My daughter got accepted to a summer program at MIT for women in engineering. So we thought since we'll already be on the east coast, why not extend the trip into exploring colleges in the Northeast. Now, being from the Pacific Northwest, my geography skills for anything east of the Rockies starts to get a... Continue Reading →
Fill in the Blank
I've climbed Rainier a couple of times and there were a few crevasses we had to cross. Some were just a mere jump, others were wider and had to be crossed with a ladder. Got me thinking about crevasses in data and how you might want to fill in those crevasses with the last known... Continue Reading →
ICON’t tell what it is…
This morning, I was perusing an article on NPR about humanitarian icons. The short of it is - UNOCHA (United Nation's Humanitarian Agency) has created 295 icons to help convey useful information. 295? Wow! That does seem excessive. Why not create a new icon language and stack a few icons together to communicate? Oh wait,... Continue Reading →
SQL Server: Splitting Strings
Today I was asked how to extract the directional component from a street address. For example, the following 3 street addresses should have a directional value of 'East': E Street East Road Big River Blvd E My first approach was to do the old fashioned case statement. Select street_address , case when address like 'E%'... Continue Reading →
New Year’s Resolutions Already?
I don't know where the rest of the 2018 went. All I know is that it's December, the last month of the year. Instead of feeling rushed through the last 31 days of 2018, I decided that I will purposefully slow down, reflect, and get a head start on my New Year's Resolutions. If you're... Continue Reading →
Visualizing Bikes and Beer in Bend
Our family leaves Seattle for Bend, Oregon every year to dry out, mountain bike, and enjoy the local breweries. What would our last vacation look like as a visualization? I wondered. I cobbled together some of our rides and brewery locations in Tableau Public to see how play felt in the tool I use at... Continue Reading →
Digital Counting: Fun with Binary
My last few posts have been a bit serious so let's have a little fun! It's easy to count to 10 with your fingers, and you can count to 20 if you throw your toes into the mix. But how can you use your fingers to go higher than that? You could throw in your... Continue Reading →
HOT Key off the Press Tip: Copy Path
Want a quick way to copy your file's path and paste into that email to send to your fellow coworkers? In Windows Explorer, hold the SHIFT key while you RIGHT-CLICK on your file name and select Copy as path. Then paste into your document and voila! You have your entire path in quotes. So simple!... Continue Reading →
SQL Server: Running Sums with Bob’s Burgers
Recall our Bob's Burgers example of padding records. Let's expand on it. We now want to know for each record in our padded record set, what was the rolling weekly running sum of burgers served as well as total burgers served to date. And we might as well get the sum of burgers served overall... Continue Reading →
SQL Server: Padding records on days when Bob isn’t grilling burgers…
I'm a huge fan of Bob's Burgers. So today's SQL tip will be featuring the Burger of the Day. We want to show burger records even on days when Bob hasn't been grilling. Let's setup our use case. Our goal is to capture a record per day in the month of January for every Bob's... Continue Reading →