Baldwin beach

Relaxing at Baldwin beach. What a life. I had a call with a person who was interested in taking Stats 315 today. He has worked in OLAP for 20 years, before it was even called OLAP. He reaffirmed my belief about the importance of Ad Hoc analysis. OLAP is too expensive (initially) and inflexible to be a viable solution for understanding data. It's amazing that the industry doesn't recognize this. Talking to him really rekindled my passion for data analysis. Product Management is exciting, and I'm learning a lot - but I'm really happy doing data analysis, or rather, I would be if the tools were better. As Swivel veers further and further from data analysis, and my list of side projects gets longer, I wonder if I'll ever return to the world of analytics. If not, I wonder if that is a good thing. I think I'm going to post the parts of my analytic software business plan on the attemptry blog, along with a critique of each part. At least that will get me engaged slightly in analytics again.