The State of the Blog, v.04 (2016)

Well, it has been four years of writing... well, blogging. I sometimes question the literary validity of blogging versus other literary pursuits. I think blogging will be (or may be currently) viewed as a legitimate literary form, and so I throw up my feeble thoughts into the blogosphere every so often for amusement and evaluation.

Before I forget, I'd like to say "Thanks!" to all of my readers, loyal and occasional, new and old. And, in keeping with internet survey options which really make no sense, those who would answer "Other" also get my thanks.

I'm afraid this is going to be one of "those" posts, the sort I'd guess most blog writers dread: I've gotta write something, but I've got absolutely no clue as to what it will be.

I suppose I could go with the "ever-popular" "Year In Review" theme. Except I don't think anyone enjoys reading those- especially folks who don't know me or my family personally.

For a change, I'd like to say that this year has been pretty exceptional. Unlike last year when I had cataract surgery, we've not had and major illnesses or injuries- and we're quite thankful for this! Jennifer's Dad has been the exception, and out of respect for her family I'll leave it at that.

Daniel is no longer a newb at his job, and has scored some pretty impressive hours for a newcomer. Amanda and Mike are still at the ranch. Mr. T is ISO employment, and sharpening his graphics skills in the interim.

Jennifer and I are still knee-deep in home improvement projects. With the roof out of the way and the mulberry trimmed, we can now (hopefully!) turn our attention to other projects- more on these later.

And finally, one might ask: what's up in the wonderful world of data and programming?

Well, my latest endeavor I've been trying to do something which seems pretty simple- download and install Microsoft Visual Studio. We have an internal project or two at work which would benefit from multiple programmers poking at it, but I have as yet been able to successfully download and install Microsoft Visual Studio completely on my (personal) laptop. I've downloaded it to my work laptop and Jennifer's computer, so I'm more or less in business.

I've not done much with R or Python, but hopefully that will change in 2017. Who knows? For now, Merry/Happy Christmas! Here are a few recent photos I hope you enjoy!

Meerkat at home

New cat tree- Kenji on top, Tinka below

Meerkat, somewhere north of Springfield, IL

Working out vs. Training

Technically speaking, the snow that fell in our area from December 31, 2013 to January 2, 2014 was a two year snowfall- after all, it took all of one year and part of another to fall. I'm glad it all fell when it did so I didn't have to drive in it. Well, it spanned two years, as Ryan astutely observed.

Yesterday, in the wee hours of January 3, the streets were pretty clean and the temperature was 3F (-16C). Jennifer and I had planned on going to the gym earlier, but the streets were still quite the mess, so we stayed home. On the 1st, we took a walk of ~2 miles (~4.4km), and after dinner I shoveled snow for about thirty minutes. I shoveled again on the 2nd, probably around an hour or so. I drove to work in not quite blizzard conditions, but by the time I got off at 0700, the wind was gone and the temps were in the low 20's (~-6C).

It is now technically the 5th of January- I say that because in my world its still Saturday (yesterday). The temperature is around 30F (-1C) and heavier than its been in some time. When I got home from work earlier, I made a path from the back door of the house to the garage- I'm interested to see what that looks like on Sunday.

That's all for now. No data. I'm just tired. :)

Addendum-

Sunday evening, and the all that is left of what turned out to be a pretty serious snow storm is a few flakes. It's tough to say how much the final total accumulation was due to drifts, but it was at least an additional 5" (~11cm). The path I had shoveled when I got home was gone- probably under a foot (over 26cm) of new snow in some spots. Jennifer got out the snow blower and I grabbed a shovel and we moved snow around for a few hours.

We had hoped to get to the gym today; we're uncertain if it was even open. Public works was out in full force plowing snow, and the streets were barely navigable. The high point of out day was when the snowblower ingested TWO plastic-wrapped newspapers that were buried in a snowbank. We had quite a laugh about that as we extracted the shredded, impacted remains of the Chicago Tribune from the impeller.

My final bit of weather news: the National Weather Service has issued a wind chill warning for the rest of tonight and going in to tomorrow. Wind chills could hit -40F to -50F; great weather factoid: the Fahrenheit and Celsius scales apparently only match up in one place- -41, so I won't bother with the metric equivalent here!

As always, I am hochspeyer, part-time amateur meterologist, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.

Let It Snow

I had planned on starting this blog off with some weather comments. Sadly, I was not able to really differentiate between astronomical and meteorological winter, so we're stuck with my definition: it's past October, the wind is blowing and the snow is sticking. And, the salt trucks are out.

As the readership of this blog is quite geographically diverse, I once again need to take a few steps back and explain nearly everything I've written. I live near Chicago- actually, quite close to O'Hare Airport (ORD), and it it pretty much winter here. I know this because the temperature has been in the single digits and low teens on the Fahrenheit scale. As I write this, its Tuesday the 10th of December. Over the past two days we've officially gotten 3" (~7.6cm) of snow, and 2-4" (5-10cm) is predicted to fall today. The lowest overnight low temperature that I saw tonight was -1F (~ -18C). I blame all of this recent temperature recording partly on a coworker who is a native of Arkhhangelsk (Архáнгельск). This coworker has expressed a desire to return home, but is at the same time what we'd call a "freezy-cat": the office is always too cold! So, on one particularly cold day last week I looked up the temperature in Arkhangelsk, and it was actually warmer by a couple of degrees (F). I said, "You can go back to Russia. Its warmer there." The irony here is that Arkhangelsk is more than 1,500 miles (~3300km) to the NORTH of Chicago! 

Has anyone tried the #hourofcode yet? This is the week to give programming a chance. It doesn't hurt, and its free! Try W3schools- they offer FREE training in half a dozen web-related languages. All free, and with a nicely designed site that offers instant gratification- this is as close to painless training as it gets! 

I've worked a bit on the database since the last post. Nothing stupendous to report, but the data is getting cleaner. That's progress, and I'm calling this a day!

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.