Reality Me

Category: Daily Life

Ramblings, often stream of conscious, journaling the events of my life.

  • What kind programs do you write?

    I often get asked, "Now, what do you do?" and when I try to explain it I get these blank stares and gapping mouths to which I pause then say, "I make web pages." Their eyes light, heads nod, and they declare, "OOooh!" Quickly followed by a subject change.

    What do I really do? Right now I am writing an application that allows service providers to advertise their services. So someone seeking a service goes to the website and enters what they are looking for and the matching providers pop up. Sounds simple enough right? Well, if I do my job correctly it will appear amazingly simple to the end user. The behind the scenes programming complexity is awe inspiring. As a minor example, the administrator has to take requests from service providers to be apart of the website. Then the administrator has to create the service provider profile which implies an administrative website that only the staff can access (roles based security). A profile! That’s simple right? Just a database table with all the descriptions of the provider and services offered right? Not really. In actuality it is a very complex system of related lookup tables. Since I cannot predict all the variants of services and pieces of services that may be offered, the system was built to allow the administrator to dynamically add and remove qualities from the service profile. Certainly a detailed specification could have made that simpler but would have resulted in a limited application where as this one can grow to meet the future needs of the client (I know..the simpler approach would have produced more billable hours in the future..blah blah).

    Of course, the service provider has to have their own website to be able to manage the details of their service without having to labor the administrator. However, the client does not want the service provider to be able to make certain changes to the profile without approval. So I have had to create a change request table in the database to accept pending changes from the service providers to be accepted or rejected by the administrator. Now there’s a level of complexity that echoes changes throughout the site!

    I love my work!

  • Listening to constructive criticism

    Yesterday I was told "If you smoked as much as you twitter you’d look 92." Perhaps I should slow down a bit.

  • Of Grasshoppers

    Student: Being a father is a guaranteed way to regularly feel like a cad.
    Master: Being a father is a guaranteed way to regularly feel like a superhero.

  • Tech Issue of the Day

    Today’s terribly frustrating error causing a long delay in a short process is:

    Parameter index out of range (1 > number of parameters, which is 0).

    It is the result of this simple insert:

    <cfquery name="createrole" datasource="#application.gDataSrc#">
        INSERT INTO #application.projectidentifier#_theroletable {
           fooASInt,
           barAsInt
        } VALUES {
           <cfqueryparam cfsqltype="CF_SQL_INTEGER" value="#fooAsIntValue#">,
           104
        }
    </cfquery>

    UPDATE: Whoops. I see the typo! There is a big difference between {} and (). Should have been:

    <cfquery name="createrole" datasource="#application.gDataSrc#">
        INSERT INTO #application.projectidentifier#_theroletable (
           fooASInt,
           barAsInt
        ) VALUES (
           <cfqueryparam cfsqltype="CF_SQL_INTEGER" value="#fooAsIntValue#">,
           104
        )
    </cfquery>

  • Relaxed and staying that way

    I have returned from a jaunt in the woods (story to follow later). I feel renewed! My taunters are still at large but I will not fall into their trap of living a panicked, stressful way. Prior to this trip I slipped into a very reactionary lifestyle. I have returned to responsiveness and plan to remain so. Let’s see what happens. Time to open and read 9 days of email.

  • Update

    Home!

  • On this day I died.

  • From the mouths of babes

    Amy, wearing Mom’s bra on the outside of her shirt with chest puffed out: "Look at my BIG nipples!"

  • I’m sorry I stole your cat

    Gray the cat

    So last night I’m on the phone with the sheriff’s office when a car pulls up and a stranger approaches our house. The lady quickly approaches in tears and starts asking about our outdoor cat. She describes it in explicit details while wiping her eyes. I excuse myself and tell the officer on the phone that she can cancel the 2 week property watch I was scheduling.

    Being slow on the uptake, and after hearing several sobbing, "I’m sorry"s, I prepare myself for the words, "I killed your cat." Of course, had I remembered why I was talking to the sheriff’s office in the first place, the story would have been instantly clear to me. See, 15 minutes prior (roughly 11pm), Tommy calmly came downstairs and told me, "someone just came up to our porch, crouched down like they were sneaking, then saw me through the window and ran back to their car and drove off." I start thinking that maybe talking to Say Uncle about improving our home arsenal would be a good idea. I prepare myself for the worse and walk outside expecting to see toilet paper in the trees or maybe the kids sandbox missing. I couldn’t find anything. Maybe they were scoping us out. That’s when I called the sheriff. They immediately put us on a property watch and promised a cruiser would go past the house several times in the night. But my concern was for my family’s safety while I’m incommunicado in the West Virginia mountains next week. The sheriff transfers me to another department which schedules property watches for up to two weeks. That’s when this lady approached my house. I have to say, it was comforting having an officer listening in while our conversation began.

    As it turns out, one of her 10 cats went missing about two weeks ago. Her pet psychic explained that the cat was ok and still near her house. Ah! The pet psychic. That certainly explained how she was able to find a dark gray cat on a county road (ie. no street lights), on a moonless night with the porch lights turned off. She showed me a picture of her cat which was strikingly similar to my cat. Mark points out that she probably knew how to find the cat by remembering where she took the picture during a previous day.

    I ponder offering to let her keep the cat but she breaks into explaining that she knew it wasn’t her cat when she got home and it started acting strange. Ok. That translates to "she start tearing things up and peeing everywhere." That would be because she’s feral, a huntress, and abhors the indoors. She literally would rather be out in a tornado than come into the house (that’s a real example!).

    I’m sure the cat was in her trunk and she was just going to release it but saw the porch lights on and knew she was busted. So she offered to go get the cat and bring it back (ie. drive out of sight, get the cat out of the trunk, make a U-turn and come back). I have to say I was impressed with how she held the cat to her and didn’t get shredded into a bloody pulp. She handed her to me and I took her with extreme trepidation! This is the cat that has killed a rabbit, squirrels, and two bats. I like my arms!

    I suggested that her pet psychic could still be correct and told her about the crawl space access in the abandoned house on the corner where my animals have been trapped before. She went on her way and after a little debate, I called the non-emergency number to cancel the night’s property watch and explain to the sheriff that the stolen goods had been returned.

  • Paraskavedekatriaphobia

    The Stress Management Center and Phobia Institute in Asheville, North Carolina estimates that in the United States alone, $800 or $900 million is lost in business each Friday the 13th because some people will not travel or go to work. [Source via KnoxViews]

    You know, if I could have just a little, tinnie, tiny piece of that….

  • Guilty Confession

    I really like watching Miss Spider’s Sunny Patch Kids (see also 2004).

  • Independent Consulting On Your Time

    Ah! The grass is always greener on the other side. If you are in the corporate world, you dream of working for yourself either as a consultant or having your own business. As a consultant or business owner, you long for the simplicity of an 8-5 job with its predictable income, insurance, and assumed stability. The dream of escaping corporate drudgery to freelance is often envisioned with copious free time, barrels of money, setting your own schedule, recovering vacations lost to corporate deadlines, quality time spent with the children, and cutting the yard while advising your client via cellphone for an outrageous hourly fee. The truth of the matter is that a consultant/freeagent has to plan for 20% more time than a regular employee. Yes, that means working for yourself you should plan for a 6 day work week OR 5 ten and half hour work days.

    Attitudes change also. The corporate world might have some flexibility in hours. Some people may work 7-4 while others work 10-6 but the world generally expects the business to be open 8-5. When you work for yourself, the world generally expects you to be open 24/7. The world is also shrinking. Right now I am working on a project for a client who is 6 hours ahead of me. That means their day is over one hour from now and if I want that critical progress payment I have one hour to show them the milestone has been met. A couple of weeks ago, I was working with a client 11 hours ahead of me. I also had a client whose corporate offices were 8 hours behind me while their US offices where 3 hours behind me but I received the work through another office which was 1 hour behind me. If you do not set your business hours then it is easy to be sucked into world time and you can easily find yourself trying to be that 24/7 person (ie. exhausted). As a 24/7 person, if you work from your house, you could find clients coming to your door to interrupt dinner, find you in your pajamas, or sunbathing naked in the backyard. Set hours! Most importantly, respect the hours and keep them. If you declare an 8-5 day, you had better be working 8-5. Setting communication hours for IM, email, and phone will also help your productivity (I don’t follow any of these suggestions).

    Now, time to defy the laws of physics and make an impossible amount of progress in the next hour. Thank goodness for the television babysitter!

  • The more I don’t want it, the more I get

    Apparently I am still not channeling this guy.

  • From the mouths of babes

    Amy, 5 years old: "I don’t want to die. Dead is forever."

  • Bad Dad

    Amy needs some attention right now and all I can give her is "Daddy has to work." I should work while everyone else sleeps.