My wife hates that I call my blog 'Boring Stuff', but really, what else would I call it?  If I were to tell you all about what I was doing at this moment, what would I be telling you about? 

Well, at work I am debugging a report that takes over 10 minutes to run and every once and a while decides not to run at all.  I think I've fixed it, but that still means that I have to run it, wait for it to finish, wait another minute or two, and try again.  When I'm done with this round of testing I get to roll it out to the main development servers and do it again.  When that's good I get to roll it out to the main testing servers and ... yep, do it again (well, that and have others do it with me who knows what the heck the statistics I'm looking at mean).

While I'm doing this I'm reading some political blogs, looked over the Wikipedia entries for Moon Knight and Iron Man, read some Slashdot stories and yelled at my monitor as I read whiny comments from people who evidently want us to all turn communist in terms of copyright.  For background music I decided to listen to a mix that includes Frank Sinatra, Iggy Pop, Bare Naked Ladies, Charlie Daniels, and Johnny Cash.

Hey, I think another report run just finished ...

Ok, so its been some time since I last posted and while I cannot promise to post as much as some people, I'm guessing that I can remember to post a little more often than once every 6 months.

In the past 6 months, several things have happened, I just don't know how exciting you will find them.  I mean, do you really want to know about my days slinging SQL code around?  Yeah, I didn't think so. 

I've read some books, gotten some DVDs, read more comics than at almost any other point in my life.  Oh, and I bought the domain http://www.thestgabriels.com, just for the heck of it. 

I will not say that I am the only Tech Guy who likes to write.  I will say that in my experience it is a rarity.  I don't know if I should blame my reading, my wife, or a certain Carter Hammond, but I love to write.  Its helping my career as people who want to write system analysises and technical documentation are hard to come by. 

Because time to read is at a premium nowadays I have turned to listening a number of podcasts every day (if you are not sure what a podcast is, think 'radio serial' or 'audio book' on my schedule, just remember, an iPod is not required to listen to them).  Most of these (from PodioBooks) are audio books read by the author and presented for free, you just specify how often you want you computer to download chapters.

One of my favorite new authors is Mur Laffery who has written a number of short things and I am now listening to 3 different of her works.  It turns out that she has a podcast where she talks about, what else, writing.  If you have any sort of thoughts of writing I'd recommend checking out her podcast if for nothing but amusement as she talks about the problems she's had finding time to write and read ....

So I do a ton of work for government clients (in fact, looking back I can't think of a single non-government agency I've worked for since arriving) and Juneau being the state capital that means I also do some work for the federal government.

I just finished up a contract for a client that involved moving tons of data around and combining it and finding trends (in an awful Database environment to top it all off).  Basically this information is used by this agency to 1) advise legislators and 2) help the agency make decisions that could very easily impact people's livlyhoods, as in, put them out of business.

I'm a data person, give me a set of data and I can mash it, tear it apart, and put it all back together to mean something.  I can also look at a set of data and say 'you've put it together way wrong'.  This client's information though was not only bad ('we can't get an accurate count of this so we estimate and fudge') but it is assembled in ways that are impossible to reproduce even by the guy who did it the first time.  The data doesn't even represent the same thing now as it did 5 years ago in some cases, still, its mashed and graphed and the agency is patted on the back.  One day someone is going to wise up and say 'give me your data and your algorithm so I can verify you destroying my business' and they will not be able to do it.

I knew governments were inefficient, but this just kinda boggles my mind.  It makes me wonder what the heck people are thinking when they say 'more government oversite on this' or 'why doesn't the government...' I mean, c'mon, really?  This is basic college level data analysis (maybe high school, its been a while) and the government doesn't get it a little wrong, they got it so wrong I'm struggling with a way to describe it.

PS.  I love my job, I really do, you have no idea.