Don't forget this when doing your taxes

There is a one time 2006 Telephone Tax Credit that you can take this year.

Now Discover Your Strengths

Here at work my boss gave everyone one our team the book Now Discover Your Strengths.

The book is a really quick read, and at the end of the third chapter there is an online quiz, which consists of about 120 questions. I am normally very skeptical about these sorts of things and went into the book half hearted, but this book has really opened my eyes. All my life I have focused on those skills I am lacking and tried to improve in those areas. This book comes from the perspective that we are all created uniquely and that in order to reach our zenith we need to focus on those areas where we have talent\themes. My five most dominate talents are below.

MY SIGNATURE THEMES:

• Activator: People strong in the Activator theme can make things happen by turning thoughts into action. They are often impatient.
• Futuristic: People strong in the Futuristic theme are inspired by the future and what could be. They inspire others with their visions of the future.
• Adaptability: People strong in the Adaptability theme prefer to "go with the flow." They tend to be "now" people who take things as they come and discover the future one day at a time.
• Ideation: People strong in the Ideation theme are fascinated by ideas. They are able to find connections between seemingly disparate phenomena.
• Intellection: People strong in the Intellection theme are characterized by their intellectual activity. They are introspective and appreciate intellectual discussions.

Just as much as it has been eye opening for me in learning about myself it has been eye opening in dealing with others. Since everyone on my team has taken the test and we have shared our talents it has made understanding and working with others so much easier.

I was thinking about giving an example of how this book has help when working with others, but I think I had better not. :-)

fire at work

I've wanted to do some blogging but I have been so stinking busy that this blog is starting to suffer. I am into a new project at work which is taking a lot of my time, and by the time I get home I am too tired to do anything.

I need to get to sleep, but I will post one picture. We had a fire today at work. I took several pictures but I will just post one.

Here is a link if you want more.

a must see movie clip

Microsoft Feels Your Pain : here
Hat Tip: Eric

i buy eggs for a living

Yesterday while on the phone with Leslie she told me that John David thought I was buying groceries. The way it came up was she was talking to him about me being at work and he started saying something like cereal, strawberries, blueberries,…

We think his understanding of what working was occurred when I told him that I had to go to work so we could eat.

Well, this morning as I was heading out of the house I yelled up the stairs to tell Leslie that I was leaving for work. She yelled back to me from one of the rooms to have a good day. I then heard her tell John David to go tell daddy good bye.

This was John David's response once he got to the gate and peered down at me from the top of the stairs. Mind you he was yelling at me from the top of his lungs.

John David: Bye Bye.
Me: Bye Bye booger. Daddy is going to work.
John David: Work Eggs. Get Eggs work.
Me: Daddy works on computers at the work office (vs our home office)
John David: Eggs Work Eggs.
Me: Daddy is going to the work office not the grocery store.
John David: Eggs

Realizing that it will probably take several months to clear up the confusion I headed to work laughing.

I've started a new business.

I've spent the last several months coding late at night and on weekends to get the LinkGrotto up and running. If you have a web page then please take a moment to hear about what I have going.

Business Plan:

The idea is to get really good google and yahoo placement on key word searches and by doing so we will get paid by online retailers for referring business to them. Yea the idea is nothing new, but the way we are going to do it is!

Did you know that affiliate companies that appear at the top of google and yahoo searches pay tens of thousands of dollars a year in advertisement in order to get their ranking? Bloggers have an untouched resource that has not been tapped. That resource is web space. By organizing we can in a few months time take the top position on thousands of key word searches.

To start off I'm going to focus on these key words:

• Get Gift Ideas
• Gift Baskets
• Unique Stuff
• Flowers

Once these are established we will pick others and go from there.

How do you get paid? Commissions work in two ways:

• Click percentage. Each visitor to your blog that clicks through to the LinkGrotto will be recorded. At the end of each pay-period a per-click value will be placed on all your referral clicks.
• Member percentage. As a member, you will also receive a flat percentage of LinkGrotto profit at the end of each pay-period.

I'm not going to go into all the details in this blog post but if you want more then head here to get the scoop.

no post

work... work... work... No Fun...

from work to pee pee

What a crazy week. On Monday when I got to work my boss assigned me a project and told me it had to be done by the following Monday for an acceptance push. When I took a look at what had to be done I told him that it was totally not doable. I wasn't able to get a feeling for how long the project would take because I was just barely familiar with the three applications that had to be modified and on top of that I did not know the inns and outs of the object model I was going to have to program against. All I knew was that it was a lot of work.

In spite of knowing I could not get all the work done I decided to try to get it done anyway. I even stayed at work on Thursday night until 10:30. As of the end of the day today I think I got about 1/3 or a little more of the way done. Luckily today my boss pushed back the deadline another weeks, which is nice because I had planed on working this weekend and now I get the opportunity to spend some time with the family.

It does look like I'll have another week next week like the one I did this past week. That being the case I probably will not be doing many posts next week.

Enough about work! This week John David went pee pee on the potty two times. It is amazing how a little pee pee on the potty can stir up a whole lot of different thoughts and emotions. From sadness about him growing up to selfish disappointment because I realize that it is going to be more work to get a little one to the bathroom on time than it would be to just change a diaper. But, he is in no way potty trained yet, he's just starting out. I don't guess I need to over think it right now.

Way off topic: I was kind of reluctant to share the above paragraph because for some reason this past month google has started to think our website has a lot more to do with bathrooms and diapers than it does. In the month of April I had over 500 hits from google and other search engines regarding either: diaper changes, bathrooms, potty, bathroom etiquette, and several other related things. It's strange how google pulled content from three or so posts to come up with the impression of this site. On the other hand I have gotten close to 3000 downloads and about 5000 hits on the Schnappi song over the last 2 to 3 months. Who knows maybe google thinks they are related. I hope not. ;-)

Well, it is close to midnight and I am really tiered from the long week. Later.

busy spell

I have been extremely busy at work here lately, and I have not been getting home until 7 or so, which is not conducive to blogging. I hope to get back to it by the weekend.

IE issue

In the project I have been working on since I change teams I have a SQL Stored Procedure that is run from an ASP .Net page. The stored proc takes well over ten minutes to run and some of the computers running the stored proc time out after 30 seconds of execution time. The error I get is the generic Internet Explorer ?The page cannot be displayed? error.

The issue is resolved by making a small registry change. Navigate to:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows \CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\

Once there delete the Receive Timeout Double Word Value (REG_DWORD).

 
 

 
 
 
Then relaunch IE. Unless of course you downloaded this :)

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.

corporate life

Sometimes the corporate life can just be soo odd. Between the ubiquitous ?off site? meetings and those team building activities that half the team members are embarrassed to show up to, this one takes the cake. Jon my cube neighbor forwarded me a link to the Conference Bike.

Make sure you check out the link to the movie.

tar baby

tar baby My boss?s boss was talking to me a few weeks back and referred to the project I was working on as a tar baby. I think that description is probably the best description I have heard in a long time. I don?t know if it is because of where I work or if it is just apropos to programming in general, but it is just a perfect description for those projects that get dropped in your lap, and for whatever reason you just can?t liberate yourself from.
It?s funny because now at work everyone is using the tar baby phrase to describe that project that they hate but just can?t get rid of it.

the cleaning lady

I have an issue with the cleaning lady here at work, but I just can't bring myself to talk to her about it. I normally don?t have too much of an issue speaking my mind, but for some reason I am at a stalemate with myself over the issue. You see, the lady that empties my trash also goes beyond that. From time to time she throws cups on my desk away and it is driving me nuts. I understand that the cleaning people are suppose to throw some stuff away so that ants and the like aren't attracted to the place, but tossing out the water bottles and cups that I use everyday is over the line.

I think she thinks she is doing a nice thing by cleaning up my cube, but how does she know that what she is cleaning up is trash? All that said, yesterday I walked into my cube and 2 Styrofoam cups of mine were no longer there. So I told myself that at the end of the day I was going to talk to her when she came to clean up. At 5:30 when I was on my way out of the building she was standing right by the exit door I use. Everything was just perfect for me to politely ask her to stop throwing stuff on my desk away, but I just could not make myself stop and talk to her.

I think my issue is that I don?t know how to politely ask someone to stop throwing my personal property away. It just seems so strange. If anybody knows how I should phrase it then please share.

work

Well, I have been very busy at work lately. I've been working quite a bit of overtime trying to get my first big project on my new team completed. It goes into UAT (user acceptance testing) on Tuesday. Though, it had to be finished today. It was written in c# and ASP.Net. Plus there is a large piece of SQL for SQL Server that goes along with it. I have to say I am most proud of the query. It is the largest piece of SQL I have seen. It turned out to be 1500 lines. The query was well written, :) and it is fast for its size. The project itself looks small, but it has taken me the better part of 3 months to complete. There was a lot that went into it...

Me at work Jon (a coworker) shot this picture of me a few weeks ago, and I just came across it on my desktop. I thought that there might be someone out there that would like to see it.