More "Pause" than "End"

Some years back, on a particularly busy night, a new hire rubbed eyes and blearily asked the Nightstalker crew, "Just how long DO you work?"

I answered in the only possible way: "Until the job is done."

That, truly, is what makes the overnight hours in Data Services interesting. I say "overnight" because my hours can be a bit fuzzy- and this is true for everyone in our department. Some folks come in fairly early, some come in around the traditional office start time of 0800, and some come in at 2200 or even later. We have one person who works a traditional second shift, and the remainder of the crew work something of a hybrid 3rd shift, starting anywhere from 1800 to almost 2300. I don't believe there's anything like an official policy regarding this; it's more of a rule of thumb: as long as one works one's 40 hours, everyone is happy. But, back to "until the job is done."

I think I may have previously mentioned that our plant can be considered a "job shop" or "contract manufacturer." In other words, the product that we manufacture- direct mail- does not "belong" to us. You will typically not see our name on it anywhere. We may have some involvement in the design process, and we are often involved in the postal and logistics components of a job, but at the end of the day, we're simply the folks who manufacture something for someone else.

Sometimes...

Sometimes things just need to get done. One of our top clients has a job that runs every month, and it keeps the programmer pretty busy for around a week. However, once the client approves the job, yours truly ("me") typically swings into action. This particular job requires a lot of hard copy:  proofs for press and prepress, and tray tags for press. Printing, collating and marking up of this takes ~12 hours, and is best done when the office is empty. Why? Because one simply needs a lot of space to do the job correctly and efficiently, as well as tying up two printers.

So, the Friday before last, I came in with the expectation that I would be working on this job. I had put a dent in it when I left Saturday morning, and came back Saturday evening. I got home around midnight, and everything was done.

In a nutshell, my weekend was more of a pause than an actual end to the week. The obvious downside to weekends like this is that they are short. Jennifer and I got in a nice walk on the following Sunday- almost three miles. I did a bit of work in the Secret Underground Lair, as did Mr. T, and great progress has been made. My plan for the weekend, though, had been to get to the unused desk and hook up my Raspberry Pi. That hadn't happened yet, but we're on the cusp of it!

One other huge thing that happened the previous week was the Great Book Cull, during which time a few hundred books were donated to our local library. Although both Jennifer and I hate getting rid of actual paper books, there were a few compelling reasons for eliminating these particular volumes from our collection:

1) They were classics (Shakespeare, Tolstoi, etc)- these are readily available online and downloadable as plain text files

2) Cold War fiction- entertaining reading when it was written, but no longer plausible.

3) Out of date software texts- bye, bye, Windows 95 For Dummies, etc... I  kid you not.

So that was the two weekends ago. I visited the opthamologist for the last post surgery follow up for my right eye. (all is good- come back in a year). Don't get me wrong- if you're in the Des Plaines area, Dr. Winkler is the best. I'm just ready to get on with my life!

Pause, continued... this past weekend (Dec 19-20): I got out on time on Saturday morning for a change, but I knew I'd be coming back on Saturday evening. I figured a few hours would take care of a few quick production QC's- boy was I wrong.

The first job went smoothly, and it was done fairly quickly. The second, though, took much longer, as some paperwork was missing. It's not unusual for this to happen with this particular job, though. The third job was unexpected, but pretty easy- especially since the lead programmer was also in the office to explain a few things. The last job, though.

In a nutshell, it was programmed correctly but the output was set up incorrectly, and consequently compiled incorrectly, and the output was just plain wrong. As it was late and hadn't brought my meds to the office, I remade the files and recompiled the job, but did not perform the production QC.  

Finally, data.

I need to say something about my writing process, which will eventually relate to data. I promise.

When I write a blog, I generally have an idea of where I want it to go. Sometimes it goes there, sometimes it doesn't. This blog is a case of: IT DOESN'T CARE WHERE I WANT TO GO.

Point: my idea for this blog actually had to do with a concept for music opinion data analysis.

Way back when, in my college days, I started my music database. It was on looseleaf paper, and it was unwieldy and incredibly difficult to update or edit. At some point, I decided I'd create something of a personal "Top 40". Only looking at my stats was somewhat biased, I quickly surmised.  Undaunted, I expanded my pursuit to include what others were interested in. When I shared my results, however, some (many) of the participants were upset when I told them the results were weighted. That is, their top votes received 10 points, and their bottom votes received one point. Huh?

Participants in the survey were asked to vote for up to 10 of their favorite albums, and 10 of their favorite songs. I asked that they please put them in order of preference. When the results had been tabulated, I shared them. In my circle of friends and acquaintances, no one could believe that "Bread's Greatest Hits"  was more popular than "Barry Manilow Live" (joke).

I did it this way for a couple of (what I thought) were very good reasons. First: everyone probably has a favorite song. Hey, if its YOUR fave, why not weight it? Second, I wanted to be able to track which songs were actually more popular than which songs were most often voted for. Taking the two most "popular" songs of this era (from my polls), the hands-down winners were The Beatles' "Hey Jude" and Led Zepplin's "Stairway To Heaven". As my survey was quite small, let's say I had 10 voters: 4 went with the Beatles, and 4 with Led Zepplin. Let's say the other two went with Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Freebird" as their favorite. If Hey Jude == 1, and Stairway == 1 and Freebird == 1, then we have 4 to 4 to 2. What matters next is what is the next greatest song.  So, two of the "Beatles" guys vote for  "I Saw Her Standing There", and a couple of Zepplin fans vote for "Rock and Roll". After that, each of the other Beatles and Zepplin fans votes for Hey Jude and Stairway, furthering the tie. Then, we factor in the Skynyrd fans, who generally might like the Zep guitars, but can sing to Hey Jude. So, the final score ends up being Beatles: 5.8 (among Beatles fans), Zep: 5.8 (among Zepplin fans). The two Skynyrd fans, though, both vote Hey Jude #2, and Stairway #3, giving the Beatles a total of 6.6 and Led Zep 5.8. Therefore, in this tiny, theoretical sample, "Hey Jude" is the greatest rock and roll song of all time.

Sorry about the length of this... I told you all of that to tell you this: I have a new data project which is based on my previous data project.

I know what songs I like and those which I don't like. I plan to quantify this data and publish my findings in a new format.

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

Suburbia 302: Nightstalkers

"He says there's a storm coming."

"Tell him I know. I know," Sarah Connor replies to the gas station owner at the end of the original  Terminator movie just before she drives off towards the mountains, the storm and the epic Terminator music score.

I sorta knew what Sarah Connor was thinking when I pulled into my driveway this past Saturday morning. I opened the door of Meerkat, our trusty Subaru Outback, and did a quick survey of our yard. Yep, the grass was due for mowing- and the local meteorologists all agreed that the Chicago area was going to be hammered by wind, heavy rain and hail on Sunday- all day. Four letter words, each and every one of them!

Time for an aside here....  Back in my college days, I used to do a fair amount of creative writing, both for class and for personal enjoyment. Stream of consciousness was often used, partly because my typewriter (my manual typewriter) was horrid, and the "t" did not work properly. It was so bad that I once wrote a short paper for a freshman English class and I was struggling so badly that I slipped into stream of consciousness (SOC) without even knowing what SOC was whilst writing this essay. The paper itself was bad, but my salvation was my viewpoint- after several typos, I started SOC and the paper ended up getting a very good grade simply because I took the topic and a bad situation, and managed to get a laugh out of my classmates and our instructor through my commentary.

That was English 102. Fast forward thirty-odd years to 2015. I present Suburbia 302: Nightstalkers. And actually, this is not really for Nightstalkers. It is about Nightstalkers, and why we do things in the manner that we do.

Let's set the stage properly. At 0700, do you want to be wakened or have your morning disturbed by a lawnmower? Of course not! I'm not certain if this is a local ordinance, but the convention seems to be no mowers or other noisy equipment are to be in operation prior to 0800. I generally arrive home sometime between 0500 and 0700. Apart from the fact its bloody early, its also generally fairly wet, as the grass is covered with dew. So, I have the following windows available for grass cutting: Tuesday through Friday 1700-1900, Saturday 1800-2000 and pretty much all day Sunday and Monday. (And Sunday is the only full day of the entire week that I do not normally have to work for my employer.)

The bottom line, though, is that the grass does get cut, although sometimes because of meteorological conditions, it sometimes gets a bit shaggier than some of our neighbors' lawns who employ lawn services. For example, in May when Jennifer was out of town, I was always behind in my grass cutting because of Mother Nature's gleeful demonstrations of deluges, downpours and general dampness. Many of our neighbors had lawn services that seemed to suddenly appear with their high-powered self-propelled mowers the moment the rain stopped. Me? I had to wait until the grass dried- often a day or more. I once cut the grass in the rain, just because it was in dire need.

Its not quite like I see our suburb anywhere near the Monkees' Pleasant Valley Sunday, but I try to make our home and property look nice. And yes, I am aware that the song is NOT about nice or pretty (for 60's fans, please see also Proud Mary)

On the data front, not much has been going on. As some may be aware the Secret Underground Lair (SUL) has been undergoing a remodel. Mr. T., in an honest effort to move things along, committed a tactical error which has created a setback. In my previous blog, (Around) 2.5 Years Ago, or, my personal Interwebz v2.1, I had noted that the major moves were complete, and what was left was arguably the hard part- getting everything back in the office. Mr. T. decided to expedite the process by unboxing a great deal of old software to save some room. The net result of this was the complete occupation (wasted space) of nearly two shelves of formerly unoccupied space. It has been a week since he did this, and I'm still trying to figure out the best way to re-package this software.

Lego data has not been worked on. But- some Lego elements have been organized for ease of counting.

Lastly, Jennifer came to me with an odd problem- she was trying to read a document, but it would not download properly. At first, the website was blamed, but after a bit of troubleshooting, I discovered a much simpler error: Microsoft Office was not installed on her PC. Fiften minutes later, everything was good.

Now if I could only find the interface cable for my DSLR....

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

Can't. Sleep.

Ugh. Every so often, one gets one of those nights when one simply cannot fall asleep. Of course, in my case, it's one of those days. Regular followers of this blog will recall that my "day" starts when most civilized folk are settling into their after-dinner routine, be that retreating to the comfort of a sofa and catching one's favorite program on the telly, possibly curling up with a newspaper, periodical or book, spending quality time with the spouse and kids, participating in a sport or hobby, or possibly just a good old-fashioned snog... North Americans will probably have to Google that last one!

But, yeah, here I sit in the Secret Underground Lair. The birds and insects have long since given up on their calls and buzzes, and the survivors of that particular breakfast are more than likely sleeping the morning away.

Me? Not so lucky.I should set the stage here- I've been working a fair amount of overtime lately (where FAIR AMT=6 out of the past 7 days, and 7 out of the past nine, where WEEK= 7 days), and those of you gentle readers who are not members of the elite community of Nightstalkers may have a bit of trouble understanding my point of view, but tighten your seatbelts and I'll try and illuminate things for you. My evening typically begins anywhere from 2000 to 2200, depending on how the previous "day" had gone. Like most other folks in the West (well, the USA, at least), I put in an eight hour day. I work in a job shop, though- that is, we don't make the same thing every day until a new design comes out or a new model year. We contract to produce a product for a customer, and the salesforce works very diligently to ensure that the presses have enough work to run 24/7. These men and women do a good job, as downtime is typically at a premium.

So, here's the soap opera domino effect that was set in motion late last week: the lovely J (a kindred spirit of sorts) was slammed last week by the influx of six jobs from one customer. Not a huge deal, normally, except that this particular customer is a "Group"; that is, several companies are owned by this customer. So, three different companies with jobs that were quite close together in our order numbering system. I was asked to come in Saturday to do the second proof QC on one of these jobs, but we got slammed with uncharacteristically severe thunderstorms, so the lovely J was unable to remotely log in and get the proofs ready. That was okay, as it turned out she had some other work for the Group that needed to get done. I finished that, and was back on Sunday night. More ugliness had surfaced, and I ended up grabbing some food for her: while my weekend was ~14 hours, she put in 10 hours on Sunday. I delivered the food, and we talked about the jobs- my task was to run production and QC. She went home, and I sprung into action. I was moderately excited as I launched production on four different machines. My excitement turned to despair, though, as one by one, the program bombed. I frantically hit the communicator and shouted, "Scotty, warp factor 9- NOW!"

To no avail, of course, as I don't have a communicator button. Sheesh! Can't a guy get a break? After taking a few deep breaths, I figured out the problem, and proceeded to fix it. There are more hilarious details, but I will not belabor my gentle readers with them. In the end, I got everything to work.

Monday was fine, and then Tuesday rolled around and a whole new soap opera opened. It's mid-Wednesday morning as I write this, and the Tuesday soap opera has come to its exciting climax, with the performance of yours truly being nominated for an Emmy. Stay tuned- the ride doesn't get any smoother, but it's a doozie- guaranteed!

Lastly- data. Hah! You probably thought you were off the hook and/or I forgot.

I'm the black sheep of the Subaru family, apparently. We bought our Outback in April, and I've gotten at least two notices to come in for scheduled 3,750 mile (6,000 km) service. I've been putting it off because, well... overtime. We just hit 2,000 miles (3,200 km), so next week we'll hopefully be taking Meerkat in for her 1st service. I need to contact Sandy and see if we can take some test drives while we're there.

Real data: one of the neat instrumentation features of the Outback is a real time MPG calculator. This miles per gallon calculator resets every time you refill the tank, and gives you a pretty good idea of how you're driving. When we first got the car, we didn't use it, as the estimated cruising range seemed like a decent metric. Jennifer had suggested trying the MPG setting, and I've left on there since. It's become something of a game, getting over 21 MPG  in mostly short trip, stop and go suburban driving with an AWD vehicle.  Which brings me to what would have been the original title of this blog: "How Much Data Is Too Much?"

Subaru engineers decided to make the MPG increments .3 of a MPG. At first, this bothered me, as I'm all for the smallest practical range- .1 MPG. However, after about a week of watching this metric and making informal mental notes of my behavior, I decided that .3 is a good and useful number, not so much as it is significant, but because it does not distract the "data-enhanced" driver.

More words than usual- thanks for your patience. I've got a new database I'm experimenting with at work- I got the idea from Frank. I'll post updates if it becomes useful.

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

On subject matter 05.28.14

I'm currently writing two blogs, one here and one on Wordpress (hochspeyer.wordpress.com). It's days like today that tend to drive a writer just a bit sideways, because even though there is nothing in the way of compensation involved in these writing projects, I still feel a certain compulsion to get a certain volume of work out each calendar month... because even thought we might hate to admit it, at its heart blogging is a numbers game.

And that's a problem when you're trying to write for a blog which has a theme, but for which you have absolutely no pertinent subject matter for your post. However, in the frenzied world of publish or perish- which is the internet as many bloggers may know it-publishing something can sometimes be better than nothing.

So, here I sit in the Secret Underground Lair. To my right, a single-player game of Civilization V is being played. My phone has the mobile version of Words with Friends going, Windows Media Player has just finished sorting songs (in descending order) according to number of plays (James Brown's The Old Landmark from The Blues Brothers movie is currently playing). 

The casual reader might infer from the photograph that right now I'm doing more photography than data, and honestly, the reader would be correct. Still, as long as I'm writing, there's data to be had. While my Wordpress blog is still in its infancy and slowly gaining something of a following, the blog you are reading right now has expanded its international presence, adding readership in India and Lithuania. This gives the blog readers in forty-three countries!

So that's going to be a wrap for my Blogspot posts for the month.

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

#notsobigdata- an epiphany of sorts

I recall writing recently that I was going to lay off of the data-focused posts for a bit and get back to the format of life in and around the Secret Underground Lair for a bit. I was even ready to go with a new topic, a music topic that is near and dear to my heart: why did (fill in the name of a popular and talented musical artist- singer or band) record that atrocity? Furthermore, why did it sell and why did it receive massive airplay? Alas, that will have to wait for another day, because I had one of those moments, and now the Secret Underground Lair's Data Vault will never be the same.

As I had briefly mentioned in an earlier blog, I had updated a table which had the effect of blowing out all of my queries. This is not important right now, as the total amount of data is still under 5Mb(!) and there are still fewer than 900 records in the main data table. For the purpose of updating this table, though, I decided to make a query which would simply list movie titles and formats. So, I sat down with the query wizard and proceeded to make a simple query which would output an alpha list of only movies, as well as their formats.

Simple, right? Muahaha, I guess the air in the Secret Underground Lair was a bit thin when I tried to do this, because I kept on trying the same thing and I kept on getting the same error. Suddenly, as I was staring at the Criteria in Design View, it hit me: it was not working because when I tried to run with the criterion I had selected, the criterion was not recognized. In plain English, I wanted what I thought was data, but Access interpreted it as a displayed name.

Since there are only two pieces of data in the table, I figured out that Access wanted to see the record's autonumber rather than the name displayed in the target table. I switched the so that Criteria==9 (where 9==the record number of the piece of data that I actually wanted to use), and it worked. Which means, if I'm feeling adventurous, I'll save a copy of the database and figure out how the relationships are set up, and then correct so they are pointing to the desired field in the source table. Then, I will eliminate the autonumber field, setting up the only remaining data as the primary key.This will lighten the database a bit, and make it much easier to write queries, as the criteria will all be in plain English. And going forward, all new single field tables will not have an autonumber.

Next time, I'll try to get those songs out, as well as an idea for a relatively ultralight database that I had some ideas about. Until then,...

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

Peace, Love & TQM

After a couple straight database-laden posts, I thought I'd go back to the somewhat more familiar format I've been following- that is, the larger part of the post being about life in the Secret Underground Lair, followed with a bit of database news. That's a polite way of saying: until I get back to rebuilding my queries, it's pretty much going to be data entry for a while!

My cohort in contracting has said on several occasions that to force writing is to end up with forced writing. Well, something along those lines. As I was leaving the office this morning, I said to him in parting, "Peace, Love and TQM!" It's such an odd phrase, coined by yours truly in Germany, in the halcyon days of The Drawdown following the end of Desert Storm. And this is the crux of today's musings.

In any environment where the same folks gather on a regular basis- whether it be professional, social or casual, a common vocabulary will emerge as these individuals get to know each other and become comfortable and maybe friendly. Beyond lingo, jargon or truisms, a certain "groupspeak" will emerge. Groupspeak, according to wiktionary.com, is "The jargon used by a particular group." They go on to define jargon as,
  

1. (uncountable) A technical terminology unique to a particular subject.
2. (countable) Language characteristic of a particular group.
3. (uncountable) Speech or language that is incomprehensible or unintelligible; gibberish. 

I like their definition #2 best, as it fits this monologue quite well. The characters in the group I'm in have been together for around five years, with additional members who have since either left or work different shifts. It is worth noting that not all of the phrases are original to our group or even original at all, but have developed into a kind of verbal shorthand for us. With that having been said, I'd like to share some of these expressions and their current usage. It should also be noted that not everyone has a signature groupspeak phrase.

There are a few different ways in which we announce that we are leaving for the day. "I don't know about you all, ..." is Adrian's phrase; Jimmy Z's is, "I gotta get out of here" and mine is, "I've had enough fun for one day".

A great deal of what we do at night and overnight is quality control, which sometimes requires us to engage with folks from different departments or even facilities in different parts of the country. One evening, we were checking some work for a job we were doing for another facility, and we had to call the Customer Service Representative (CSR) for advice on this particular job (this particular CSR has long since left the company). First we asked about some counts, and the CSR said, "Is that really important?" Uh, yes, it is. Next, there was another issue and the response was," Do you think they'll notice?" Uh, yes. The last question was answered with, "Does it really matter?" These legendary, epic responses have become a regular part of our groupspeak and are invoked whenever something that obviously needs to be fixed shows up.

There are many others, of course, but one final group is the ones which just don't really mean anything- things like "Where do I sign?" (where something should be done, but the speaker indicates that another person has thoroughly checked something out), "He's off my Christmas card list", which indicates someone has done something particularly inane. And then there's the Jimmy Z all-time classic, "It's a setup!" in cases where something has gone horribly wrong, or where someone else has started a job, and then goes on vacation, leaving all sorts of potential disaster on the table (as well as all of the responsibility).

That's it for today. As mentioned, I'm pretty much to data entry mode, so no database news today.

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

More Steam, punk!

It’s time for a rant. Per internet protocol, this rant is hardly serious- it’s merely an expression against some minor perceived frustrations of modern life.

As compensation for a purchase I recently made, a certain manufacturer included in their product an offer for some .mp3 downloads. Being a fairly savvy consumer, I understood that the manufacturer most likely was betting that the average consumer would not redeem all ten .mp3s that were the offer.

Well, I am quite the music aficionado, and I was happy to get ten songs out of the deal. It literally took around three hours, so I’m not sure what my ROI is. I suppose the bottom line is that I was able to fill a few holes in my collection. The downside was I was not able to fill a few holes in my music collection. There were artists that were unavailable that did not surprise me. What surprised me was popular songs that were not available from certain one hit wonders.

Okay- end of rant. I got some good  music- considering that the actual product cost 14 USD, and an .mp3 generally costs something like ninety-nine cents, I only paid four dollars for the actual product.

Back in the real world, I’m listening to a tune from Axe’s first (and best, in my opinion) album as I write. “Jennifer” is a great tune. Behind me, the XW4200 workstation is resting. I finally got up the courage to fight cables, track down power supplies, and bring the workstation back online. It is re-entering service as an Ubuntu box; our son is all excited that Steam is now available on the Ubuntu platform, so he is going to get the opportunity to start working with Linux. I read some of the Canonical blurbs about Quantal Quetzal, and it looks somewhat different from the last Linux I played with, which I think was 8.10 LTS. The install was slightly odd- about a ten minute preload where not much happened onscreen. The rest of the install was typically painless- Canonical have the install process down. One improvement over the last time I did this is the informational screens… all in all I’m pretty jazzed about this latest version of Ubuntu.

The other benefit to the Linux install is the reclaiming of office space- the Secret Underground Lair is unfortunately no stranger to clutter, and this most recent project forced me to do a bit of straightening, and more will follow.

One final note which pretty much pegs the geek-meter at 11 concerns printers. I think I had previously mentioned that we had picked up a used HP printer at our local Goodwill store. Because of the way the office is set up, this printer sits on top of a pair of PCs- until tonight, it had rested on three. The activation of the Linux box required some repositioning of equipment, so now it sits on top of two PCs. What really pegs the meter, though, is this printer is our third HP printer in service (simultaneously); all take the same ink, and all have output trays which face East.

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