Still Alive Just Not RPG'ing

I'm still alive, I just haven't been doing any reading that I would relate to the whole Appendix N bit nor actually involved in any role playing games.

My regular group mixes up their games a lot. When they do Pathfinder or 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons, I make extra effort to get in some gaming time, but they've been doing a lot of Fate and the Cipher System and some other stuff.

It's not that I don't think those games are good or anything, it's just well, between my actual playing of Warmachine and my weird ODC where I want to play painted miniatures, I've been painting and playing a lot. Painting specific miniatures for the armies does take up a bit of time.

In terms of reading, yeah, 'fun' times...



Excel is such a huge program that I'm always wondering what else is there under the surface. My job requires me to do a lot of reports. I'm fortunate enough to know enough of VBA that I'm able to automate quite a bit of it, and comfortable enough in front of a group of people that I can teach the basics.

But there's always more to learn. The Dummies book is pretty solid in getting some basic details and ideas there. If you want something that's far more detailed and goes into a LOT more of the high end in a very dry tone, Analyzing Business Data might be more for you.



And as big data has become more and more of a thing, I've looked at some introduction books on R. It sounds like an awesome software and has a lot of possibilities. If anyone has any recommendations, please throw them out there. My knowledge base of it is minimum but I was able to download it and do some charting exercises. The charts here tend to be a lot stronger in terms of smoothing the data lines between points.

Anyway, hope everyone is having a great holiday and is prepped for Christmas and is ready for 2016! Let's hope it's better than 2015 but as it's an election year... ugh... I can already see the memes...