UPS delivered my shipment of Andrew Beyer books last last week, and I have just returned from the Daily Racing Form website, where I signed up for a free account.1
I poked around the DRF site shortly after the end of the most recent Search for America Tour, and was intrigued by their Formulator, which is an application to manipulate and filter data from the DRF. We used to buy the dead tree edition; it’s great, and I marvelled at the volume of data captured in just a few column inches of newsprint. Simultaneously, I realized the effort required just to capture the data in a format conducive to some electronic analysis was huge indeed. As I said before, the TRS-80 is long gone; we gots us some real computers now.
Still, when I clicked on DRF’s Formulator link, the first thing I saw was Windows. As interested as I am in this effort, running Windows is a show stopper. Another click on the site, and I see that the Formulator is now a full-fledged web application. WooHoo! I was taken by this observation from the FormulatorWeb FAQ:
What does Formulator Web mean for you?
No more software downloads.
No more clashes with Microsoft Vista or Macs.
No more missing pieces.
Don’t know what the “Mac clashes” were, but I can imagine the hand-to-PC combat that must have taken place in the Microsoft world.
The only outlay on this little quest thus far has been for the books. I’ll read those, get familiar with the recently acquired DRF tools, and go from there. So, I’m off, bursting forth with the power of ten billion butterfly sneezes, as it says up top there. I got my actual blog title into a post; first time in over three years.
-k-
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