More Code Monkey and Food too

Another code monkey day, but I am pretty much finished and not a moment too soon. After putting off the coding to automate data handling for almost 3 years it is in usable form. I got a phone call this morning from my old boss asking if I had code to automate the data handling. The project we began in NO is continuing in Clemson and the grad student doing the work needed help. As luck would have it, I got it to the basic point of usability about 15 minutes before the phone call. I needed to tweak it more for my purposes, but it was in a good place to send it to Clemson to help them out.
My version worked great on the first batch of approximately 1,400 files. My computer did not like it though. I left my computer to crunch a second batch of over 5,000 files. After the first 20 minutes I left and the computer was still contemplating the hard part of the process. If I am lucky when I get to work tomorrow the first stage (and most computation intensive) will be finished. I can run the second phase while we run the gin.

On a more interesting note, unless you like computer programming, is this very interesting article on the life of a steer. For the uninformed, a steer is a male cow that is castrated at a young age. The castration causes them to be more docile, but more importantly they can a ton of weight especially in the all important meat eating areas. The article is fairly unbiased and an interesting insight on the economics of cattle farming. The cow in the article is a Black Angus that has a bit of Hereford mixed in. My grandfather raised mostly Herefords and Santa Gertrudis. The Santa Gertrudis are your stereotypical red/brown cows, whereas the Herefords have a white face on a red/brown body. There were a few others over the years as well.