Good as any, Better than most

Thursday, August 31, 2006

Parties and weddings

Last weekend, I went with a bunch of guys on a bachelor party.  We hit Wisconsin Dells and had a good time.

We rode some go-karts, yelled at women and bungee jumped.

That’s right, jumped out of a little cage, with elastic cords strapped to our ankles.  The place we jumped at videoed the activity.  Watching the video is amusing, seeing the jump from a different angle than the ground rushing toward you.

I also noticed that, well, I’m fat.  Not just a little extra weight on the old gut, but serious amounts of hang-age, everywhere.  So, on Sunday, I ate my last pig out style, and started counting calories on Monday.  I’ve been reading The Hacker’s Diet and it has some pretty good general information.  I mean, I know that to lose weight, you need to eat fewer calories than you burn. 

Really, all I’m going to do is watch my intake, and get my normal amount of exercise for the first couple weeks.  Every time I’ve started excising in the past, my food intake has just gone up.  This time, I’m going to focus on the intake side, and get myself in the habit of eating normal portions.  Then, when my body is over that shock, and I can go to bed without my stomach screaming, I’ll start some low impact work, so that my body doesn’t eat all of my musculature.

I figure that since I’m blogging, and blogging is all talking about yourself, I might as well go whole hog with it.  I mean, that’s the fun, right?

Wednesday, August 30, 2006

It’s a dirty job, but somebody has to do it

I work for a property management company.  We rent out spaces.  We deal in commercial and residential units for the majority of our operations.  Our single biggest department, number of employees-wise, is maintenance.  They deal with every complaint from leaky toilets, long grass, to “odd smells”.

This isn’t about them though, it’s about me.

The department uses an archaic Lotus Approach database for all their work order and time sheet needs.  This same database is later exported into our accounting system for payroll.  It’s also used for all the reporting to individual projects.

It’s the slowest piece of garbage ever.  The database itself is homegrown.  Read that as designed by someone that doesn’t really understand what an index is.  OR why there should be separate tables for specific things, instead of just random extra databases.  Granted, the guy that wrote it did a damn fine job, given the circumstances.  It works, albeit slowly, for everything they want it to do.  Most of the time.

Every 2 weeks, we get a constant stream of complaints about the speed.  Almost 2 years ago, we contracted with a company to rewrite the application, using a Web front end (most likely ASP) and a SQL back-end.  This company specializes in exactly this sort of custom application building.  They haven’t even started on it.

I think I could hammer something out for in, given a month to work.  And it looks more and more like I’m going to have to do that.  I don’t want to do that, at all.  I know how much time it will consume, and how much of a headache I’ll get just writing it.  Then we’ll have to support our users, and train them all up on the new way to do things.  Just thinking about it makes me anxietous.  That should really be a word.

And to top it all off, my video card crapped out, and the new one I ordered is on back-order.  Maybe it’s time to sneak in an order of a couple workstation PCs for the IT department.

Currently Listening:

Artist:  Gordon Lightfoot
Album:  The Complete Greatest Hits
Year:  2002

Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Faster than I thought

Ok, all of my myspace blogs are moved over.  I’m going to leave them over there, due to the quality comments they got.

I’m almost wondering if I should mirror the new ones over here, with a link over there, since only 3 people know about this site at this point.  Maybe a global link?  I don’t know.  I’m not really sure what I mean to accomplish with this, other than to give me an outlet for stress, and possibly some creativity.

I can’t promise the creativity though.

I intend to follow the “Mine.” storyline up.  Really.  There’s some other pieces like it that I have laying around, started, half a chapter here and there, that I’d like to get into digital format, and be able to work on as the mood strikes.

I’m also moving everything I had up in a subdirectory on the Windows server, over here.  I’m not 100% on file sharing/file modes in a Linux environment, and this gives me a great opportunity to sharpen up on that.

The Migration

My plan is to move all of the myspace blogs I wrote over here.  There’s not that many of them, so it shouldn’t take long.  It should give me a nice jumping off point to flesh this bad boy out.

The plan is to eventually have all the pictures and shit that I have shared out in the past here too, so that they’re centralized.  That’s a goal for another day though.

Monday, August 28, 2006

Note of rather insignificant importance

I just got home from work (there’s a 12 hour day in), and I wanted to see if ye olde website was accessible and usable from home.

It looks like it is, or you wouldn’t be reading this.

So not only do I like the layout of this engine better, it’s already at 100% up-time for me.

Sure, I don’t have a non-functional database of album covers, and book covers to show you what I’m currently reading and listening to, but...well, the site actually loads in a decent amount of time.

Any slowness is directly related to the functionality of our wireless ISP, which sometimes drops random connections temporarily.

And hey, the blog has a spellcheck, built in!  How’s that for importance?

Trial by Fire

I was really sick of myspace always eating my little notes.

So, I’m going to see if I can do any better using off the shelf software.

Well, it’s more of off the apt-get software, but that’s neither here, nor there.