Arggh: A quick update

Not much blogging lately. Also, not much (not any) Cites & Insights writing. That may continue for a while.

Here’s the situation:

  • I’d planned to spend the last couple of weeks focusing on a second draft of “Open Access: What You Need to Know Now,” but pausing between chapters and doing some final recording of blog metrics for the 2010 liblog project.
  • But…well…last week was about 80% disrupted by “stuff”–some good, some so-so, some just peculiar. And this week was about 60% disrupted by “more stuff”–some bad (but not major), some good, some just peculiar. All time-consuming.
  • I’ve managed to keep some momentum going on the OA project, using any peaceful half-day to focus on that. I’m about halfway through the second draft…
  • The other stuff was sketchy, but I was at a great pausing point…and then:

I found that, somehow, Excel (or, let’s face it, the person operating Excel) had managed to munge some portions of some rows. I suspect it has something to do with sorting the spreadsheet while some columns are hidden, but it could be something even more peculiar. (It’s a fairly large spreadsheet–currently one sheet with 1,277 rows and 23 columns, another with 1,300-odd rows but only two columns; when I start doing analysis, the first sheet will probably go to 24 or 25 columns and there will be at least one derivative sheet with a couple dozen columns but only about, oh, 900 rows.)

I’ve now checked the most obvious cases, spending about 4 hours recovering/verifying about 8 hours work.

The remaining validation pass…well, it could take as little as 12 hours (spread over several days), it could take as much as 50-60 hours (spread over a couple of weeks). (Yes, I have a saved copy: That’s how I recovered from the worst of the munge.)

So, well, I’m working on it. And, when times are peaceful (maybe next week?), focusing first on the book.

As for C&I? Well…one of these days, maybe.

Ah, retirement: Nothing to do and all the time in the world.

Comments are closed.