belated halloween

the end

powerful oratory skills

I snapped this image during lunch while Ben was trying to explain to Jason and me why he voted Libertarian this time around. I think I caught him while he was trying to say Badnarik.

try again?

bad timing

Well some where along the line our team started an on call procedure, so for the next week it is all me. I have to carry around a cell phone waiting for a call that I hope never comes. Talk about bad timing. If I get a call that interrupts my nighttime remodeling I am not going to be happy.

Last night we ripped down wallpaper in the master bath and the guest bathroom. The guys started ripping up the floor downstairs. I am soo bummed that my new digital camera has not come in yet. I want to get some pictures of the demolition. Tonight we plan on pulling wallpaper in the dinning room, half bath downstairs, and the foyer. I need to get to it?. Later?.

the new house

Front Yard

Back Yard

We were able to meet a few of our new neighbors last night. Paul and Jaime live in the house to our right. We were in a rush so we only got to meet Jaime. The neighbors across the street are John and Kim. They have two girls ages 3 and (4 or 5) months. We did not meet John only Kim and the two girls. For those of you who read this and know Carldine, she lives less then half a mile from our new house.

The pictures to the right are from the MLS listing. They are not that great but will give you an idea of what the house looks like.

good by Signal View.... Well almost

Today at 2:00 we will be closing on our 214 Signal View house and will be buying the Fox Den Ln. house. I don't guess I have really bogged about us moving too much. I guess somewhere deep down I did not want to jinx the whole thing. I just had Leslie order me a digital camera on Saturday, so once it gets in I will post some pictures. If you read my blog regularly you will probably hear more about our move then you want to. Well, unless I am just too busy and you don?t hear from me for the next month. It could go either way.

We will be renting our current house until the 14th of November so we can finish remodeling the new house. We have a lot of painting and wall paper removal to do. We are also having a contractor make an opening between the den and living room as well as having hardwood installed down stairs. We are installing Brazilian Cherry. It looks very nice but we did have some environmental concerns. The wood looks to be farmed, so hopefully we are not supporting the clear cutting of the Amazon. If you think I might be having the Amazon cut down and you have some reputable links then please share.

commercial

beer drinker?

sql server

Today I got bit from SQL server which a production app of mine is using. This is what happened. I have two temporary tables that I am creating in a SQL server query. The two tables look something like this:

When I had to decide on the column types I should use for my temp tables I just decided to use whatever the type of the base tables column was i.e. varchar (255). The problem with that logic is that this database is highly relational, so the type of value that you get back from that column is dependent on joining with a key in another table. The value coming back could be a string, float, decimal, integer or anything else that can fit into 255 characters.

My query where I used those two temp tables looked something like this:

The result from that query above looked like this:

What I expected to get back was this:

What happened was it concatenated the first two columns and did not add them. Coming from a Teradata background, I did not expect the concatenation symbol to be a ?+?. On the Teradata platform the strong concatenation symbol is ?||?. I was able to fix the issue pretty quickly by just making the data type of the temp tables integers. Like this:

I really like using the ?||? approach over the ?+? approach for concatenation because, for one, such an error would have been caught in the coding process and would have never made it to production. Plus using the ?+? just seams too object oriented and looks out of place in SQL.

journalists

I just dawned on me the other day that the profession of being a journalist does not really exist. There are only pundits and pundits in journalist clothes.

corporate life

i can't help myself

carden blog rolled again

Ben remembered that he had a blog, so I have added him back to the blog roll. He is using a blogging tool bBlog, which I have never heard of.

He posted some good picts of his little one so you might want to go check them out.

our trip

the bellybutton

The last five days or so were spent down in Ft. Myers FL, for Leslie?s Dad?s 60th birthday. We had a good time, and on top of that John David was able to take his first air plain flight. He did well. On the flight back he even sleep through the takeoff and landing. We decided to fly out of Atlanta because we did not want to push our luck with a 20 month old and their universal need not to sit in any one place for too long. There must have been eight or ten babies on the flight down and none freaked out. The trip down worked out well because Leslie?s sister (Heather), two brothers (Max and Konrad), and her other sister?s son (Nicolas) were on the plane with us.

I was able to grab some pictures of the trip off of Leslie?s Dad?s Digital camera. The picture to the right is one of them. I just love this picture even though you can barely tell what he is doing. John David has this thing about his belly button. He kind of uses it as an emotional reference point. If he is a little nervous he goes for the belly button. If he has just finished chasing the cat around the house, he goes for the bellybutton. If he is eating a good meal, he goes for the belly button. If he is having his diaper changed and he does not like it, he goes for the belly button. If he is not sure about his surrounding, he checks to make sure his belly button is around. If it is he knows everything is okay.

I am putting together some other pictures from the trip and will post them once I get a chance.

part I: Structure of a URL

As I said in my last post, I am taking a web services class. There are two things that I have learned in this class that I probably should have learned while getting a CS degree from UTC. They are "how http requests are handled" and "what exactly makes up a URL".

http://host[:port][path[?querystring]

I guess I never thought about URLs too much. I knew it could have a querystring and that depending on how the host server was set up you could either add the 'www' or not. What I find interesting is that you can specify the port that the URL will connect through. So both of these URLs are valid:

thegidcumbs.com:80/dblog/index.php?querystring=value

thegidcumbs.com/dblog/index.php?querystring=value