Ryan Robitaille

Let’s be honest – I’m a data guy. “Geek” to be more exact. But, I’m also a sports guy – and if there is ANY sport out there that prides itself as being massively data-centric… its Baseball. Data goes with baseball like Barry Bonds and… um, Home Runs (yeah, that’s it). Data collecting is an [...]

TrueBlood. Killer show. Let’s face it. It really is a weird-ass perfect storm of timing, promotion, and just straight up quality storytelling. Don’t even dare to compare it with those Justin-Beiber-esque-Saved-by-the-Bell-type-Vampire-Twilight-Movies that are currently sweeping the minds and loins of young teens these days. They are an inferior product – vamprires (fictional or not) do [...]

If you’re like me (exactly maybe, as scary as that might be) and have a Motorola Droid, and use Clicky for awesome and simple web analytics – you’ll want this. Its only 1 dollar – which is the same as a double cheeseburger at McDonalds (if you local vendors participate – since we all know [...]

A few months ago, I showed how you can do simple back and forth ETL task with python scripts – this time I’m going to take it one step further and show how with an extra python module we can actually export data to a usable Excel format as well. I often use this method [...]

In the Data Transformation Services (DTS) / Extract Transform and Load (ETL) world these days we’ve got a LOT of expensive ass products. Some are good, some are marginal, and some are pieces of over-complicated (and poorly performing) java-based shit. But, hey, enough with the negativity – I digress, I just want to show you [...]

Have you ever had an activity that you became totally lost in – where time either flashed by in an instant or seemed to stand still – your entire concentration was on that task at hand and the rest of the world just kind of faded away temporarily? Well, then you have experienced the “State [...]