The State of the Blog, v.03

If it's December, then it must be time to...

Celebrate. Commemorate. Conjugate...?

Well, maybe not conjugate, but it's the THIRD anniversary of this blog! I'm somewhat e-excited about this. I can honestly say I never expected it to go this long, or have so many entries. Here's the quick recap, from the 1st blog The Final Frontier to the still strangely most popular one Why, 2K to the one that slipped through the proverbial e-cracks A Red Letter Day In History.

The unifying theme of this blog is data. A casual observer might not notice this, but I did say "unifying theme". So, if you're looking for the golden data nuggets of wisdom check out the twitters or websites of my good e-buddies Kirk Borne Ph.D. Lee Baker Ph.D. or Gregory Piatesky Ph.D.

For  those who think my data science is a bit sexist, please check out my good e-buddies Diego Kuonen Ph.D., Carla Gentry and Carol Lynn Curchoe Ph.D.

(In the FWIW column, these folks are some of my followers on Twitter). Not to drop names, of course! :)

In any event, I did drop a few names there, so I should probably clarify things a bit. Some of my more recent posts have been of a somewhat personal nature, and not much data was presented. For the (I'm sure this is a very small percentage of my) readers who were expecting some data in those posts, I apologize.

In actuality, most of my "data" occurs on Twitter, with some on Pinterest. To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure what my most impactful social medium is these days... Twitter is the easiest, Blogspot is the deepest, and Pinterest is the broadest. And, most importantly, it's hobby, so I'm not paying for analytics!

I suppose I enjoy blogging the most, as it is the most creative. Pinterest is lots of fun- and easy. However, there's very little original content. Twitter is fun, but once again, not much original content, as I'm generally more of a repeater rather than an original content contributor. Blogger... this is my "original" e-home. To quote AC/DC- "No stop signs, speed limits...." Not that I'm an AC/DC fan.

An update on the SUL (Secret Underground Lair)....

This is my corner of the SUL. If you're curious, the two leftmost PCs are Win7 machines, and the other is an HP workstation running Ubuntu 12.10, I think. There's actually a 4th screen (which is off camera to the right) for Raspberry Pi use and testing), and there are two additional PCs- one of which is another Win7 box, and the last one is an offline XP machine. In fairly big SUL news, we've been getting rid of old tech boxes (those of the cardboard variety, to clarify), and have reclaimed nearly a square meter of floor space.

That's all for now. Oh... still hoping someone in Antarctica will pick this up!

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

Outpatient Postoperative Status: O.K.

"What is this, the Dark Ages?", asks Dr. Leonard McCoy, in "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home".

It might not be the best Star Trek film, but Star Trek IV is near the top of my favorites list. Dr. McCoy  pretty much nailed why I haven't been to the dentist in some time. To make a long story short, I found myself in an oral surgeon's chair at high noon today, and I left the office about an hour later with two fewer teeth. What amazed me, though, was the relative speed and comfort of the procedure. First, a panoramic x-ray- and not a lead suit of armor anywhere! Then, the actual procedure: a shot of a novacane-type numbing agent, and I was completely numbed in less than a minute. Then, the procedure: two teeth removed... total time- less than five minutes. The total bill was even a bit less than I had been earlier quoted! Snookums and I drove home, and I had to have gauze in my mouth for two hours before the bleeding was reduced to a bit of seepage. This, of course, threw the rest of the day off a bit more than I had planned. I was concerned about opening the suture at work, so I took the evening off, and the day job is also going to be an unpaid sick day, but, barring any unforeseen issues, I'll be back at it tomorrow night!

I had some soft food, some tea, and finally got down to the Secret Underground Lair. As the Playstation upgrade has been verified, I deleted the 160GB transfer/backup folder from my 1TB portable HD. I thought to myself, "Hmm. That's a lot of data. I haven't defragged this HDD since... um, since I bought it. Over a year ago. Well over a year ago- and it's in daily use. May as well do that now." So, I did. Normally, we use Defraggler here, but this PC doesn't have all of our standard suite of utilities, and I ended up using the native Windows XP defrag utility.

It took around five hours. Well, it's not like I was going anywhere.

Other news/updates: I hope to have Ubuntu news and a database update next edition. I've not done much due to dental situation (which actually dates back to last Thursday), so my fuzzy schedule is still fuzzy. I also found a monitor stand, so before I do any more wiring, I need to mount that on the desk. We also may have one more PC to deploy; if I do that, I'll more than likely try to get another two port KVM when finances permit. I also need to download the latest versions of ubuntu, Fedora and possibly Mint. The database has only had a few new items added, statistically insignificant even for me.