29 August 2006

Quickie.

Started spinning the rest of the superwash merino last night. It's slippery stuff and I noticed that I tend to spin thin at the start of a skein (likely because the spindle is lighter and it's easier to spin thin with a lighter spindle (or so I'm told)), so that combined with the slippery means I drop the spindle more often. I am trying to spin thicker, but that whole consistency thing is still a work in progress.

Need to clean more Clun Forest fleece, but I've been dithering on how. I still need to figure out suitable drying space and that's the sticking point at the moment. Maybe I'll run out and look for some sweater drying racks over lunch or after work. It would be cheaper to make my own, but I'm impatient and don't want to take the time to figure that out and do it properly.

Have some data work to do this afternoon*, though, so I'm not sure I can escape for lunch and still get it done. But it's for a meeting tomorrow morning, so if I don't get it done this afternoon, I'll likely do it from home tonight. Which will cut into the washing/spinning time, but since I need the day job to pay for the hobbies, it'll have to be okay.

*Which really doesn't tell you much.. let me try to elaborate.. much of what I do is count beans and format tables that contain the bean counting. I do a lot in Excel with frequency counts, in other words. This is tedious and really not something you need someone with my training to do, but it needs to be done and I'm the only one in my office**, so I get to do it. When I refer to "data work" I'm usually referring to something more involved - either querying our eccentric and quirky and non-normal (in the database structure sense of the word) data system, and/or actually creating statistical models and running analysis, usually in SPSS. The later is more in line with my background, and I find it much more interesting, but it's also not seen to be as "necessary" as the bean counting stuff, so it often has to wait until the bean counting stuff is done. And it seems that there are always more beans to count, and different ways people want them counted, so the bean counting is almost never done.

**Though there's talk of me getting a student worker for 10 hours a week. This will be good if it's someone I can train to use Excel well because then I can run the bean counts and pass them off for formatting. I get giddy thinking about how much more data work I might be able to do if this happens. Yup; there's a reason my Margi's nickname is "Data Call Girl"***.

***Someone else is "Data Slut" - because she'll purportedly do anything for data. Upon hearing this, I stated that it had to be *good* data, which meant I was christened as something appropriately more selective. *shrug*

1 comment:

SaraSkates said...

ROFL re the nicknames. Terry calls me "Captain Data Base".

I so hear you about bean counting vs. data work.