Life in the Twittersphere

I'm not going to do the parody lyrics here, but bring up the Eagles' "Life In The Fast Lane"  from their "Hotel California" album and you can sort of hum along- it pretty much works. I used to do a lot of parody lyrics, as a matter of fact, but as far as this blog goes, I really didn't make the connection with the Eagles until I actually saw the title of the blog.

For what its worth, this was going to be another "Hoodie Migration" blog, but that was before I read a few posts from the Outmannedmommy blog. To be fair, the Outmannedmommy blog is quite funny, but it may be NSFW (not safe for work) as F-bombs occasionally detonate- especially from guest writers! Still, I enjoy Mary Widdicks' writing- because her style is great, and I can relate to her writing.

Also, strangely (or not?), I don't read a lot of other blogs, Mary's is the only funny one I normally read; most of the rest are retweets on Twitter (nothing wrong with that) about the IoT and bigdata.

And here's the crux, the nexus of this post: Me and Twitter (if you ant to try your hand at parodying this, try Tom T. Hall's most excellent "Me and Jesus" or "Faster Horses, Younger Women, Older Whiskey and More Money".

Twitter is by far the number one reason for my dearth of blogs as of late. I've been contributing a fair amount to the Twittersphere, focusing primarily on Big Data and the Internet of Things. One of my coworkers constantly tells me that I'm a fraud (he's kidding... mostly) because I'm not a PhD, a data scientist, a statistician, or any number of other things associated with Big Data and the IoT... and at that point I always remind him that I make no claims to be anything more than a catalyst or a conduit for ideas. And even though I'm no expert, I've become fairly adept at picking interesting and informative stories, factoids, infographs and blogs. This is evidenced by several folks that ARE PhD's, data scientists and statisticians who follow (and retweet) me.

That's the really short version of Life in the Twittersphere, but I need to get to bed, so I am going to close this and hopefully get another blog out very soon.

News from the Secret Underground Lair (SUL): I think I had mentioned that Mr. T and I were planning a bit of remodeling in the SUL. I'm happy to report that the majority of that work is now complete. Well, the furniture moving is done. Everything that got moved out now needs to be moved back in- I wish there was a defrag utility for small offices... press a button on the wall, and all of the books, boxes, doodads, computer components, computers, etc would find the optimal place to rest and automatically go there.

Finally, data news (this blog is about data, right?) I've got a spreadsheet roughed out, and have put a bit of test data in. So far, everything looks good: according to my flat database, I have 71 Lego elements. 

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

Forty-Two, v7 (or so)

I've been spending a fair amount of time on Twitter (@CjoelHarrison) lately... so much, in fact, that other elements of my e-life have been suffering. Case in point: this blog. In January of 2015, while I was establishing my presence in the twittersphere, I did not post a single blog. Possibly even more tragic, my playing time on Rail Nation has suffered tremendously. And don't even get me started on my lack of quality Steam time... I'm not certain when the last time I played Sid Meier's Civilization V was.

In any event, here I am once more heralding the latest iteration of my pet database project, Forty-Two. This may indeed be Version Seven; then again, I've not kept track, so it could be any number greater than three. This iteration, though, is different from previous ones: it was not necessitated by a hardware crash or a software glitch. Rather, it is simply a fresh start with a few ideas to make a (relatively) large dataset more organized.

So, I suppose the logical question would be this: why would a home user with no database training want to even try to build an Access database in the first place?

I suppose I could just write it off as an Aspie thing- a project that goes on forever without a realistic chance of being completed (I'm not sure that's exactly an Aspie trait!) It could be that I haven't learned MySQL yet, or haven't even tried NoSQL, and let's not even bring Hadoop into the discussion!

The reality is a lot more pedestrian. And practical: I want to know what I don't know.

In plainer speech, I want to learn how to build a small relational database from the ground up. I want this database to be useful to my family. And, possibly the most important reason for building the database: should anything bad happen, I'd like to have it as a record for an insurance claim.

So there, that's what drives me to keep on trying to build Forty-Two, the database that answers the question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.

The other side projects that have been taking up my time are coding. Professionally, I'm a programmer. The interesting thing about that is that even if I spent the majority of my time programming, the world would probably not recognize me as a programmer, because the tools that I use are very specialized and are more related to composition and layout than programming- and when we DO actually write some code, there is absolutely no way it con be confused with a Turing complete language. Still, some of these tools DO have actual programming, and to help myself to better understand these areas, I've taken to studying the Python language.

Gasp- it's official now: yours truly is studying Python.

print("That's all for now folks!")