sixth day, evening

Today I set out to do another large chunk of work on the data set for my conference paper, but ended up with nothing to show for the whole day.

There's a working version of the data set I'm studying that has been handed down by previous authors, and an original data set published by the Federal government. Today what I set out to do was get a couple columns from the original and add them to the working version, just to give me some more independent variables. Sadly, there are no columns in the working version that uniquely identify rows and take the same values in the original — none at all. A straightforward merge operation is out of the question, and it took me all day to establish that, or at least enough of the day that my will to start anything else was broken by the time I got done.

Tomorrow afternoon I'll be looking over every column in the working version, figuring out whether I need it for the study being done, then either finding the corresponding column of the original and copying it into my own working subset or doing the appropriate transformation of one I've already got out of the original to produce the desired values. Can I follow the directions well enough to faithfully reproduce the data set the previous authors had? We shall see.

Tomorrow I'll be back at church for the first time in three weeks, having been on the road the past two Sundays.

Naia's been less cooperative yesterday and today than the previous few. I admit I've been out at what may seem like some weird times to her, but I've tried to be back quickly. Today I was gone twice, hitting up a yard sale in the morning after bringing her back from her walk, and later getting dinner from a local pizza place that I've missed since its location in my own neighborhood closed a year or two ago.