Few things make me crankier how every county stores their data differently, and how sometimes they put data in random fields, and you have to detect strings in fields and move them into a format that there is reasonable chance that zip4 encoder will have an idea what to do with them. The life of Data Services director.

Garbage in and pretty data out. ♻ I guess I’m a recycling or at least refining the data, though at times I feel like I’m a janitor. 🧹 Certainly getting damn good at cleaning data with R Studio. That said, using R for work so much I forget all the fun visuals you can create with it too. There are at least 9 data jobs awaiting me when I get into the office.

I’ve been working so damn hard these days, 🖥 writing code and processing data left and right. It’s almost entirely my fault because I keep coming with ideas to push the data harder and do more with it. But the data I get from the counties is often such crap. And volunteering to take on more projects. 📄 And supervising staff, which at a certain point you just have to trust that they’re doing a good job –  because as a manager you really don’t have time to dolge into the details. 👷 Plus, staff don’t like it when you do their job or replace their judgment for your own. But at times it feels like your flying blind, with no idea what is happening, beyond data streams come in, data stream go out, processed and cleaned to the best of your ability. You just hope you have good information ℹ to make good decisions. 💭 Like so many things in the world, it’s a blind sleep of faith. 🙏

Not only where they running a ditch-witch and diesel tractor until dark next to my apartment last night, 🏘 one of the worker’s motorcycles 🏍 broke down right in front of my apartment, and they were trying to get it to fire up late into the evening. With the landlord peering into my windows while I worked on my greasy bike chain. 🚲 Which I never ended up getting off. I doubt he cares at this point – I’m sure his plan continues to be to gut my unit once he can persuade me to move out. But I hate the peering eyes, 👀 looking into my dirty, worn out apartment as they conintue to kick up the dust and Mud outdoors. I do give them credit though, they painted the window sills and tried to pressure wash the mold off the outside of the building. He does seem like to be a fairly responsible landlord. 🤷‍♂️ I just find it creepy to know your somebody else’s bitch, 🐶 even if you probably make more money then they do. But ain’t that always true with life. I should buy my own land, 🚜 but the options are all so crappy, as I dig through Zillow and various real estate agent pages that sell rural estates and small hobby farms. 🐐

I plan to take the bike 🚲 to the shop on Friday morning to be serviced. 🔧My chain 🔗 splitter is busted it appears and I couldn’t get it to split the chain so I couldn’t put on the spare chain I had from the old bike I got years ago. It looks like the old chain would fit but it’s a cheap chain and I’m sure it’s not necessarily engineered for long life with the amount of miles I ride. It’s fine, I’m busing it to work today, 🚍 enjoying the later pace heading in, 👣 catching the express downtown. 🏢 I have my meeting downtown midday, I’ll take the shuttle 🚀 back downtown.

It’s going to be a nice weekend 🏕 and I was going to do Vermont for a few days but I have so much work to do and I don’t want to be so remote and distant from Wi-Fi 📶 and reliant on both the solar panel, the inverter and the mobile 📱 hotspot for work. Especially if I planned to work 9 hour ⏳ days both Friday and Monday, plus driving there and back. Plus I’m so paranoid about Friday the 13th and some stupid but awful shit happening on that day like getting into a wreck or Big Red breaking down. 🛻 Or getting busted for having joint at the National Forest. Not it’s essential but it’s fun around the fire 🔥. I might do Rennselaerville State Forest on Friday evening, it depends if I have enough downtime and when my bike will be ready. Hoped to do some end of summer floating ⭕ on the Deerfield River but it’s not going to happen. Maybe next weekend? Doubt it will be so warm and sunny. ☀ Probably the last weekend of September I’ll do four days in Speculator as the library has good Wi-Fi there. I’m cranky about not going to Vermont this weekend but in my mind it would be a very bad idea 💡 even if it’s just pure Friday the 13th paranoia.