Brian's World

Dirty Business

A few things going down today. Word on the street is someone is out to get me, that’s never pleasant. By calling it out over the internet, I hope someone will think twice if I don’t pop up in the usual places over the next few days. I don’t like wearing my raincoat’s hood, it makes it very difficult to identify if someone is coming up behind you. I also don’t like how the sun rises over BARH in the morning, around 8:00 or 8:30 its just peaking over the building when I’m walking back up the Burdett Ave stairs. Scanning the roof for snipers is very challenging, so I usually resort to running up the several flights of stairs in a randomly generated pattern.

That said I am surprised in the preventative actions some are taking against us, its not like we’re forming a militia for a coup d’etat or anything like that. I would say we are much better military strategists than that thank you very much. As usual, I’ve assumed my typically counter-intelligence role, I find data mining to be one of the most effective forms of stockpiling. Sure, you could stock pile munitions, food, even people… but they all take up space, and require funding.. data on the other hand tends to be cheap, and only takes up neural connections. To assist me in this task I’m going to recruit what I call the “Miner49er”. No, you cannot see him yet, and you probably won’t be able to see him ever thank you very much. Some people have imaginary friends who they talk to, I have imaginary friends that scour the internet for data.

I was also surprised to see a former ally actively ignore me. I thought that my communications had gotten lost or misplaced, last time we spoke the phone system was acting up at his location so I thought no big deal right. Everyone has busy points when they forget things. Clearly this was not the case, the project I started on was continued without me signed off on the completion of my stage, essentially leaving me hanging for several months. There isn’t much I can do now, because the audit trail is extremely weak at best. I guess I’ll just keep watch, and if I see this project take off to anything more than the demo status I’ll elevate my reaction.

All this thinking has got me interested in business intelligence software again, specifically reporting software. I’m familiar with Cognos 8’s Report Studio and Query Studio and I’m looking for a tool similiar, without the pricetag. I’m willing to jump though some extra hoops to set it up, but the ad-hoc query defination system needs to be slick. So far I have found nothing to this effect, but I’ll keep searching. You might be thinking what business does Brian has that requires intelligence? Good question! Well the fact of it is I would like to experiment with leveraging these tools for Personal Intelligence. I could create my own dashboard, tracking data important to me, providing an executive summary outlining what I might want to drill down into.

I successfully did not eat one of the 2 remaining cookies I have for the week. That means I will be able to eat that cookie later in the week.

Good Night, and Good Luck.