No plan of battle survives first contact with the enemy

Well, that's how I learned this particular truism. According to von Moltke the Elder, "No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy's main strength" (or "no plan survives contact with the enemy"). His idea of warfare seemed to be plan, plan and then make some more plans- maybe not too bad an idea for business? Such has been my experience with the first day of Mr. T's and my grandiose plan to bring Order and Balance to the Chaos which is currently the Secret Underground Lair (SUL) in only seven days. Monday is done, and quite honestly, our chances for success are looking rather bleak.

Still, I'm an optimist.

We've decided to tackle the project in fairly easily manageable stages. The first stage involved the relocating of a small bookcase and its base from the east wall (next to Mr. T) to the west wall. Not a big deal, but Jennifer is also moving things outside of the SUL. What she is doing is important in our little world and needs to be done, but our home is not large (by American standards) so my progress was greatly hindered, but in a good way. I ended up tackling another area in the SUL, which needs to be tackled and will help out with the upcoming work of the next few days. Still, at the end of the first day, I had hope for more progress. But, as Vivien Leigh (as Scarlett O'Hara) said in "Gone With the Wind", "After all, tomorrow is another day". And Tuesday is done.

It's Wednesday evening, and this is my last SUL update for this entry. Jennifer and I got up early today and took our trusty Subaru Outback, Meerkat, for a Springtime checkup. We drove down to Grand Subaru for an oil change, tire rotation and a surprise complimentary wash- which included our epically salt-encrusted floor mats. On the way home, Jennifer heard about a special sale a local bakery was having, and although we knew of them both by their reputation and having sampled their products, we had never been there before. We decided to check the sale out, as it was not too far out of our way home.

Chicago's National Hockey League (NHL) franchise, the Blackhawks, is in the playoffs for the Stanley Cup- the League championship. So, Central Continental Bakery is having a merchandise promotion: when the Hawks win, Continental Bakery will have a special discount on one of their items the following day. The Hawks won last night, so today's special was a 20% discount on eclairs. Let me state firmly and without reservation that I love eclairs. As a family, we seldom have desserts, and when we do they are generally something Jennifer has made.  So, to go out of the way to actually purchase a dessert is nearly unheard of.

The bakery is commonly known as Continental Bakery, and features a dizzying variety of what seems to be primarily pastries of central European origin (Danish, German, Polish, Austrian, Slovak, Moravian, Czech, Swiss). When we first walked in, our experience was this: we were smacked upside the head with EUROPE. It was like walking into Dr. Who's Tardis in Chicago and stepping out in Hochspeyer, Echternach or Tønder. The bakery's customer area is laid out in an L shape, and not a bit of space is wasted- even the decor drew us into a happier time across the Atlantic... had I looked out the window, I would not have been surprised to see a German vendor selling Itälienisch Eis from his little truck or a Citroën 2CV idling at the stoplight.

I said I had tried their wares before. Continental Bakery is famous throughout Chicagoland as THE baker and purveyor of pączki. The interesting thing about this pastry is that it is only available on one day each year at Continental Bakery: the day before the Catholic feast of Ash Wednesday, or "Fat Tuesday". On this day, the bakery is open and operating for twenty-four hours, cranking out pączki. This event is often featured on local television news.

So, we walked into the bakery with very high expectations and were not disappointed. The eclairs were beyond my words to describe, and we also picked up some soft cheesy garlic breadsticks, as well as sampling a few of their butter cookies. To quote Arnold; "I'll be back".

This is a bit lengthier than my usual posts, so I'm calling this a wrap- data next time! 

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.