I owe Victoria Brookhart an apology. One day, we were in the graduate student lounge discussing research methods and she burst out, “Isn’t this great? Here we are warming ourselves at the fires of knowledge. These are the times we’ll remember our whole lives as the good old days.” The rest of us threw spitballs…
Vista on VMware was running slow. I mean painfully slow. Like, bamboo shoots under your fingernails painful. As in banana slug slow. SAS Enterprise Guide was running SO slow on VMware I had gotten to the point where I would read a book while waiting for it to open, or to view results in a…
This is a blog about blogging. On the fun scale, meta-blogging probably falls midway between metadata and meta-analysis but I am going to do it anyway. In stages, because, just like if it has bullet points it must be serious business, if it has stages, numbers and units you’ve never heard of, like petapixels, it…
Hmm … so, Liz, our finance person is incomparably efficient and unfailingly nice, where I am usually efficient and have a reputation for being correct 97.6% of the time (as someone commented on twitter, if it has decimals in it, it must be true). Between the two of us we just accomplished the impossible task…
Some times documentation can be a little hard to find… You may be aware of the fact that, if you are running SAS 9.2 on a 64-bit Vista or Windows 7 machine the Import Data option from the file menu does not work for Excel files. Per SAS Usage Note 33228: (Courtesy of Peter Ruzsa…
I am writing a paper on moving from novice to intermediate programmer and got to thinking about the sort of things that people say that identify someone as a novice programmer. NOTE: No one is allowed to feel bad for having made these mistakes. Everyone you meet will admit to having made the exact same…
There are two kinds of people in organizations; those who can count and those who claim to have “people skills”. When David Wechsler created the most commonly used intelligence test in America, the results gave two IQ scores, Verbal and Performance Intelligence. Dr. Wechsler said he had noticed that there are some people who were…
Back when I was in college, there was a group advocating burning rock albums. A major investigative journalist wrote a story on their motivation (I think he either wrote for Rolling Stone or Playboy, the latter of which, yes, I really did read for the articles. Despite having competed on my college track team and…
I’ve been in business for over twenty years. All of that time, I have run a small business, by choice. During those twenty years, I have had a sick husband, been widowed, had four children – so I had some reasons that becoming the next Oracle was not my priority. However, I have made a…
So, I am writing a paper on how you know you (or someone else) is a “real” programmer. That is, they don’t fit in that “new user” box any more. But how do you make that decision? Is it like pornography, you just know it when you look at it? (Not that I ever personally…