I’ve spent the better part of the last week and a half cranking out a massive database. I’m not sure exactly how many records, but I’m guessing about 6,000. The best part–each record required me click-and-drag some information from a .pdf. That’s clicking and dragging 6,000 times using a trackpad. I might be in occupational therapy next month. Seriously. My thumbs hurt.
And it certainly doesn’t help that my hobby of choice during breaks is playing Guitar Hero III.
So today, I’m playing it easy. Ran a couple of queries and now I don’t have too much to do. Last day of break for a long time, so I may as well have some fun with it.
Therefore, I’m treating myself to a few episodes of Season Four of the Wire on DVD.
Sesaon Five starts January 8. I can’t wait. I realize there’s going to be a big problem, though.
I’ve spent the last year watching the Wire on DVD. I’ve run through seasons in two days. One episode’s over? Time to watch another. It’s like flipping to another chapter in a book and, next thing you know, you’re on page 250.
I don’t know how I’ll be able to deal with getting just one episode a week. I need a quicker gratification than that.
Gonna be a tough life for me, especially since I can’t get OnDemand.
Anyway, I figure I’ve got a bunch of Wire posts I can do, so I’ll drop a few here and there. And if you won’t know what we’re talking about, go rent the DVDs.
5 Comments
by Tim
I had the same thought last night as I was watching one of the Season 4 episodes on OnDemand. One hour a week through a series of months… it’s probably better for some of us to catch up with shows after they’ve run their season’s course, so we don’t feel too tortured having to wait to get to the end. It’s like unwrapping one layer of a 13 layer gift once a week…
by ladyb
guitar hero is my distraction of choice, also… and my right thumb has officially gone on strike. good luck with your “therapy”. i mean, i too, consider catching up on the wire while resting my thumbs “therapy”…
by RHH
my deepest sympathies. The paradox of having to perform computerized manual labor in this day and age frustrates me to no end.
fwiw, if you’re the programming type, there are libraries out there that can read pdfs and populate databases. for future consideration.
by Rex
For all you “Guitar Hero” nuts out there… It’s never too late to learn to play a real guitar.
by Rex
Oh, and Bo, time to invest in a mouse. The Mighty Mouse in my opinion ain’t so mighty. I’d recommend a Microsoft Intellimouse for desktop use and a wired (so you won’t run out of batteries) Kensington Travel mouse.
Also, I’ve done a LOT of data base mining over the years. For import into a database, I would recommend creating a tab delimited text file. Copy all the stuff you need into a blank file and have each record separated by returns, and the fields of each record separated by tabs. Using Word’s “Find and Replace” tools can help a lot.
Save as .txt (or .tab) and you can import it into most database files. I’m assuming you’re using FileMaker?