Month: July 2004

Archiving

ssegraves

I have almost completely finished the archiving feature that I have been working on for a while now. It should be up and running by tonight or tomorrow. My next goal is to do a redesign of the database structure and see if I can tweak to fit my needs a little more.

I am dissappointed because my host does not allow InnoDB table types and I don’t want to use PostgreSQL to do my work. Why InnoDB you ask? I want to be able to use true foreign keys to cascade a table when a record is deleted in another. With MyISAM I have to manage the deletion of records through PHP which is cumbersome and from a systems design point of view, flat out wrong.

Truck Fixed

ssegraves

Well, the truck is fixed and quiet frankly I think it was something that I could have done myself (or had someone else do) for a lot cheaper. The cost for the work was 3x the cost of the part. Kind of depressing isn’t it?

Tonight I am compiling a list of candidates for work PC’s to take in tomorrow so that my bosses can make a decision. My budget is $2,000 and they would really like a nice monitor that would last a long time. If you have any suggestions for a programming machine, e-mail me at ssegraves [at] gmail dot com.

Truck problems, again

ssegraves

Driving to the store on Saturday I noticed that the shifting mechanism did not line up with the gear that the transmission was in. So when it looked like the truck was in reverse it was really parked. I had this problem fixed not too long ago (February to be exact) and I took it back to the people who did the work originally, Gene Messer Ford.

While I was waiting on them to fill out some paperwork I had 3 different employees give me suggestions on other service I could do to my truck from an oil change to an injection cleaning. When they said I needed an oil change I just gave him a funny look and said “I just changed it about 2 months ago” so he proceeded to show me the color of the oil in my truck, it was brown. He showed me a sample of what it should look like, clear. Uhh, I don’t know what kind of car this guy was driving but I don’t know of any oil in any ones car that’s clear.

Stop trying to sell me stuff I don’t really need and just fix my car. It’s that simple.

Where I stand

ssegraves

Someone asked me today exactly where I stand on the upcoming election. I responded by saying that there were certain things with both candidates that I did not support and there were certain things I did. The breaker right now is the fact that John Kerry cannot shoot straight with the public, at all. He doesn’t lie because he doesn’t know which lie to tell.

I do support Kerry’s stance on sending jobs overseas. I feel that Bush could have kept jobs here and allowed the economy to grow naturally. To be honest though I do not really support either candidate’s tax proposals. Neither of them will pan out to get the job done, all they will do is make one side of the spectrum mad at the other.

Gay marriage? I personally am not a supporter of gay marriage but I also understand the seperation of Church and State. I feel that it is no right of the government to ban a church from marrying gay couples but I also feel that the government cannot force a church to marry them if the church does not support it.

That’s pretty much where I stand. I support the war in Iraq because I feel that something should have been done about Saddam during the Clinton administration when Hussein blatantly defied the U.N. and its inspectors. Clinton had the power then, but he blinked and faltered.

Cameras

ssegraves

Talking with some photography students and a coworker I have come under the impression that the Canon AE-1 is arguably one of the best cameras ever made. From ease of use to the quality in which the pictures are taken, the AE-1 is at the top of the list.

Since it is an older model I have been searching Ebay for people selling their used ones. I have come across a lot for sale but I am somewhat unwilling to commit to one. Do I go digital? Or do I use a tried and true method for taking pictures?

In the market

ssegraves

I am looking for two PC’s now, one to replace my current one and one for work. I am looking into getting a new workstation for programming at work, my bosses have told me that the current one just isn’t cutting it.

At home I just need a new PC because mine doesn’t have any “umph”. I still want a laptop but I would also like a desktop, now I just need to figure out exactly what I want. I don’t need the most high-end machine out there but it would be great to get something decent that would be upgradeable in the future (my current computer isn’t very upgradeable).

So I will be spending my free time looking up prices and specs on new computers.

Phone meetings

ssegraves

Just for the record, I really do not enjoy phone meetings. I don’t enjoy long phone conversations for that matter, unless it’s someone I really want to talk to.

This morning was a meeting with another client on the east coast who we have been doing some programming for. He’s a smart guy but he doesn’t understand the concept of being billed for new development and fixing bugs. If there’s a bug in the work we have done for him, we fix it, no problem. However, when he wants a feature completely changed or something new added that means billable hours.

I am not sure if he understands that we cannot make exceptions for him and bend the rules, so I basically had to stop him and tell him that the things he was asking for were all billable. That cleared the air right away and the rest of the phone conversations went over well.

I am still making decisions as to how I want to get music in the future. I am torn between iTunes because of its ease of use and just buying music at the store and ripping it. The AAC format that Apple has decided to encode their music in is not compatible with WinAmp (my music player of choice) and that is a huge downside. WinAmp too has its own share of downfalls. You can no longer rip CDs to MP3 format without paying WinAmp $14.95, a small amount of money, but it still defeats the purpose.

So lately I have been messing with different rippers and encoders to see which one I like best. I’ll let you all know when I make a decision.

Light show

ssegraves

We are in for another one of God’s light shows tonight. There is a storm headed this way from just south of Amarillo and from here (about 120 miles away) you can see most of it.

It is amazing to see huge storm clouds lit up by lightning at night. You see nothing and then a bolt of lightning and you see a huge mass of a cloud. If I had a digital camera I would take some pictures and share them.

Development at work is going very well. Tomorrow we should finish up our work on one aspect of the project and we will start discussing the way to move forward to port our work to the other sub-companies of this bank. We are trying our best to keep the sites molded together on the front and in the database aspect. My co-worker (Andrew) is a really good database designer and has done a spectacular job laying out the current database so all that lays ahead is planning to extend the database to even more companies. Should go well but we’ll see.