Mike Kimel's Occasional but Hopefully Useful Tidbits of Information

In most large companies that need a business intelligence and/or sales intelligence tool, the company pays a site license to SAP, IBM, Oracle, etc.   The IT department then manages the process, with some occasional interaction with the vendor. But say, for some reason, this is not done at your company.   Perhaps, for whatever reason, the IT department is in disarray, or someone simply refuses to authorize the expense of the site license.   That doesn’t erase the need for a tailored BI/SI tool.   The sales team still needs information, executives need information, etc.   That information needs to be easy to manipulate, and perhaps, for security reasons, access has to be controlled.       Sure, even without a BI/SI tool, the data is still available somewhere in the company’s systems.   But that is cold comfort to some poor soul driving through a snowstorm in Duluth on a way to a meeting who needs information on the customer is about to meet. These days, though, it is possible f

I voted the other day (by mail).   The options were for candidates for mayor, for the city council, and for a position on the Long Beach Community College Board.  I did some reading up, and figured out which candidates made the most sense for me in the first two races.  The third race is a bit more difficult.  First, I don't think its an understatement to say I don't pay much attention to the workings of the Long Beach Community College Board.  I'm not sure I ever thought about it before, in fact. The candidates are an incumbent and a challenger who seems to be racking up a fair number of high profile endorsements.  I read through their official campaign information and it isn't sufficient for me to make a decision.  So I did some more digging.  It is actually easier to find information on the challenger.  He has a high profile background, and an unusual name.  One of the things I found is that he has a twitter account, and he made that twitter account private.  This

The man was only in our backyard for a few seconds.  Our property backs onto an alley, and he came in through the alley.  He walked straight for the aluminum ladder belonging to our handyman, grabbed it, and left.  We have it on video. My wife posted pictures on NextDoor.com.  Not long after, my wife's post had a response.  Someone else had checked his security video.  He had film of the gentleman from our back yard folding up the ladder and putting it in his van.  There was also video of the gentleman obtaining another package and placing and placing it in the vehicle.  The moment he obtained the package is just out of view of the camera, but it seems obvious from which back yard it originated.  What is in the package, and its value, I do not know.  Finally, the video we were sent also includes the license plate of the gentleman's vehicle.  Unless the gentleman also stole the vehicle, that should be enough information for the police to to identify him.  Our handyman plans

I n recent months (years?), there have been calls in some quarters for the use of models whose body shape is r elatively "normal" or even plus-sized. My wife, apparently, disagrees. I learned of this the other day when she called me to complain that her favorite Athletic wear catalog had apparently begun begun using larger sized models. “If I buy an outfit to workout,” she said, “I want to be inspired. I want to feel like ‘that could be me if I worked out enough.’ Seeing the outfit on someone who is in worse shape than me isn’t inspirational.  It doesn't make me want to work out, and it doesn't make me want to buy the outfit.” I think there may be something to what she said. People aspire to be better than they are. When it comes to exercise, that means being more fit. People want to run faster, to develop more stamina, to have an effective backhand or a longer drive on the golf course. They aspire to be like Ussein Bolt or Simone Biles, even if they are middle ag

A year and change ago, we bought a house in Long Beach, CA. Typically, if you put less than 20% down, the bank requires you to pay for PMI (private mortgage insurance).  As you pay down the mortgage, eventually you owe less than 80% of the value of the home, and the PMI goes away. Immediately upon moving in, my wife began doing renovations.  A few months ago she was confident that the changes she had made had increased the value of the house enough that our equity now exceeded 20% of the home value.  So she contacted the bank and asked them to send someone by to reappraise the house. Someone was sent.  Long story short, he re-appraised the value of the home about 65K below what we thought it was worth, which meant that PMI would stay.  My wife is the sort of person who looks through paperwork.  Thoroughly.  And she looked through the appraiser's report.  Thoroughly. She found a number of discrepancies.  The analysis seems to have been done before the appraiser ever cam

Microsoft's VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) is clunky and slow, but occasionally, it is the right tool for the job, particularly for cleaning up data that is stored in an Excel format.  One of the problems with VBA, however, is that it tends to suck up memory.  Anyone who uses VBA to play with data sets with more than a few thousand observations will run into the problem of seeing their program slow down more and more.  In fact, if you run the same program multiple times in a row, you will find it runs slower each time you run it.  If your data set is large enough, or your code runs through enough calculations, you will eventually get an out of memory message and the whole thing crashes.  It turns out there is a simple solution to this irritating problem.  However, to fix the problem, you have to understand why it exists, which is that Excel has an undo function which also extends into VBA.  In order to undo a step, Excel "remembers" the old state, so it can return