My Blog

New!!!

2005-06-24T11:13:00.000-07:00

Something newer than the last post

Sharing the awesomeness

2005-05-11T02:27:00.000-07:00

done

2005-04-08T18:38:00.000-07:00

the scripts just now finished... yay

Wait wait wait...

2005-04-06T17:46:00.000-07:00

i waited a lot today. computers are so slow sometimes.

when i got to work it was the typical mauling party of "i need this to happen," didn't take too long this time though. my mom just reiterated the stuff that we went over from sunday evening. sarah was there. those two are going to go hang out a week after she gets back from vegas. right after she gets back from vegas though, we're going to see joe satriani at the roseland again. i really can't wait. hopefully they won't throw us minors over into the can't-see-a-thing section again, but even if they do it'll be a great time. armaan and andrew, buy your flippin tickets.

my napolean dynamite "flippin' idiot. gosh." shirt bled. the collar and ends of the arms, which are red, now have a red fade coming from them. who's the flippin' idiot now?

jamie had some cascaded deletes that were set up horribly wrong, which would be why whole production records magically disappeared (they're after their lucky charms...).

the quotes were showing up very wrong. single-item systems' viewing names should show up as their item's model number, but oh no. filemaker has decided to, instead of working how it should, show blank system name as the viewing name. but of course to make it seem even cooler, filemaker only does this at certain times. so now i'm having to store the model number into the system name and have it stored so this will actually work properly. the script to do this took forever, and the receiving script from last week is still running, so i got to wait for a long time.

i talked to val today for the first time in like forever. at least a week before sarah's party, which was early spring break; i think it was longer than that though. we caught up, well she caught up, though i get the sneaking suspicion that she's just been working this whole time. she really needs a break. see val is my 37 year old mormon chick friend. even though she's mormon though, most of her personal doctrine seems pretty solid, so i think she really does know the Lord, as opposed to mormo :P. she was married very early to some dude, who i really don't know much about now that i think of it. they had three kids, he kind of wanted to do some crazy stuff or something which val went along with as a "good wife" i assume, and she ended up excommunicated because of it. she wants to get back into her cult for some reason though, even though i've had her convinced at times that it's doing nothing but hurting her. she's really cool though, and sends me free prerelease stuff like toothbrushes and such. very awesome woman, always a pleasure to talk to.

so neither script had finished up yet and so i went out and downloaded some audioslave, haven't listened to them for a while. as andrew says, his voice sounds really cool when he isn't screaming.

i also went searching for a good blogging program, and found ecto. best thing i could find for mac at least. much better than using blogger's online crap.

there's a new version of unison, a usenet client for os x. much improved indeed.

as a sidenote, armaan take down your laszlo thing or whatever it's called. even though it's cool it slows everyone down and nobody uses it :P

...please :)

well the system name script finished up so i could do some work. i wrote and queued up another script that will unmerge any merged items. i'll probably eventually be able to get rid of the entire items table, but the thought of doing that is very scary to me. so much stuff will need to be patched up all at once... *shudder* so for now redundancy will be the way to go.

i worked on some invoices, apparently i need to be more specific and detailed on what it is i did. not a problem of course.

dad mentioned the filemaker server advanced copy that we have. oh yea, i need to create web-accessible layouts here someday. that plus ben's new report request plus an old report request plus regular maintenance plus the home page idea of andrew's that's really cool actually plus any other crap that i forgot or that will come up equals a lot of work on my plate. the thing about this work though is that it's hard to hire out others to help me. this database is my baby, and it's my job security, whew.

the item history splitting script seemed to be a long one as well, so i let that run and helped my dad with stuff for the rest of the day.

i spent about 45 minutes adding users to the new firewall that's been sitting for about half a year that isn't being used at all yet. i then realized "oh hey why don't i look for some sort of configuration migration like i wanted dad to look for a while back" and found a backup system that may work. going into it i knew it would save a lot of time and hassle if it does in fact work, so i crossed my fingers, waiting another 10 minutes for the backup of the old firewall to finish.

jamie pulled me off to help him with a sales projection file he's been working on for ben that i didn't know about. very cool file, most of it's working just fine already, he's getting better at this stuff i think.

I"M FIRST POSTER QW))OOO!

2005-03-30T15:09:00.000-08:00

armaan told me to blog about work... this is work of 3/30:

i got up and remembered i had the so sweet slimserver set up that i'd be able to listen to at work. wouldn't even need to bring my ipod in, and i have my new kutless cd for the car ride. yea, kutless did the worship at athey creek this last sunday (easter... eww sex).

oop, before i get out of bed, i have to log how long i spend in "media" and how many advertisements i see. media studies... psu... strictest, teacher, EVARR. i have to make 7 of these logs, each spanning 5 days. 35 days of my life i have to keep track of every single thing i see... i hate this class.

mmkay finished getting dressed and showering... 12 ads. walked around the house picking out breakfast and stuff, 30 somethin ads. drove to work, another 42 ads. hating each and every one of them...

so i get into work, first i do is vpn in, set up the stream in itunes, hook teh up safari into the slimserver and hit play. sweet streaming goodness :) (start keeping track of time spent listening to music....)

first priority of the day is to correct all the receiving information on items that got b0rked during the big database shiftover. i spent about an hour coming up with a script that will hopefully work. it's still running. initial debugging and testing seemed hopeful, but filemaker has its own really special characteristic personality of coming up with ways to not work.

dad's at his desk. hey dad! check out this cool music streaming thing. walk over, show him how flippin sweet it is. yea john that is neat, you need to turn it off though because it bogs down the network. the peachtree systems get so slow they can't even work when people are streaming music so i've put a ban on it across the company.

this is a sad sad state of affairs.

so now that that was out of the way for the day, at least as far as i was going to be able to do today, it's time for lunch. i get up, walk to the kitchen where about 5 or 6 people are talking, receive no acknowledgement, open the freezer, heat my pizza, walk out when donna sees me.

donna is an extremely nice lady. she is in some ways semi-computer illiterate, but at least attempts to get through the problems she faces. sometimes her attempts lead her (and ultimately, me) into more trouble though. we do the chat thing, how was your spring break, slight delay from me, well couldn't have been too great you were working through most of it from her, chuckle and yea from me, did you have fun in astoria?

astoria. friday i went to astoria. i went with sarah (teh hottie), nichole (hottie's best friend from idaho, hates napolean dynamite), and joey (jomosexual, nichole's new "official" boyfriend). it was a fun drive out there, i ended up going faster than i ever had before, about 110 i think, whee. went up to the astoria column, which i guess is in the ring 2, a movie i've been told not to see because i might get scared to death of how bored i am.

joey took his buickmobile with custom brakelights that look equally as bad and a new subwoofer that's horribly wired that i helped install. this is a sweet ride. we went out makin cookies in the sand with it, and joey carved out some boobs with it.... joey... funny guy

so i set my pizza at my desk, go use the bathroom, sit back down to find jamie d (the male kind) waiting for me. jamie's a cool guy who smells like cigarettes whenever you get a little too close to him. he's extremely nice, always tries to be very quick and prompt with my time, never fails to be considerate. jamie helps out around here with the filemaker stuff as well as runs the production department. he needs help a lot of times but, again, is always very quick about it.

so jamie's been wanting the production and testing database to be order and system driven as opposed to just system driven. he's copied most of the backbone from something i threw together a while back, but he's having some problems. he had some layouts pointing to wrong tables and a few script steps needed some changing, but all of the mistakes are reasonable and some are things i didn't figure out how to correct until about a week ago. it takes me about 45 minutes to fix everything for him, and now he's happy. this makes me happy of course, but i'm just fried and i still have two hours left to work.

i came up with a sweet idea to get my slimserver working again: stream it to the fileserver once it's up. the fileserver is going to plug in straight to the modem so as to eliminate that opening firewall ports issue. streaming music will take minimal bandwidth on the modem and won't touch the lan. i tell my dad about it and he tells me to go fire it up (sweeet). i have to remind him though that last time we "fired it up" it brought our firewall down... he still hasn't called integra online about what might be causing this, but it's something we'll probably test again this weekend.

i start going through my list of support requests and emails and fix a few issues people have been having, ignore some things i simply can't fix, and overall have a minivannish time doing it. i get back to the ups tracking issue that i've been having the strangest problems with. first problem i had was i would go to the ups site normally, enter a tracking number to view its info and everything, then just copy that url and parse the current order's tracking number in to get it working? sounds flawless right? well ups decided to let me know that there is no content at this url, or something to that effect. long story short it was a problem with, you guessed it, filemaker. an update solved everything after some spitting from people.

donna came down with a problem with a certain demo that was printed out, yet was deleted now in the database. i went straight to a backup and sure enough there it was. i don't why but this has jim's name all over it, in my thoughts and literally right there on the demo. he's usually very good with these things, very nice about things, but today he seems a little on edge. i'm seeing a different side of him now so i'm wondering if he just overreacted about something, deleted the demo and tried to start over or something. regardless of what happened, i reentered the demo with the old demo number.

she came back down with a problem that the order which that demo was purchased on had been deleted. i looked up a serial number from the order and sure enough all the product information is there, just the order is deleted though. this is a little weird because a deleted order should cascade down and delete the useless part information that had been leftover, but this hadn't been done. it's stuff like this where i start to think, well crap maybe it is my fault. i'll keep my eye out for similar problems but hopefully this is just a weird case. i restored the order as i did the demo before it. and i shall smite thee.

it's time to go home and start counting ads again. i'm headed to dinner with sarah, her dad (jerk), and her stepmom (incompetent)... at least she has a great mom. na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na.