This morning was the first time I woke up to find snow on the ground this season.
It really does start to put me in a winter break kind of mood.
I just had this vision of enjoying my coffee, watching the snow from inside.
Know that I don't have to head out there anytime soon.
Of course, I know that this all presages lots of struggling through snow,
shovelling the driveway,
scraping ice and snow off the car,
etc.
And there is a bunch of things that I want to get done before the winter break.
Writing has always been a thing of moods for me.
Sometimes you're not going to feel like it at all.
That's one thing that I want to tackle with this daily writing practice.
Force myself to write something even if I don't want to.
In my current role, I occasionally have to create or contribute to briefing notes.
I used to live and work in Ottawa,
so I would hear from friends about having to put together a briefing note at the last minute.
That sounded like something terrifying at the time.
How do you write something that sounds even remotely good in a few hours?
Even if it's a subject you know well.
I'm learning that I can build up that ability in myself.
Mostly through practice, as you're seeing here.
I know it's going to come in handy.
I have a nut allergy,
and while it is generally mild it means I avoid eating nuts.
This means I can't eat a lot of granola on store shelves.
When I was out in British Columbia,
I got hooked on Rogers Granola,
which used to have one non-nut flavour.
Now they don't even list the non-nut flavour on their website.
I was complaining about this when my sibling suggested I make my own.
Apparently they do this all the time and it is really easy.
And I can now attest that is is actually very easy.
I found this simple granola recipe that has no nuts.
I add pumpkin seeds, raisins, cranberries and whatever else I want.
I make a big bag and it servers me well throughout the week.
It's great for commuting days when I have to eat breakfast on the go.
Anyway, I still have to perfect my technique.
This morning I found a chunk of brown sugar that hadn't been completely dissolved.
Not really an unpleasant surprise, but not perfect either.
I've been using DuckDB a lot more lately
It's a database, but one focused on analytics.
And it's very simple to install and use.
I've been using it more an more since they added the UI extension.
It really lets you just dive right into using it with a notebook interface.
Also, the notebook contents is stored in a database file and is automatically versioned.
I started another data analysis today.
Not a very strange occurrence since it is my job.
Since I've been working on database stuff and I didn't want to shift gears,
I wanted to load the data into DuckDB and work on it there.
It was easy enough to import the excel sheet and everything seemed to work.
I verified that it had imported the data by checking some of the summary stats
I had been provided with. All good.
But then I noticed something strange: there seemed to be a lot of missing data.
Then I noticed that the table created by reading the excel file had over 4 million rows.
And this from a spreadsheet with under 2 000 rows.
I specified the range incorrectly, I believe.
So it just added all those empty rows.
Fun times!
I had an early start this morning and
I totally forgot the time change.
I checked the time on my phone just to confirm how early it was.
The automatic time change on phones is a lifesaver.
I even have an analog clock in my office that handles it automatically.
But I had that moment when I looked at the non-updating clock on our stove.
How the heck did I lose that extra hour...
Oddly enough, Daylight Saving Time started close to home for me.
Today I learned that Port Arthur, one of the cities that was later amalgamated to form my home town of Thunder Bay, Ontario,
was the first city in the world to adopt it.
This clears up a mystery from my childhood.
I was raised on the Fort William
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side, and my family was very proud of it.
My mom talked about the time when Port Arthur was in a different (and therefore wrong) time zone.
When the original time change happened, both Fort William and Port Arthur sprang forward, but Port Arthur didn't spring back.
Fort William did, so for five months it was probably very confusing if you had an appointment in the other city.
They schedule time changes at 2 a.m. so most sleep through it.
However, I had a bit of a career working in Alarm Monitoring Centers.
They have to run 24 hours a day, so you have to work your share of nights.
I worked weekends when I was a student during the week, alternating days and nights.
so I got to observe time changes first hand.
It's kind of a strange experience, expecially working in a place where everything is time stamped.
When it springs forward, you just have an empty, non-existent hour.
But when it falls back, you have to loop back through that hour again.
So, I've always been facinated with time changes.
But given the distruption to people's lives, I don't think the are a great policy.
In 2020, Ontario passed the Time Amendment Act which officially moves the province to permanant daylight savings time.
The date this is implemented was left blank, to be announced by the Lieutenant Governor.
This is to ensure that we align with Québec and New York State.
But maybe we want to just do it on our own.
These time changes always mess me up.
As an aside, see this post for my thoughts on the names of Fort William and Port Arthur.
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When I was growing up it took me way too long to realize that Fort William was named that because the location of the North-West Company fort was in that city.
I never realized that because the Fort William Historical Park is nowhere near there.
In a location that makes no sense for a trading post.
And because Fort William was a North-West Company trading post,
their big corporate rival the Hudson's Bay Company never opened one of their big stores in Thunder Bay.
I don't know for sure, but I have always assumed it is because of a very longstanding corporate grudge.
Well, the HBC is basically dead now.
So they can just suck it.
Similarly, I never realized that Port Arthur was named that way because the port is there.