The next time your boss asks what you do all day or why it takes you so long to answer a question, show him or her this … Now, unlike this blog. where I basically drink Chardonnay and say whatever the hell I feel like, when people are paying me for answers, I take my…
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…
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…
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…
Writing a presentation for WUSS, I had to fill out the usual check box for the intended audience: Level of programming expertise: ___ Novice __ Intermediate __ Advanced and I started wondering when exactly does someone stop being a novice? One answer is that your programming no longer LOOKS like it was written by a…
If I had time, which I don’t, I would start a series of how-to articles for statistical software and copy the Car Talk scale they use as a guide for whether or not you should attempt a job yourself, from a. There are two kinds of screwdrivers ? to e. I have built a working…
In my copious spare time, of which I have none, I occasionally get the urge to actually read technical books from beginning to end. I think my life took the path of most grown-ups in my field. You get a degree, or two or three or four. Perhaps during the course of that, but certainly…
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…