The Diary of A Simple Man

Dear Microsoft,

Just a note to say "hi!" and thanks. I was working on my website, trying to get things done before finally getting some much-needed sleep. But you knew that my work wasn't really important. And that's why you decided to install some important updates and force my computer to restart.

Oh, you gave me a few minutes warning. You even provided a little window with a countdown, saying "X minutes before restart". There was a box that said "Restart Now", and another box that said "Restart Later" - but wacky jokesters that you are, you greyed that "Later" box out! You know I didn't really want the option to wait a few extra minutes and finish my work. No, it's so much more satisfying to have the computer shut down on me against my will, at the command of...well...you, Microsoft.

I can't help but imagine what the world would be life if you guys ran everything. Say I'm in the middle of a phone conversation with my doctor. I had some tests recently (no, not really, but bear with me - this is dramatic license) and she's going to tell me how I'm doing. Is it cancer, doc?

"BEEP! This is Microsoft. We've installed some important security updates on your phone. Press umlaut to delay hangup. Ha ha! Umlaut isn't an option! Say goodbye! Click...beeeeeeeeeeeeep..."

And just to cap things off, after the computer restarted you thoughtfully didn't bother to restore my programs. FireFox can do it, and it's open source. But you, Microsoft, you're much too busy to bother wasting time considering the convenience of your users. Why, if you did that once, they might expect consideration ALL the time!

So thanks, Microsoft. And fuck you, fuck you very much.

Sincerely,
Peter

I work with data. And I suspect that the sort of thing I do isn't done by many people. So this will probably either be meaningless to you, painfully obvious, or boring - take your pick.

That doesn't mean I won't subject you to it, of course. :D

One of the things I do involves cleaning name data. This generally arrives in Excel format (and if it doesn't, I get pissed off). It can range anywhere from a few dozen names to a few thousand, and I've had files of over a hundred thousand names come in. Fortunately, that's rare.

The problem is that the data is almost always really shitty. In part this is because it was put together or maintained by people who either didn't care about the data, or didn't really understand it. It's also true that in some cases the ultimate source of that data is a competitor who knew that we'd be working with that data. I'm pretty sure they try to make it as difficult as possible.

Just to give you an idea, it's not uncommon to see data like this, all in a single column:

Brown, Robert Q.
Harold ZbeodkwsiMr.
Neil
ABSOLOMPANDATHANIMA
John B BodyLiesAMoulderinInTheGrave
OBRIEN, Seamus

My goal is to create clean last and first name fields as quickly and accurately as possible. I simply don't have the time to go through each record in a thousands-plus name file, though. So I've evolved a lot of little tricks over the years. These generally involve searching and replacing with wildcards in various ways. If you don't know, the wildcard characters are "*" and "?". The asterisk represents any number of characters, and the question mark represents a single character.

But lately I've been seeing a new problem: somebody is throwing wildcards into the data. Specifically, asterisks. The problem is that if I try to do a global search and replace to remove "*", I end up deleting ALL the data - the "*" is taken by Excel as a wildcard. It's quite an annoying little trap.

It may not be intentional, of course; it could just be various idiots trying to "footnote" the data, although I've never seen an actual footnote in a name file.

But I thought of a solution, and had the pleasure of having the first thing I tried work perfectly. I copied the entire column and threw it into a Windows NotePad file. My hunch was that NotePad was just basic enough to not have the wildcard replace option. And it doesn't; a search and replace of "*" with nothing works perfectly. Then I copied the data from NotePad, pasted it back into Excel, and voila! clean data.

Which still has to be worked on, of course, but at least I've gotten rid of those damned asterisks.

Things were quiet yesterday (Sebastian was visiting Teri's mother) when I finally got the chance to install the XP service pack 2. I must admit that I was worried; I'd heard that SP2 had killed some systems, and my system is more vulnerable than most.

But it needed to be done.

I'd heard that it was a 75 MB download, but it was actually 92 MB. At several points I feared that the system had frozen and crashed, but each time it turned out to be just...thinking. After all was said and done I restarted, and a security screen came up. Long story short, the whole thing worked well and seems to be a genuine enhancement to XP - I'm shocked!