Well, it's the last day of 2012 in my neck of the woods, and so I suppose its appropriate to do something of a year in review blog. In January, I was an employee of RR Donnelley; as the year comes to a close, I am a contractor at RR Donnelley.
A "real" job, with benefits, would be greatly appreciated!
This past year also saw the creation of the Forty-Two database, as well as this blog. Both are important on a few levels. The database, currently Access 2003 format, satisfies my need to know exactly what we've got in the house, as well as telling me exactly what my favorite music, books and movies are. Everyone has been here before: you're chatting with an friend or maybe a casual/new acquaintance, and the question is posed- "So, what's your favorite book/author/band/album/movie/genre?" When asked, I often answer a certain way, but if I look, for example, at Windows Media Player, I find that my answer does not always jibe with reality. So, the database gives me a reality check.
The blog was somewhat unplanned, but is for me a natural outgrowth of the database and my job search, as well as giving me an outlet for my desire to write. This is all still very new for me, so I'm not sure what if any netiquette applies. I don't want my posts to be too long or frequent, as I believe this would dilute whatever demand or interest there may be in my writing. Its also a bit stream of consciousness, in that not everything is about the data or the database.
And going back to my last post, I spoke with tech support at the reseller (where I purchased the DOA computer) this morning. I never did receive the Windows XP SP3 recovery CD, which should have arrived this past Saturday at the latest. They will be sending out a replacement PC on Wednesday. I hope!
Lastly, I'd like to throw in a plug for Goodwill. A Goodwill store opened up in our neighborhood this year, and our family visits it at least once per week. Sundays and Mondays they have special discounts, based on the color of the price tag. Today, I scored six albums (7 CD's) for all of seven dollars before tax. This makes me happy.
And two of the albums were factory sealed.
Believe it or not, I think goals can be set for a blog. With a grand total of five posts and no comments, I'm going up on the soapbox and putting a goal out for 2013: I'd like this blog to be read by at least one person on all seven continents. I am fairly hopeful that this can happen, as I've had traffic from three continents in less than a full month.
Happy New Year!
Monday, December 31, 2012
Wednesday, December 26, 2012
An IT Christmas (whole lotta cliches in here)
I've got an idea for Tim Burton... yes, the Tim Burton that makes movies. The working title is, "The I.T. Nightmare Before Christmas". The protagonist would be named Jack SCSIngton, of course.
It all started on Christmas Eve, of course. We received three packages from Amazon that day. One contained a 2.5" HDD which would be used as a Playstation 3 upgrade, and a couple 2GB sticks of memory for our son's computer. The second shipment was a brand new refurb XP box for my wife. The third was a cheese wedge-shaped box containing an industrial quantity of mouse toys for our cats. These arrivals brought joy to everyone's hearts.
Our son brought his PC up to the dining room table, which seems to be the designated hardware upgrade area. I spread out some newspapers to keep the case from getting scratched, and laid the PC down. I opened it up, and our son said the memory slots were directly underneath the spaghetti mess of I/O, power, and who-knows-what-else cabling. Since the case has more than its share of plastic, I had to do a bit of looking before I found a substantial piece of metal to ground myself before opening the memory. Feeling pretty positive about my personal electrical field, I opened up the package, gently pried a stick out, and examined the pins and notch at the base of the stick. After a few attempts, I was able to partially seat one end of the memory. The other end, though... well, it was having no part of being seated. When gentle pressure was applied, it rocked. So, I applied a bit of logic and turned it around.
And got the same result. Our son right now was getting a bit upset. "I think you've got the wrong memory" I said, but he quite vehemently disagreed with me. "Nope," he said. When logic, restraint, nicety and reason all fail, there is only one thing left. The cold, hard truth. I put the new stick back in its cocoon, and reached back into the belly of the beast. This time, I had to fight with the previously mentioned spaghetti mess, gently but firmly moving cabling aside to get to Bank 0 of the memory. I disengaged the latches and pulled out the original memory, then grabbed the new memory. Placing them back to back, I showed our son that the notches did not line up, even when I turned one of the sticks around. Nonplussed, our son quickly blamed his brother for ordering the wrong memory, and we took the PC back down to our Secret Underground Lair.
Our other son got an RMA, and the memory should be going back tomorrow.
As for my wife's new PC, it was pretty much a dead out of box PC (geek level here is prolly +7). Now, I've gotta say, I've been working both professionally and at home for a long time with Windows XP. I've done untold numbers of "nuke the hard drive back to the stone age" reinstalls. I own XP recovery disks for SP3; I have the SP2 direct-from-Redmond disk somewhere, and our house has pretty much been an HP "shop" since I discovered the joy of refurbs many years ago.I had a DC7100, and then several DC7600 HP "convertible minitowers". Over the years, I've become adept at maintaining and upgrading them. The PC I got for my wife was a DC7800- part of the family, I suppose, but more related to my XW4200 workstation in appearance, at least.
Appearances, however, can be deceiving. Even for XP, a 10+ minute boot time is extreme. When this PC is booted, I get a cursor in the upper left side of the display that blinks for ~5 minutes. Then, Windows starts to load. I'd say that's a problem. My wife is taking it very well, because it is just a tech upgrade to her. For me, it was something related to Christmas, and a huge disappointment.
Lastly, there's the database. I don't update very often, partly because I'm also doing my own data entry. I did discover one thing interesting about it, though. In more than one table, I have a user defined field named "ID". It wasn't a huge issue until tonight, when I discovered that two of my tables had identically formatted ID fields.I have since remedied this.
Well, almost lastly. The mice seem to work just fine.
It all started on Christmas Eve, of course. We received three packages from Amazon that day. One contained a 2.5" HDD which would be used as a Playstation 3 upgrade, and a couple 2GB sticks of memory for our son's computer. The second shipment was a brand new refurb XP box for my wife. The third was a cheese wedge-shaped box containing an industrial quantity of mouse toys for our cats. These arrivals brought joy to everyone's hearts.
Our son brought his PC up to the dining room table, which seems to be the designated hardware upgrade area. I spread out some newspapers to keep the case from getting scratched, and laid the PC down. I opened it up, and our son said the memory slots were directly underneath the spaghetti mess of I/O, power, and who-knows-what-else cabling. Since the case has more than its share of plastic, I had to do a bit of looking before I found a substantial piece of metal to ground myself before opening the memory. Feeling pretty positive about my personal electrical field, I opened up the package, gently pried a stick out, and examined the pins and notch at the base of the stick. After a few attempts, I was able to partially seat one end of the memory. The other end, though... well, it was having no part of being seated. When gentle pressure was applied, it rocked. So, I applied a bit of logic and turned it around.
And got the same result. Our son right now was getting a bit upset. "I think you've got the wrong memory" I said, but he quite vehemently disagreed with me. "Nope," he said. When logic, restraint, nicety and reason all fail, there is only one thing left. The cold, hard truth. I put the new stick back in its cocoon, and reached back into the belly of the beast. This time, I had to fight with the previously mentioned spaghetti mess, gently but firmly moving cabling aside to get to Bank 0 of the memory. I disengaged the latches and pulled out the original memory, then grabbed the new memory. Placing them back to back, I showed our son that the notches did not line up, even when I turned one of the sticks around. Nonplussed, our son quickly blamed his brother for ordering the wrong memory, and we took the PC back down to our Secret Underground Lair.
Our other son got an RMA, and the memory should be going back tomorrow.
As for my wife's new PC, it was pretty much a dead out of box PC (geek level here is prolly +7). Now, I've gotta say, I've been working both professionally and at home for a long time with Windows XP. I've done untold numbers of "nuke the hard drive back to the stone age" reinstalls. I own XP recovery disks for SP3; I have the SP2 direct-from-Redmond disk somewhere, and our house has pretty much been an HP "shop" since I discovered the joy of refurbs many years ago.I had a DC7100, and then several DC7600 HP "convertible minitowers". Over the years, I've become adept at maintaining and upgrading them. The PC I got for my wife was a DC7800- part of the family, I suppose, but more related to my XW4200 workstation in appearance, at least.
Appearances, however, can be deceiving. Even for XP, a 10+ minute boot time is extreme. When this PC is booted, I get a cursor in the upper left side of the display that blinks for ~5 minutes. Then, Windows starts to load. I'd say that's a problem. My wife is taking it very well, because it is just a tech upgrade to her. For me, it was something related to Christmas, and a huge disappointment.
Lastly, there's the database. I don't update very often, partly because I'm also doing my own data entry. I did discover one thing interesting about it, though. In more than one table, I have a user defined field named "ID". It wasn't a huge issue until tonight, when I discovered that two of my tables had identically formatted ID fields.I have since remedied this.
Well, almost lastly. The mice seem to work just fine.
Friday, December 7, 2012
The tilde, a hero for Everyone
I'm still pretty much the noob at blogging, but I've heard and experienced firsthand that, if one wants to get better at something, them one should just do it. So, you know the drill....
*Warning: not much (nothing, actually) about the database below!
It's early morning on Friday the 7th of December, and it's 44 F and there is a light rain. I got back from the Double-Wide-In-The-Sky (thanks, E-Man, that moniker is a keeper!), where it was a relatively painless night of QC'ing a few jobs. I was into my last task of the night when Chazbaby and Javvi became moderately animated about the job Javier was working on. At last, Chazbaby went off to do something else, and as I was wrapping up my job, I figured I'd pop over and see what the issue was. Now, in all fairness, the folks I work with are highly trained, experienced and generally really good at solving problems within their baliwicks. The problem is that apart from me, no one has Excel in their baliwick in this shop. Excel exists primarily for two things: to create departmental forms, and to be saved as .csv's, which other software can then utilize.
I asked Javvi who the previous programmer had been. I figured maybe the previous programmer might have some insight as to the issue, but when he told me, Chazbaby and I both laughed, because the scope of this job was pretty much beyond this individual. So I took the next step and asked him exactly what was happening. "It's dropping the final zero when we try to save it as a .csv." to which I replied with the obvious, "It's usually the other way around".
Let's try copying it, I suggested. So, he did, doing a <paste special> in the target worksheet, and PRESTO! Absolutely nothing happened. At that point I uttered my Great Spreadsheet Truth: Friends who have friends that don't know how to make spreadsheets don't let them make spreadsheets. Undaunted, I suggested we move on to Plan B. "Try <CTRL + ~> I said, and thunder pealed, lightning flashed, a great "POOF" of smoke appeared, and there was the spreadsheet in all of it's raw glory. "WOAH" (think Bill and Ted). My original thought had been to copy the data and paste just the format, then save as a .csv, but when that didn't work quite as expected, I launched Plan B.
And the answer? What he had been looking at was already formatted to always display two significant digits. The zeroes that were missing from the .csv were actually not there. And, since we never touch customer data without their written permission, we called it a night.
I use Excel every day, and I approve of this blog post.
*Warning: not much (nothing, actually) about the database below!
It's early morning on Friday the 7th of December, and it's 44 F and there is a light rain. I got back from the Double-Wide-In-The-Sky (thanks, E-Man, that moniker is a keeper!), where it was a relatively painless night of QC'ing a few jobs. I was into my last task of the night when Chazbaby and Javvi became moderately animated about the job Javier was working on. At last, Chazbaby went off to do something else, and as I was wrapping up my job, I figured I'd pop over and see what the issue was. Now, in all fairness, the folks I work with are highly trained, experienced and generally really good at solving problems within their baliwicks. The problem is that apart from me, no one has Excel in their baliwick in this shop. Excel exists primarily for two things: to create departmental forms, and to be saved as .csv's, which other software can then utilize.
I asked Javvi who the previous programmer had been. I figured maybe the previous programmer might have some insight as to the issue, but when he told me, Chazbaby and I both laughed, because the scope of this job was pretty much beyond this individual. So I took the next step and asked him exactly what was happening. "It's dropping the final zero when we try to save it as a .csv." to which I replied with the obvious, "It's usually the other way around".
Let's try copying it, I suggested. So, he did, doing a <paste special> in the target worksheet, and PRESTO! Absolutely nothing happened. At that point I uttered my Great Spreadsheet Truth: Friends who have friends that don't know how to make spreadsheets don't let them make spreadsheets. Undaunted, I suggested we move on to Plan B. "Try <CTRL + ~> I said, and thunder pealed, lightning flashed, a great "POOF" of smoke appeared, and there was the spreadsheet in all of it's raw glory. "WOAH" (think Bill and Ted). My original thought had been to copy the data and paste just the format, then save as a .csv, but when that didn't work quite as expected, I launched Plan B.
And the answer? What he had been looking at was already formatted to always display two significant digits. The zeroes that were missing from the .csv were actually not there. And, since we never touch customer data without their written permission, we called it a night.
I use Excel every day, and I approve of this blog post.
Wednesday, December 5, 2012
A free night
I should have spent at least part of this evening in what a former coworker lovingly referred to as the "double-wide in the sky", but it's a slow period, and I'm a contractor, so.... The office is a prefab perched against the exterior wall of a print shop, and resting on some prefab concrete. Factory, actually, is what the shop is, with several good-sized web presses on the floor. The office is pleasant enough, and the peeps are nice, but outsiders get a bit concerned sometimes when they visit. We had a printer in the office once which was giving us fits, so many fits that the lessor called in a factory rep to smooth our ruffled feathers. He came up with the repair tech, introductions were made all around, and after a few minutes, he remarked, "Doesn't the vibration up here bother you?" To which three of us replied, "What vibration?"
Still, when I don't go in now, I don't get paid, and that is not cool. I spent a good part of the evening looking at emailed job leads, job boards, and updating things on Dice and Careerbuilder. Once all of that was done, I went back to the database. I spent a good amount of time on data entry tonight, adding seventy-four records to the main table I'm working with right now. It made a good dent in one category; and with a little bit of luck and a lot of tenacity, that category will be done by the weekend. Then, all I need to do is put it in order on the shelves.However, that's part of the raison d'etre of the database: as everything will be cataloged, all I'll need to do is make a few more queries, and then all of the music will at least be in order.
After that, it's videos, books and Legos.
Still, when I don't go in now, I don't get paid, and that is not cool. I spent a good part of the evening looking at emailed job leads, job boards, and updating things on Dice and Careerbuilder. Once all of that was done, I went back to the database. I spent a good amount of time on data entry tonight, adding seventy-four records to the main table I'm working with right now. It made a good dent in one category; and with a little bit of luck and a lot of tenacity, that category will be done by the weekend. Then, all I need to do is put it in order on the shelves.However, that's part of the raison d'etre of the database: as everything will be cataloged, all I'll need to do is make a few more queries, and then all of the music will at least be in order.
After that, it's videos, books and Legos.
Tuesday, December 4, 2012
The Final Frontier
I haven't done much in the way of blogging before, but a Facebook post reminded me that 12/12/12 is the last date that any of us is likely to see in our lifetimes- the next trio of numbers, of course, being 01/01/01 (January 1, 2101... simple math eliminates the vast majority of humanity).
So, rather than a slew of 140-character succinct and tantalizing tweets, or a more lengthy Facebook status post or two, I've decided to do a bit of blogging to talk a bit about my database. BTW, who talks about a database anyway?
I've decided to give my database a name befitting it's goal: FORTY-TWO. Those familiar with Douglas Adams' tales will probably get the concept, but for those who don't: in Adam's universe, FORTY-TWO is the answer to "LIFE, THE UNIVERSE & EVERYTHING". My database is, at its most basic level, an accounting of everything significant and/or quantifiable that we own, and in many cases, how often said things are used. It has its beginnings in the prehistory of music, when vinyl giants dominated the world, and 45's enslaved small minds. In those days my data was all on paper, a complete collection of every LP I owned, as well as a record of every time each of them had been played. Later, I invited others into my musical world, doing a few music popularity polls. These days, when someone asks me what my favorite album/artist/genre are, I want to be able to pull up a database, check the speeds and feeds, and respond accurately.
So, FORTY-TWO answers all of my music questions. It also answers similar video questions- and, more importantly, it answers the (seemingly) ages-old-question: "What haven't we watched in a while"? I'm a firm believer in AV diversity (*listening to tobyMac right now), and my tastes are pretty predictable... loud (according to snookums), 80's hair band music. I also train with weights, and more often than not, I've got some music (relatively) blasting- even our kids, the youngest of which is seventeen- ask me to turn it down.
I'd bet Orff didn't go through this while composing "Carmina Burana".
Back to the database. As of this moment, it is an Access 2003 database comprised of eleven tables and nine queries. There are currently 54,366 unique pieces of data. My "main" table has 711 records - these are an incomplete record of our AV collection... and AV includes not just music CDs and videos of all descriptions, but games and books.
So, rather than a slew of 140-character succinct and tantalizing tweets, or a more lengthy Facebook status post or two, I've decided to do a bit of blogging to talk a bit about my database. BTW, who talks about a database anyway?
I've decided to give my database a name befitting it's goal: FORTY-TWO. Those familiar with Douglas Adams' tales will probably get the concept, but for those who don't: in Adam's universe, FORTY-TWO is the answer to "LIFE, THE UNIVERSE & EVERYTHING". My database is, at its most basic level, an accounting of everything significant and/or quantifiable that we own, and in many cases, how often said things are used. It has its beginnings in the prehistory of music, when vinyl giants dominated the world, and 45's enslaved small minds. In those days my data was all on paper, a complete collection of every LP I owned, as well as a record of every time each of them had been played. Later, I invited others into my musical world, doing a few music popularity polls. These days, when someone asks me what my favorite album/artist/genre are, I want to be able to pull up a database, check the speeds and feeds, and respond accurately.
So, FORTY-TWO answers all of my music questions. It also answers similar video questions- and, more importantly, it answers the (seemingly) ages-old-question: "What haven't we watched in a while"? I'm a firm believer in AV diversity (*listening to tobyMac right now), and my tastes are pretty predictable... loud (according to snookums), 80's hair band music. I also train with weights, and more often than not, I've got some music (relatively) blasting- even our kids, the youngest of which is seventeen- ask me to turn it down.
I'd bet Orff didn't go through this while composing "Carmina Burana".
Back to the database. As of this moment, it is an Access 2003 database comprised of eleven tables and nine queries. There are currently 54,366 unique pieces of data. My "main" table has 711 records - these are an incomplete record of our AV collection... and AV includes not just music CDs and videos of all descriptions, but games and books.
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