On my way back from Tunisia via Paris I ended up in a redneck dive bar somewhere in Georgia reading the New York Times on my Kindle while the lady next to me asked the very drunk waitress if she knew who had won at NASCAR this weekend. This sounds like the beginning of a…
I have been trying to get ready for two workshops this summer. One is called Visual Data with SPSS (pretty obvious what it is about). The second one is statistics using SAS Enterprise Guide. I was going to call the first course Statistics without Numbers and the second one Statistics without Programming. A colleague pointed…
I’m at Seattle this week, at SAS Global Forum, and it is even greater than usual. I go to several conferences each year, some because I am presenting, some because there is a topic that particularly interests me, but there are three I go to every year. Of these, SAS Global Forum is the one…
So, thanks to the wonderful Heidi Johnson of SAS Tech Support I have finally successfully installed SAS Enterprise Miner 6.1 . I had major problems installing Enterprise Miner on any virtual machine. So, I did what I always do in these situations. I went back to the most plain vanilla no-frills thing I could possibly…
I stole that name from Chris Hemedinger for “The Missing Manual” because I thought it was hilarious. If you don’t program in SAS much then you probably did not think immediately, “Oh, . is the symbol for missing numeric data, how funny.” In fact, you are probably more like my daughter, Maria Burns Ortiz, who…
“But look, you found the notice didn’t you?” “Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’.” It sounds as if Douglas Adams, author of the Hitchhikers’ Guide to the…
The other day I needed to have a job run daily. My two efforts at solving this problem failed. These were: 1. Ask the six people hanging around for no particular reason how to do it. All vaguely remembered learning that at some point and had forgotten specifically how to do it. 2. Using Google…
I have long suspected that the main role of other people on this earth is to annoy me. Take FIPS codes. FIPS stands for “Federal Information Processing Standard”. Does no one know the meaning of the word “standard” ? A FIPS code is a useful thing. For counties it is a FIVE digit code. Got…
Grown-ups lie to kids. I have discovered this. When I was young, my mom did not have a lot of money, and so things like trips to Disneyland, when they occurred at all, were on an extremely tight budget. No buying candy, souvenirs or extras. I swore that when I grew up, went to graduate…
Maybe I have been wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time, in fact, most of the really great things in my life have come about when I realized I was on the wrong track and took a sharp right turn. (Uncharacteristically skipping the opportunity here to make snarky comment about my first boyfriend, job or…