caffeine | Monday Monday

My back hurts! Ok, well just the upper right part of it. The lat. The muscle that is currently bunched up around the shoulder blade, sending referral tension up the neck and down to the elbow. Skipped my Saturday morning workout and opted for a massage. Canceled tonight's appointment with my trainer. Took an hour off work and got in to see a chiropractor. I used to go see Dr.P. about once every three weeks until he dropped out of the practice due to the pain of insurance. A true loss to the industry. The guy I went to today knows him, and they come from the same methodology of chiropractics, so it seems I have found a new Doc. Also

redbird23 recommended him, so good call on her part. Thanks! He crunched my back really well and we got some better movement out of the shoulder area and it is feeling a little better now. Need to get another massage and I have a follow-on appointment this Friday too.

This week is BUSY. We have two people at a conference, and I get some tasks from both of them. Then another person is out for a long while starting Wednesday, and I get all of her data management tasks. Plus, I had about 4 hours of meetings (ok, 3 hours of meetings and a Dr. Appt), but still half my day already gone. I managed to crank out the high priority items today and left all the mediums until tomorrow. I should be able to almost catch up tomorrow, assuming people get back to me with their information. ("You want summarized test results from your tests. You have done like 15 tests. Pick 2.") I am not summarizing, averaging, and collecting peaks from hundreds of datapoints across multiple servers and multiple metrics. Maybe if I had a day or three with nothing else to do, and I wanted the pain that is Excel to be beaten into my skull for hours on end...

I have my data for tomorrow captured, but now I need to start summarizing. And since it is the end of the month, I have even more stats to compile. Yes I use perl. Yes I use subtotals in Excel. It is still painful. On the plus side, I have started using Publisher to pull together all of my graphs and comments, so the presentations look better, and I don't have to send everyone huge excel files that have 8 tabs of data and 4 tabs of graphs. It is an extra step of cutting and pasting, but the end result seems to be much nicer. Plus, lots of those graphs are only useful once/month or quarter, so people do not need to see them every week. Also, lots of those graphs do not change significantly week to week, so why include them. If people want the detail data, they can click a link to the full file.