If you've been following this blog, you've probably noticed that I've had a few bad experiences with PC's in the past month or so. I got everything working, which is the good news, and snookums has a dependable PC, but when the existing external HDD is powered up, it does not boot. Well, not entirely true- the PC tries to boot... from the HDD. I went into the setup menu and changed the boot order to HDD, CDROM, USB, and rebooted... to no avail- it kept on trying to read the drive that didn't have an OS.
FOUR. LETTER. WORDS.
Power down the external drive, and it boots normally. Adding frustration. This is AFTER I've sorted out the boot order. Sheesh. But, the drive works just fine once the system is booted. So, tonight I'm copying files to another drive (I think it is fairly obvious by now that tech runs deep in our home), and in a day or two she'll have a new drive with all of her data.
OTOH (On The Other Hand, for the uninitiated... and, from the For What It's Worth chronicles: I spend some time defining things here, and because I officially have a worldwide audience spread over four continents, I've decided to define all of the "tech" terms at least once, as this blog is for everyone. And while I'm at it, "snookums" is the screenname I use for my wife, and if I have to explain something to her, the term is worth an explanation here.)
The database! I've been pounding on this for a few days, bringing one of the tables up to speed. This particular table, Songs, is vitally important to my previously unstated "normalization out of the gate" quest. I've got around 200 (199 to be exact!) songs right now, representing 16 music albums. If only I typed quicker... then again, I found a small issue in this table: it had never been set to "no duplicates". The good news was that this was an easy fix, and very few dupes showed up (one album was duped). And now, speeds and feeds from the database...
No major changes- I'm simplifying the roundup by saying there are 190 new entries from the last count, and 423 from the first count. The "next big thing" may be adding images to a few of the tables: the Album table, and the as yet to be created Lego table. The album art isn't really necessary, but would be a nice aesthetic touch. Lego illustrations could be very important though, as Lego elements often will be printed with different designs. And, since I have nearly 2800 distinct cataloged part numbers for Minifigs (Lego "people") that are only variants of four basic part numbers (Lego p/n's # 970-973), pictures may be a necessity for that particular table. That won't happen for some time, though, as the Legos are not counted, and there are 26,000+ part numbers which I am getting organized in Excel right now (another project altogether, but another Prime Motivator of the database).
I also just found out that my employer, who had just jumped from Microsoft Office 2003 to Microsoft Office 2010 ~six months ago, will be upgrading to Office 365 this weekend. And, going from Groupwise to Outlook. Major changes like this are always unwelcome in the eyes of endusers (well, me, anyway), but eventually you get over it. However, to do a major software upgrade (Office) AND a groupware/messaging upgrade (Outlook) is very, very gutsy. I mention this because the template I'm using for the very time-crunched project I'm involved with is an Office 2003 document. I've been updating it in Office 2010 for the past few weeks and its been going well, but now... well, I don't even know what the 365 UI (user interface- the way a program looks when opened up) looks like! I'm going to do some quick research over the weekend, and hopefully nothing will have mutated over the weekend.
Did you ever think I.T. could be so dark. And dangerous?
As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.
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