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I'm off to see the wizard!
May. 27th, 2005 08:20 amWell, my flight leaves at 8:20am, theoretically. I had to make a trip up to the mall to buy a garment bag, somehow mine has disappeared. I found that Penney's had one on sale for $30, I thought that was reasonable. Get to the mall, decide to check out Radio Shack to see if they have the data cable for my cell phone, they still don't. I should just buy the stupid thing on eBay and have it sent to Ohio. In fact, I think I'll do that after I finish this blog entry. I've been looking around town, admittedly not as diligently as I could, with zero success. Yeah, that's what I'm going to do.
ANYWAY, I'm at Metrocenter, walking to Radio Shack, and on the opposite side is a discount luggage store! I wander over and they have a decent enough bag for $35, but it didn't really grab me. The guy then points out a leather bag that's a bit smaller. I ask him the price and it's ALSO $35! I pop over to Penney's and can't get any service, nor can I find the one on sale so that I could just grab it and go back to the cashier's, so I go back to the discount place and I now have a leather garment bag.
It sounds more impressive than it is. Still, it's kinda cool.
Today was one of those good/bad days. I had an 8:30 meeting this morning with my boss and with the guy who is the main contact with the Feds on my database project. I did a high-level overview of what I've done in the four months that I've been there, I can't call it a dog & pony show because we were dealing with raw source code. But they really liked my overall design because it's extremely standardized, every data file that I produce will be done in one of two ways, every header file is produced the same as every other header file, the only difference being two default fields in the table itself and the data table that it references to get a record count. And all of the code that I've written I've liberally inserted comments describing where the data is coming from. So basically I have an excellent framework that is very standardized, so when I have to do the next set of files, once I start receiving data from the people who are the custodians of said data set, it's not difficult to put the pieces together.
The one weakness is that I can't write in Visual Basic any more. The current version is v7, called Dot Net. I haven't touched VB since v4, and the change from VB6 to .Net was MAJOR. Since I can't write the extract program in VB, I have to write DTS packages that perform the same steps to take the data and give me a file that we can transmit to the Feds. That's one DTS package per file set, there are something on the order of 75 file sets, each producing one to three files (three levels of detail, school, district, state, one or two may be missing from any specific set). I'm hoping we can free up a VB programmer to write an extract program. It takes me about an hour to copy and modify a DTS package for a new file set, so that's probably over two weeks work (over the life of the project) writing DTS packages for this puppy.
Saturday was a good day. I saw Andria and got worked over a bit, it was more of a tune-up before my trip than actually needing to be worked on (as opposed to me seeing her today because I started shaking pretty bad at work, I think it was mainly from my lovely food issue last night plus not enough sleep the last few days). I hit Mervyn's on the way home and added two polo shirts, a silk shirt, and a new watch to my wardrobe. I know that I don't have to put on a big show to win Russet's parents over, but I've been getting tired of my shirt collection, it's been a couple of years since I added any shirts in, in fact, it has been two years since it was right after I got my Cisco certification and I bought two Cisco shirts.
The watch is quite nice. It has something that has really (ticked) me off about every single previous watch that I've had: a stainless-steel case in addition to a steel back. So many watches have a steel back, but then the body of the watch is base metal, and eventually my perspiration starts eating at the body of the watch. And this includes $300 Seiko's! It is an analog face, battery-powered, has the date in a little window, and a VERY comfortable band! I'm so used to watch bands tearing at my arm hairs (I've got fairly fuzzy arms) that this one with its rounded edges is really nice for not pinching at me.
The best thing was the price: $60. It's an Armitron, but it looks really nice.
I'm happy. :-)
Well, gotta get the packing done, got a 4am get up time, need to be at my folks at 6:00. No idea if I'll be doing any bloggage during this trip, I'll probably be doing some writing as I know Russet is going to slip into a night schedule at some point, so I'll be up in the day while she's sleeping, it'll be a good time for writing.
ANYWAY, I'm at Metrocenter, walking to Radio Shack, and on the opposite side is a discount luggage store! I wander over and they have a decent enough bag for $35, but it didn't really grab me. The guy then points out a leather bag that's a bit smaller. I ask him the price and it's ALSO $35! I pop over to Penney's and can't get any service, nor can I find the one on sale so that I could just grab it and go back to the cashier's, so I go back to the discount place and I now have a leather garment bag.
It sounds more impressive than it is. Still, it's kinda cool.
Today was one of those good/bad days. I had an 8:30 meeting this morning with my boss and with the guy who is the main contact with the Feds on my database project. I did a high-level overview of what I've done in the four months that I've been there, I can't call it a dog & pony show because we were dealing with raw source code. But they really liked my overall design because it's extremely standardized, every data file that I produce will be done in one of two ways, every header file is produced the same as every other header file, the only difference being two default fields in the table itself and the data table that it references to get a record count. And all of the code that I've written I've liberally inserted comments describing where the data is coming from. So basically I have an excellent framework that is very standardized, so when I have to do the next set of files, once I start receiving data from the people who are the custodians of said data set, it's not difficult to put the pieces together.
The one weakness is that I can't write in Visual Basic any more. The current version is v7, called Dot Net. I haven't touched VB since v4, and the change from VB6 to .Net was MAJOR. Since I can't write the extract program in VB, I have to write DTS packages that perform the same steps to take the data and give me a file that we can transmit to the Feds. That's one DTS package per file set, there are something on the order of 75 file sets, each producing one to three files (three levels of detail, school, district, state, one or two may be missing from any specific set). I'm hoping we can free up a VB programmer to write an extract program. It takes me about an hour to copy and modify a DTS package for a new file set, so that's probably over two weeks work (over the life of the project) writing DTS packages for this puppy.
Saturday was a good day. I saw Andria and got worked over a bit, it was more of a tune-up before my trip than actually needing to be worked on (as opposed to me seeing her today because I started shaking pretty bad at work, I think it was mainly from my lovely food issue last night plus not enough sleep the last few days). I hit Mervyn's on the way home and added two polo shirts, a silk shirt, and a new watch to my wardrobe. I know that I don't have to put on a big show to win Russet's parents over, but I've been getting tired of my shirt collection, it's been a couple of years since I added any shirts in, in fact, it has been two years since it was right after I got my Cisco certification and I bought two Cisco shirts.
The watch is quite nice. It has something that has really (ticked) me off about every single previous watch that I've had: a stainless-steel case in addition to a steel back. So many watches have a steel back, but then the body of the watch is base metal, and eventually my perspiration starts eating at the body of the watch. And this includes $300 Seiko's! It is an analog face, battery-powered, has the date in a little window, and a VERY comfortable band! I'm so used to watch bands tearing at my arm hairs (I've got fairly fuzzy arms) that this one with its rounded edges is really nice for not pinching at me.
The best thing was the price: $60. It's an Armitron, but it looks really nice.
I'm happy. :-)
Well, gotta get the packing done, got a 4am get up time, need to be at my folks at 6:00. No idea if I'll be doing any bloggage during this trip, I'll probably be doing some writing as I know Russet is going to slip into a night schedule at some point, so I'll be up in the day while she's sleeping, it'll be a good time for writing.
