Goodbye Summer, 2014... the affair is officially over

Summer officially ended in North America (Sep 21, 2014). I can't say that I'll miss it, in part because of the amount of overtime I put in at work, and also in part because it's not my favorite season. Yeah, I'm not a fan of the combination of heat and humidity. On the other hand, I do enjoy photography, and I do think summer has the inside track on being the easiest season to take pictures- after all, its the season when everything is green or blooming and wildlife is plentiful. For photographers, its a win-win. Spring and Autumn, of close, are close seconds when it comes to photographic topics.


As we're pretty much "officially" out of panic mode at work, I had this past Saturday off. This was really nice, as strong thunderstorms had been predicted for our area. We were thankfully spared from getting hit by the storms and had a quiet night. Sunday ended up being a "heavy" day- the humidity seemed to be off the scale, and we moped around for the better part of the day. I turned the television on around 1330, hoping to catch a part of the Chicago Bears' game. I mentioned in a previous blog that I enjoy watching the Bears. At noon on Sunday. Last week they played @1900; this week they're playing on Monday night. I work on Monday night- at this rate, I may not ever get to see a game this entire season. I could care less.

The photo above was taken with my Samsung Galaxy SIII; it shows my Nikon D3200  with dual battery grip, tripod, wired shutter release, 40mm Micro Nikkor lens and hotshoe mounted tri-axis level. It's a nice combination of equipment- I shot ~120 frames in 90 minutes. In a previous blog, I had introduced Darth Anna, Defiler of Planets. This past Friday I had brought my camera in to show her the battery grip. She seemed to be a bit puzzled about the need for two batteries, and I didn't try to explain my reasoning for the battery grip; suffice it to say that I shot for ninety minutes this afternoon without doing anything except for swapping a lens.

It turned out to be a glorious late afternoon photoshoot. There were definitely some photos that just did not happen because l had "lost the light"... that's one of those stock phrases that is SOOOOOO true; it's especially important in my subject area- railroads, where browns and reds predominate. Before this gets too boring, I want to pop in a photo that is important to me right here and right now- the very first image I captured with a DSLR (earlier this year).

No data to report, but one number: 2489. Not even a prime number... I thought it might be, but the internet said otherwise. It's the number of photo files I moved over to Adobe Lightroom. I had hoped to do a bit more than move files, but Adobe wanted updates, so I did the updates instead of real work. I have a few thousand more files on another couple of harddrives that also need to be moved over for renaming and archiving as well. One of those drives also has my music library, which is in serious need of deduping. I STILL need to replace the motherboard in Jennifer's computer. And, last but not least on my I.T. laundry list.... Mr. T. has apparently given up on his dream of building a computer with DDR4. It is his considered opinion that this new memory will not be reasonably priced in the foreseeable future. Last night, he said he had seen a 4GB stick for around 100USD; I laughed and told him that our first Windows computer had a pair of 4MB sticks that cost 78USD- and that was cheap!

In any event, Mr. T. has suggested that he can build a DDR3 PC pretty inexpensively. His plan is to wait for the Black Friday sales. In the interim, he'll be researching options... for building a dual graphics card box. I'm not seeing the "inexpensive" here.

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

#notsobigdata

Yes, I did create the twitter hashtag #notsobigdata in the wee hours of Wednesday, August 7. It is for my Not-so-big-data theme. And even though I realize that Big Data is the future, Not-so-big-data is the here, and the now, ... and the foreseeable future.

Not-so-big-data can still be a lot of data. For example, I once worked as a data analyst for a Wal Mart vendor. This was back in the Excel 2000 days, when Excel had a limitation of 65,536 rows. Even though I reported on only six to eight SKUs on each weekly report, there were weeks where the data exceeded Excel's capabilities, and I had to grab the data in Access, and then slice and dice it into chunks that the Excel of the day could handle. It was also at this time that I became familiar with what is seriously the best mouse ever devised- the Logitech Trackman Marble. I had never had to select 60,000+ rows of Excel data before, but this mouse made that task easy. We own four of them.

Getting back to not-so-big-data...

Not-so-big-data is what we deal with on a daily or weekly or monthly basis. Some of it is eclectic and ad hoc, often never gracing a ledger or spreadsheet... data like fuel economy or utility usage, but maybe bits and pieces of the family or organizational budget. The bottom line is that these dollars and cents (or whatever one's local currency happens to be) are important, at least for the day or week or other short period of time in question. Jennifer is a perfect example of a not-so-big-data consumer.

And not only is she a perfect example of the not-so big-data consumer, she's also an expert not-so-big-data manager and analyst. As an example, our has meters for gas, water and electricity. Even though these utilities employ meter readers, we send in our readings every month, because when the utilities don't read the meters, they estimate usage. And sometimes, the meter readers just plain make mistakes. We were on the wrong end of a meter reading error once- a 100 USD mistake. Jennifer caught this, and the mistake was corrected.

Along a similar line of thought, I was doing some data entry in one of my Access tables on Thursday before going in to work, and I ran into some duplicate records, or "dupes" for short. There were at least six sets of dupes. Egad! I was not happy to find them, as I am typically pretty vigilant about my rules. This particular table ("Names") currently only has two columns- the autonumber and the name. Right now, the only purpose the table serves is to force normalization in the current primary ("Media") table. The Names table is the sole source of data for the Artist/Author column in the media table- I do not allow free data entry into areas that are prone to seeing repetitive data. As I was working with some books, I glanced over at the bookshelf and replaced the dupes with authors which had not yet been entered into this table. Adding insult to injury, I know exactly when and how the errors occurred.

I had been entering the data of some compilation music cassettes a few weeks ago, and as each cassette has a number of artists, I got a bit careless and just entered several- instead of checking to see if there already was a record. And so for a moment's complacence, I had to spend time fixing rather than creating. I hope to eliminate this from ever happening again by double-checking to see that there are no more dupes in the table, and then setting the duplicates property of the field to == no duplicates.

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

It isn't data entry. Exactly.

Well, we got what I consider our first real snowfall of the year today. As I compose this, the second wave of snow from this storm system is falling; the prognosticators have said that the second is to be greater than the first. So far, that does not seem to be the case, which doesn't bother me in the slightest (on the plus side, the snow that is falling is providing a nice cover over the wet spots, adding a bit of natural traction control). Jennifer and I spent over two hours shoveling patio, sidewalks, driveway and apron earlier in the evening. We stopped for two reasons: 1) we were done, and 2) we were hot. The snow that fell was of the "heart attack" variety- really heavy, and as the ground still isn't all that cold, there was some melting going on underneath as well. We were suited up for the worst, having layered insulating layers and wind/waterproof stuff... all very lightweight, of course. Still, over the course of two hours at just below freezing temperatures, we were drenched in sweat when our task was done.

The library

Looking north from our front door

The snow started during our dash to Office Depot and the library. There were a few things that needed to get taken care of at the library tomorrow, but we surmised the roads would be better today before the snow hit, so we dashed out. We got gas first, and then headed off to Office Depot to pick up a USB hub. Jennifer's computer has decided that the USB ports are going to work intermittently, and as we had confirmed at least one is working properly, we decided to utilize that port and plug up a powered USB hub into it. We found a reasonably-priced Ativa-branded one and went to the checkout. As we were standing there, we were drawn to some flash drives that were on sale. One of the boys had said they needed one, so we grabbed a 32GB drive for just under $15 USD! I remember the first time I purchased RAM for a computer- $78 USD for 2x4MB!!! And that was about $20 USD under the going rate- yep, got'em at Sam's Club. As we paid for our purchase, we saw that the flurries that had been gently wafting from the heavens had transformed into a full-blown snow assault. We packed up, and headed off to the library. There were no parking spots on the main level of the municipal garage, so we headed up to the 3rd level, which is uncovered and has a nice view of downtown. We braved the gusting winds and snapped off a few photos before retreating to the safety of the truck and  heading back  to find a parking spot on the main level. We took care of business at the library and headed home where we enjoyed an impromptu lunch mashup of chicken, cabbage and ramen.

I was able to finally get  what I hope is the last piece of the normalization puzzle in place between last night and tonight. I cheated a bit. I had considered doing a make table query, but wanted to cleanse the data. So, rather than creating the query, I exported the whole table into Excel, and got rid all of the data except for the column which would become the new table. Unfortunately, last night I neglected to dedupe the data before I created the new Access table, so that had to be done manually today. It was not a complete goof-up, though: as I manually purged the data, I found a few dozen records that would not have been caught by Excel's dedupe, and I fixed these as I went along. Fortunately, the table currently holds only 831 records, so the process was relatively painless.

Normalization in progress

Now the table is in place and the dropdowns are functioning normally. I've had to make corrections here and there... I don't know if I've ever mentioned this before, but data entry isn't exactly one of my strong points. Of course, when one selects from a dropdown, it isn't exactly data entry- is it? On the plus side, all of the tables look like they are working as planned- I have updated 120 out of 831 records. When this process is complete,  the existing "Title" field will be deleted from that table, and then I can get back to the bane of my existence- data entry.

Nota bene- I've always loved that phrase, "nota bene" but seldom have cause to use it. The reason for the N.B. today has to do with proofreading. As I write this, I'm on at least my twelfth preview/save cycle. Although I proofread professionally, I still find that proofreading one's own text is much more difficult that proofing the copy of others. And for me, the issues is generally a typographical error more often than not, and almost always (infuriatingly) something that the built-in spellchecker/grammar nanny doesn't catch!

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