7 clone. He is making sure that the Glorious Leader destroys Pinky three times before Uncle Sam is spawned. The guy in the background is the hacker that put the system together.

Back to my flashback... the mouse directly in front of the Glorious Leader is a Logitech Marbleman- my preferred weapon of choice for data work. I use it almost daily. 

One more flashback that might explain why this mouse is so valuable (I own four of them). Back when I was at Pursuit Marketing Inc., one of my tasks was to grab the Monday morning numbers from WalMart's RetailLink database. The problem I experienced at that time was that I could not always get all of my data on one Excel 2003 spreadsheet, which was artificially capped by Microsoft at 65,536 rows. Wal Mart data often exceeded this, so to compensate, I downloaded the data into an Access database, and then queried it out into the data I needed. As a final measure of email economy and job security, I made the files I emailed to the VP smaller by stripping out all of the formulae from the worksheets. 

At PMI, I had a Fellowes mousepad with an attached gel wristwrest. One of my coworkers insisted on jabbing this with her fingernail, which effectively destroyed it. I am in the process of replacing it- after all these years.

My last entry into Tools of the Trade is my Logitech G105 keyboard. A while ago, I was in search of a backlit keyboard. Amazon was having a closeout on the Call of Duty MW3-themed Logitech G105, and I grabbed a few. I'm not really a gamer, but this is a great keyboard for what I do! The action is nice, and it has a green backlight (the standard G105 has blue backlighting).

Data-

I've been hard at work getting up  to speed with the BrickLink database. I'm near the halfway point in my cut and paste operation, and I hope to be finished by month's end. At that point, I hope to start cleaning the data, and have a usable spreadsheet by the beginning of September. Time will tell.

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

Feeds, Needs and Speeds

Well, it's starting to get real. The database, that is. As I posted earlier on Twitter, 200 rows of data in a single column do not a RDBMS make, but it's a start (the count is currently 224). As Jackie Gleason quipped in one of his signature lines, "And away we go!"

The casual reader may be wondering at this point: there are actually folks out there still building relational databases? Isn't the non-relational NoSQL model more popular in terms of new deployments, versatility and just plain coolness?

I'd like to explain a bit of my personal journey that brought me to Forty-Two, the database.

Long ago, like teenagers everywhere, I faced highschool graduation without a plan. Not just a clear plan, mind you- NO PLAN. Computer Science was in its infancy at the time, and nearly nonexistent in most high schools. I was not one of the cool kids, nor was I a jock or a brain, but I was also not a nerd. However, I knew one or two nerds. And the nerds were highly focused in their scholarly discipline: they were not into math and science; they were into math. They were geometry slingers, wearing leather slide rule holsters on their hips. They had glasses, thick glasses. Below average complexion. Few social skills. Pocket protectors in their left shirt pockets. And behind the pocket protectors... punch cards for their next "program".They were the late 70's analogues of Drs. Sheldon Cooper and Leonard Hofstadler (The Big Bang Theory).

I was not them. Well, sort of not like them. I liked history. I was (probably) the worst kind of history nerd: I was a military history buff. I started out with Avalon Hill games like France 1940 and Panzer Blitz, and progressed to Tobruk and Squad Leader, eventually culminating in the non-Avalon Hill classic Fletcher Pratt's Naval Wargame. The point is this: as the complexity increased, the playability decreased, as did the number of folks willing to take on the rules. But, I digress.

I was accepted to Rosary College (later Dominican University). I declared history as my major, and spent two unremarkable years there. I eventually had five colleges or universities under my belt, with no undergraduate degree to show for all of the buckazoids invested.

Long before this became a mainstream theory in education, I discovered that we do not all learn in the same way, and that higher education was not really the best choice for me.

Fast forward a few decades. I've mentioned this fairly recently- I was working as a data analyst at an "action sports" company. The company designed paintball equipment, and had it manufactured overseas. My job as the data analyst was to take Wal Mart RetailLink data and dice and slice it into what my employer could use.

The problem was my employer was using either Office 2000 or 2003, which limited Excel to a maximum of ~64K  (I believe it was 63,536) rows. As time went on, my data often exceeded this artificial limitation, and I was forced to use Access just to grab the Monday morning data. Once again, skipping several steps, I became adept at moving data between Excel and Access.

Fast forward one more time to today. I use all sorts of tools to do my job; Access and Excel aren't really part of my professional portfolio of commonly used programs on the job, but I use them at home,.. pause for effect.

Yes, although I may have mentioned a bit about Forty-Two before, I don't think I've said too much beyond it was my own little database dev world. Here's where the title comes in: way back when I was an I.T. reseller, we used to often qualify sales by talking about speeds and feeds- equipment specifications. Needs are also important (besides completing the alliterative trilogy).

So, Forty-Two is an obvious reference to Douglas Adams works, and is so named because its' goal is to answer that elusive question: what is the meaning of Life, the Universe, and Everything. It is starting out life as an Access database, currently with only one table. Previous iterations have taught me to take it easy with adding tables, so my aim is to get this Titles table to be mostly complete before adding additional single- or very few-column tables and then finally starting to create the relationships.The first table is called Titles simply because it holds titles: books, videos, software... if its media, then its name goes here. Why? Forced normalization: why go through the normalization process when I can start out with a relatively clean dataset?

This is starting to turn into a wall of words (by my standards, anyway!), so stay tuned... Lego is next!

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