plonq | Entries tagged with duck

I wish that I could tell you more about this duck. I wish that I could fill in the background details about where I was when I saw this duck, and what inspired me to take a picture of it. Alas, all of that minutiae has been lost to me in the time since I took this picture. None of the pictures around it in the set give any clues, other than the fact that it was probably shot down at The Forks.

Since it is a shot that I took in the middle of that "picture a day" regimen I was following at the time, I am guessing that I had planned to hold it in reserve in case I got no other good pictures that day. Fortunately, I also got a good picture of an angry-looking person handing a balloon frog to a little girl, so the duck never got called up for duty.

Until today.

While formulating a reply to my team leads about why I could not get any meaningful hump data on a scale test car from the start of this year, I got tired of using phrases like "our data retention sucks on status events" or "finding the data I need from this dataset would be like finding a cut diamond in a pile of yak dung."

Instead what I said was: In many respects, the [redacted] tapes are our data equivalent of a bonsai tree; trimmed to the point where they serve no function beyond the purely ornamental. They make you feel good about being able to run queries against truly ancient data, as long as you are not too concerned about the data being complete or useful

To illustrate my point I presented them with some sample output sculpted into the shape of a duck.