I have locked my car keys inside my workplace. Arg.
JP not Patches
I was saddened this week to hear of the passing, at 76, of my former professor and friend and all-around character J. P. Darriau, at home in Bloomington, Indiana. J. P. grew up in NYC during the war in a Jewish neighborhood, and one of my favorite memories of him is this grey-headed child of French Catholic emigrants to the States singing Yiddish songs about baseball at a piano during an evening of performance art circa 1989.
J. P. came to Bloomington in the early sixties and remained a prof at IU until his retirement in 1996. He was my professor in three classes and became my friend during the first. He opened his home, over the years, to innumerable members of my cohort, usually something I would discover much later.
During the first class i took with him, which he insisted on holding in his backyard sculpture studio instead of on campus, all the members of the class were charged with researching something about transformative performance traditions and presenting our findings in the context of a performance. While the details of my research are somewhat hazy, as I recall I determined to compare and contrast the European use and abuse of alcohol to the indigenous and pre-Colombian use of tobacco. I spent about $100 on various interesting beers and about the same amount on a selection of high-end tobacco, including what must have been among the last tins of Balkan Sobranies imported into the US before the Yugoslav civil war destroyed the factory.
I loaded all this on the back of my mountain bike and sprung this on the class, insisting that we had to consume all the beer and smoke all the ‘baccy in the three hours set aside for the class. J. P. was not happy with me and gave me an additional assignment to make up for the drunken debacle class that day was transformed into, and he explicitly enforced a no-booze policy on these classes after that day. But he certainly had his share of the goods I brought that day and there is no question in my mind that our relationship was deepened and cemented that day.
J. P., you were a good man; a hardworking, insightful artist; and a thoughtful, challenging, at times baffling but always deeply engaged teacher. My world is richer for having you in it, and I owe you more than can be told for your role as my mentor and as a contributor to the alternative culture of my hometown. R.I.P.
Tacos
Los Taco Trucks Unitos, via Seattlest. Useful!
Boozocracy
Boozocracy, partiallly the product of one Editor B. I’ll drink to that!
Jarts!
Bocces was fun, but of course Jarts came up, as we had two toddlers running around. eBay came up empty, but it seems they can be had!
Hoosier Boom – or bust?
Eric notes Counterpunch: “Will they bomb Bedford?” I will contact my conspiratorial Bedford FVW friends to see what they think.
SLC news sources credit the ever-muckracking CJ with the story.
Bocce!
After an intensive round of googlizing and calling local retailers, I was able to locate a bocce set for sale today, and thus will spend this evening cooking and eating hot dogs, apple pie, and root beer floats to the soothing accompaniment of the klonk of lawn bowls. I was briefly introduced to this sport one blazing September afternoon over ten years ago in Bloomington, Indiana, at the pre-New orleans home of Bart and XY.
And may I say how am excited to see my old pal Kenneth Goldstein this week for an evening? Very well then: very. Sometimes the right friend just finds you.
Multimedia message
Dinner on the porch
Zilliness
I have been keeping an eye on Zillow’s valuation of our house this summer, largely for morale-reasons. Currently the site lists the home as valued at well over 100K more what we paid for it in October. Anecdotally, I have heard that Zillow tends to err on the side of inflating reported values. It’s certainly what I expect the site to do, as a way of creating stickiness – it’s certainly working very well in drawing my repeated site visits.
Curious to see if anyone has done a systematic analysis of what Zillow’s reported values for a given property are in comparison to what people are actually paying for these listings, I was disappointed to find that no one’s done so in a careful, large-scale way. Are you listening, Consumer Reports? For that matter, are you listing, HouseValues and Redfin? Careful competitive analyses of competitor’s datasets over time could be a great marketing tool!
However, I did not come up wholly dry. This Phoenix-area blogging realtor did a quick set of reality checks on some recent sales in the Arizona community, and while I’m guessing he must have cherry-picked, he found little correlation between Zillow’s estimates and what he takes to be real-world market values. In two cases, he found gross overvaluations based on inaccurate data at Zillow, and in cases of homes currently listing, he found that Zillow was undervaluing the homes, based on his opinion of the market.
His basic critique is reasonable enough – you can’t trust an automated valuation service to provide accurate estimates because the actual condition of the property is likely to vary from that represented by the available data. I’m also not surprised that he feels the site is undervaluing homes that he is involved in developing listings for – the more capital there is in his market, the more there is available for him.
I am surprised that Zillow’s valuations do appear to be on the conservative side. I suppose that after this summer winds down and Seattle’s market cools down to match the rest of the country’s slowing sales, I’ll have a better sense of things. I was amazed to see that so far this summer nearly every house that has sold in our immediate area has well topped $400k. Wonder if it will hold. I hope so, now that we’re in it.
Access denied
I’m hacking away at our database at work, attempting to automate the daily data imports we use to bring orders into our order management system. We have three distinct data sources for each merchant identity, and of course these three sources employ diferring schema. I have chosen not to worry about normalizing the data at import in any significant way, rather storing the data in one flat-file table with fieldnames that segment the unique datasource elements. This makes it very easy to pull out the original source data in the format it was passed to us.
The associated merchant IDs are not written into the export files; this, determining the associated merchant ID is implicit and cannot be established by testing the data structure.
What I want to do is automate the import process such that my operator svaes the daily downloads in a given appropriate folder. Currently we have been saving them in files tagged with the data provider’s name and the date. I beleive I will change this to incorporate the data provider, merchant ID, and date shortly.
However, MS Access does not natively support automating data import with a dynamic file name – the Text Transfer function requires a hardcoded path and file. I think I could set up macros that useTextTransfers that import from a fixed-location file and that then create a new exported file incorporating additional data such as date of import and merchant ID, but again I find myself bumping up agains the fixed-file-name issue in Text Transfer.
I’m sure there must be a way to use VB to construct the filepath from user input selected via drop-downs, but I’m not there yet. Argh!