Snow!

Mar. 2nd, 2007 11:52 am
caffeine: (Default)
Another goodly amount of snow has fallen. 
I managed half of the driveway before the the snow thrower ran out of gas.  BGFE [livejournal.com profile] mle292 and I cleared the corner so I could get the Honda out and I ran to Home Depot to get the mix-oil and then to the gas station to fill up. Big sign at Home Depot announcing they were SOLD OUT of snow throwers and snow-shovels.  Fortunately, they still had plenty of the oil mix packages.  I bought extra this time. 

When I got back, MLE had finished the path from the street to the front door and all the way back to the garage!  I filled up the snow thrower and finished the driveway and cleared what the plows had left on the alley so it will be easier to get in and out.  Hopefully the neighbors plow service will be by soon to clear their portion of the driveway and make even easier.  I imagine their service is a bit busy and so I do not really expect them to be by until later.

And in other news, MARSCON!  Soon I will pack and do the last minute Con things and then off to the hotel.  Assuming, of course, that I do not need to be in Jury duty, which would suck, but I find the probability of them calling additional jurors on Friday afternoon with half the city shut down to be a very low risk.  I'll know in half an hour...

You can tell it is a snow day, as the VPN is slammed.  See, I wanted to update my Out Of Office, which I forgot to do last night when I left....
caffeine: (Default)
Our Corp intranet Retail Industry Headlines section had a link to this article this morning:

http://www.epi.org/content.cfm?id=2394

Lots of interesting points, including that Wal-Mart could raise their wages of all non-supervisor positions by $2100 (annual comp) and still have a better profit margin than Costco.

Also that a major pro Wal-Mart Analysis (payed for by Wal-Mart) has internal consistency issues.

I am sure most of the same things could be true of most Big Box Retailers.

Bicycle

May. 23rd, 2006 01:47 pm
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With all of the recent posts about bikes...

Last night, after yoga, I worked on my bicycle. I had to unbend a portion of the big gear 9no, i don't know how it got bent in the first place) and then spent some time adjusting the derailleur for the front gear. Grabbed my helmet, filled a water bottle, and rode on the trail to downtown. The around on Hennipen (as an interesting aside - LJ wants to fix this word, and one option is Heinlein) to the new library. Turned around and rode back home. 11+ miles, about an hour or so, with at least 15 minutes tied up wandering downtown. A guy on the bus told me to head off on the dirt trail and come in on 10th. That was cool, but left me woefully unprepared to find my way out again. Once I spotted a fellow biker I got going in the right direction again, and then had my destination confirmed by some helpful bikers whilst we were waiting at a light.

Got home, neighbor was out working on his new retaining wall. We had a beer and chatted for a while. Turns out he is a closet geek and plays EVE Online. So we talked EVE and WoW and drank our beers until it was dark and we both needed to be domestic again and take out our respective garbage. Not to overanalyze the beer, in this case a Mich Golden (from his fridge, not mine). Not too bad when you are sweaty and tired. And a Guinness, which i <3, but to be honest, is a little heavy after 2 hours of working out.

work and tech geekery )
caffeine: (Default)
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 [livejournal.com profile] 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.

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