Hi Everyone! I’m back!
I actually got back yesterday evening, but was just too tired to log in. Be it known, though, that I’ll post a lot more about my travels here in the next few days. I’ve already posted a few pictures in the gallery section of this website, and have added nine new root beers to my root beer page! It was a wonderful trip, and we both had a lot of fun. More details coming soon!
I’m getting ready to leave for vacation tomorrow, so this blog may not see a lot of action. I will try to post when I have access to a computer though. Here’s a basic itinerary:
Saturday: drive down to Portland OR
Sunday: drive to Eugene and Grandma’s 80th birthday shindig
Monday: fly down to Sacramento
Monday-Wednesday?: Stay with Lorien’s sister and family (and her mom), visit Jelly Belly factory 
Thursday-Friday?: Los Angeles and Disneyland
After that: head to Grand Canyon, then drive back home.
See you seamonkeys (insert credit to my favorite Sealab 2021 episode) on the road!
Intel has reneged on their 4Ghz Pentium4 chip. I try to like Intel, they make those sweet hyperthreaded processors, and their chips run a lot cooler than AMD, but sometimes they can be real stupid. For example:
Instead, Intel will release another chip that has fewer gigahertz but is made faster in other ways. PC users shouldn’t be able to tell the difference, Intel says.
Today I had my last visit, except for a cleaning—I’m glad I went in and got it done, now I just have to pay for it all…
I’m numb, but happy that this is the last time for a while.
Well the little buggers that have been playing in my backyard dug out my bamboo trench, covered it with plywood stolen from a local construction site (it was used for concrete forms, I could tell by the discoloration of the wood), and then threw dirt on top of that, then dug little tunnels shooting off, I certainly give them an A for effort, but an F for doing it on their own property, because they did it on mine. I cleaned it up this morning because my gracious neighbor needs to get rid of some dirt and offered to even out my front yard for me, and fill the trench while he’s at it. So sorry, kids, but my backyard is no longer your playground.
I think the craziest thing is they had a first aid kit, tools, and even a food supply down in the caves they dug. Can you believe it?
ARG! This morning I finally found and fixed a problem in the Microsoft CRM Data Migration with importing Email Activities. No matter what I did, they just errored when you tried to open them from the Activity History. The problem was the GoldMine to CRM Migration spreadsheet provided by Microsoft was missing a key piece of information that I ran across on the MSDN site about Email Activities requiring the Direction code (the Excel spreadsheet only specifies a Direction for Letter, Fax, and Phone Call Activities). Once I got that fixed, things were great.
I sure wish I hadn’t spend more than two weeks on this problem. Lesson learned? Where Microsoft is concerned, take the documentation with a grain of salt.
I ran in to an annoying problem in Microsoft’s Visual Studio .NET compiler for C++. I’m currently porting a lead engine for our software dealers from one CRM system to another. So I’ve been modifying several SQL queries that the engine runs. I had a problem, though, where a query had a curly brace { instead of an open parenthesis (, but because of the font (Courier New), they were virtually indistinguishable. I was extremely annoyed when I finally found it, and immediately changed my font settings (even Courier is better, but I’m a fixed-width fan myself).
I got a bogomail message today from (what I assume to be) the developer of The Idaho Beat. It looks like it’s just getting off the ground. I’m happy to help out, though, and registered and posted my name and this blog’s address on it. Looks like it is a fellow PHP site, I would guess it’s powered by some CMS system with some custom tweaking. I thought about running my site via CMS, but just don’t have enough changing content to justify the effort. This blog is by far the most changing part of this website.
Well, he just came back to me and said it won’t work, because it doesn’t parse relative links.
Hey, I didn’t write it, don’t blame me. I just hate spending time on things like this when we just throw them out. But he pushed his supervisor, who has clout with my supervisor, so I can’t really say no. I’m sure a quick Google search will turn up lots of results for stale link checkers online…
For some reason, I seem to be one of the few competent people around the office, or maybe I’m just really good at what I do. I spent two hours this morning fixing a PHP script that I didn’t write for another guy, who didn’t write it either, he copied it out of a book and expected it to work. It checks links and is supposed to report bad ones back to the user, but the way you submitted the URI to the script wasn’t working. I, in my modest capacity here at the office, figured it out and got it working. I still don’t think it’ll do what he wants it to do, though.
*sigh*
Well, I was surfing around and ran across this site about the Apostrophe Protection Society. They’ll tell you how to use apostrophe‘s in their proper place‘s.
It really chafes me when I can’t even walk in to the building without being accosted to fix a problem. This morning I had people coming out to open the doors for me so they could get first crack at me. I am so looking forward to my vacation, which starts Friday.
I added this category earlier this week, but didn’t have the time to put in this entry, so I’m going to get it in right now.
I recently had this conversation with my fiance where she told me that if something ever happened to her, she wants me know it’d be okay with her if I remarried. Now there are several ways to respond to a statement like that, I’ll give a bad and a good example:
Bad: Cool!
Good: I would be devastated if that happened and never get over you.
Here’s today’s Chinese lesson for you:
Excerpt taken from Xinhuanet.com:
WASHINGTON, Oct. 8 (Xinhuanet) — A New York Times reporter is facing up to 18 months in prison after a federal judge held him in contempt of court on Thursday for refusing to name her source to prosecutors investigating the disclosure of the identity of a covert Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agent, media reports said Friday.
Note the inconsistent use of him and her in the above quoted paragraph. In Chinese (Mandarin at least, I can’t speak for the other dialects), the word for him, her, he, she, it is spoken the same (”ta“). Written down, it can vary, but doesn’t technically have to. So next time you’re talking to a native Chinese speaking person and they screw up the him-her-he-she-it thing, you know why.
Today I’m setting up an old laptop with Linux in between tasks at my desk. In order to compile and install my favorite code editor, Anjuta, I had to install library after library, it must have taken at least two dozen libraries, but I think I finally got everything I needed in (it’s compiling right now, finally). Lots of work, but like Linus Torvalds said, the Linux motto is “Do it yourself”. Which is great, as long as you aren’t afraid of getting in to it.