Category: Work

stuff about work

Vox Crossposter v0.3 and work stuff

So I spent about [insert very large number here] hours working on my plugin yesterday because someone told me that it wasn’t working for them! “That cannot be true” I thought. So I emailed (many, many times) and messaged the blogger attempting to use my plugin and after those many hours, I fixed it! Thanks in large part to her sticking with me and my plugin and not throwing in the towel. So I dub the 0.3 version of the Vox Crossposter the LuAnn version!

What was the problem you ask? Well it seems that you don’t need to include all of the normal html tags in an html email that make up a typical html page: html, head, body, and the ending tags for them. I could swear I read somewhere that you were supposed to do that. Well, you don’t! Anyway, having all those tags worked for me and everyone else I have heard from that uses the plugin except for LuAnn.

So what do I get for my hours of coding and debugging? More fan mail! This is my second piece of fanmail. Here is my post regarding my first piece of fan mail, just in case you haven’t been paying attention (or didn’t care).

On another front, I’m busy waiting for a copy of a file to be made (and it is taking forever!). Who would have thunk that it would take several hours for 200 million records to be copied?! Not me! Here’s hoping that I never screw up like that again!

Vox Crossposter v0.3 and work stuff

So I spent about [insert very large number here] hours working on my plugin yesterday because someone told me that it wasn’t working for them! “That cannot be true” I thought. So I emailed (many, many times) and messaged the blogger attempting to use my plugin and after those many hours, I fixed it! Thanks in large part to her sticking with me and my plugin and not throwing in the towel. So I dub the 0.3 version of the Vox Crossposter the LuAnn version!

What was the problem you ask? Well it seems that you don’t need to include all of the normal html tags in an html email that make up a typical html page: html, head, body, and the ending tags for them. I could swear I read somewhere that you were supposed to do that. Well, you don’t! Anyway, having all those tags worked for me and everyone else I have heard from that uses the plugin except for LuAnn.

So what do I get for my hours of coding and debugging? More fan mail! This is my second piece of fanmail. Here is my post regarding my first piece of fan mail, just in case you haven’t been paying attention (or didn’t care).

On another front, I’m busy waiting for a copy of a file to be made (and it is taking forever!). Who would have thunk that it would take several hours for 200 million records to be copied?! Not me! Here’s hoping that I never screw up like that again!

Oh Shit!

So, uh, there are a lot of cuss (curse, swear, four-letter) words in this post. I apologize in advance.

So I had one of those oh shit moments that you have when you f*ck up and replace some of the production tables (files for the Lansa crowd; I never understood why Lansa insisted on their database TABLES being called files…they aren’t files pig fukkers, they are TABLES…ya damn idiot).

Whoa! Where’d that come from?! Ok, back to my point. I totally fucked up. Shit, I said fuck. When I looked down at my screen and saw that I was manipulating the production DB, a giant wave of warmth went over my head, down my body and stopped at the pit of my stomach. You know that feeling you get when your stomach just isn’t feeling right? There’s a whole lotta gurglin goin on in there? That’s how I felt at that moment, minus the gurgling, I just had that “oh now that’s just not good, not good at all” feeling. You know the one.

Ha! That was forced, I’m not lauging nor am I in a haha fucking mood; my bad. It is funny amusing how some words can seemingly minimize a very drastic circumstance. I said “manipulating the production DB” like I changed a few records (tuples, rows, whatever) in there when that simply was not the case. I replaced three major files in the system with backups from the day before. No big deal you say?! Bullshit. You didn’t do it; it was all me baby!

So I call my buddy and say “hey dude, restore this file from the backup from last night after all of the important stuff ran”. He says “Ok” and then I start to think “wow, maybe this wasn’t so bad after all…where’d that silver lining come from?” Then I get home and get a not so welcome phone call from my earlier buddy: “Hey, um, the file you wanted restored has zero records in it. Is that what you expected?” Fuck me. No! That is not what I expected. Can you recount them and make sure there are zero there?!

Well sunuvabitch. So if all the important stuff ran last night and this backup is from after that point, then there was just no data in the file right? Whatever, I can deal with that. That file wasn’t THAT important, just one of those nice-to-have kinda things. Well then I start thinking (why did you just say uh oh?). I start thinking about this other file that I replaced.

Dammit, that will need to be restored as well. Ok, no biggie; we still have the backup tape on-site. So I restore that file. It takes about 2 hours. Then I look at the file that was restored and it has the exact same record count as the fucking file from the day before. So what does that tell me? That the backup time I was told was wrong and must’ve happened before the important stuff ran.

So now here I am. It is 11 pm. I’m not tired and am worried sick. I’ve had this shitty acid reflux feeling/taste in my throat since I discovered I was playing with production data at 3:30 this afternoon. The important stuff eluded to earlier is now running again (should be anyway; I have not checked) for today (it’s an everyday thing). I need to sleep so I can wake up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and ready for my morning of “hey, can someone help me? I’m a moron/idiot”.

So anyway, it is now that time to check and see what’s up in production right now. Time to worry more. Time to go to bed and just lay there till my alarm goes off at 4:15.

Happy happy joy joy. Anybody remember Ren and Stimpy? They were awesome.

Vacation

My vacation starts in 52 days!  We booked our cruise a while ago and last night we used our rewards points to “purchase” our plane tickets to Boston.  50,000 rewards points at $1 a point and that equals….anyone?   $50,000 plane tickets!  I think we overpaid.  It’s amusing to me how that works out.

But on a who cares how much it actually cost note, I am ready for a vacation.  A few days ago, Crystal asked me if I ever left.  “You’re here before I get here and here when I leave”.  I’ve been working a lot of 12 hour days lately and I’m ready for my first  vacation in a lot of years.  I don’t think I’ve had a real vacation since I was in high school.  I’m sure I’ll spend the first few days wondering about my crap stuff here.  Then I’ll get over it and drink myself stupid for a bit and have a ton of fun.

Work work vs. non-work work

Ok, I’m having kind of an off day today. I’m pretty torn between doing my job in which I have to look at gnarly OS/400 screens like the one below and working on my website(s), also pictured below.

I should be able to do web stuff so I can feel productive at work AND get to work on pretty web stuff (and pad my resume at the same time).

Blogged with Flock

Current work ramblings

My two big projects are going to make me gray. The Damage Claims (DC) stuff is easy enough but the problem with it are that there are a bunch of little gotchas all over it. DC is a relatively new process so there is zero chance that I’m going to break anything that is currently working in production.

My biggest issue is the replacement of the revenue file. DC is my stuff and I’m sure I’ll be branded as the “DC guy” since I wrote it from the beginning. I’ve been so busy trying to fix the “small” DC issues that I’ve been doing shitty analysis for the replacement of the revenue file. Last night I worked on stuff for about 3 hours after Aaron went to bed and got here at 6:20 this morning so that I could focus on the revenue file thing and hopefully put that to bed. It actually isn’t a tough change, it’s just sitting down and identifying everywhere that needs to be changed.

Couple those two projects with my new guarantee letter/renewal billing responsibilities, month end reporting, (poorly performed) basketball, a new workout regime (low weight, much higher reps) PLUS a website idea that I just can’t seem to stop thinking about (peoplearray.com) and you’ve got one insomniatic, stressed out kid (well, kid in as much as a 26 year old can be considered a kid).

Ugh, I can’t wait until the first week in September when Meri and I get on a big ass ship and float around some islands (Aaron-less) for a week. I’m not sure if being without Aaron for a week is a good or a bad thing. Probably better for Meri and more difficult for me since she is around him about 24 hours a day.

IE7 Beta 2 and FF 1.5.0.3

I just tried the peoplearray.com trial index (now with more web2.0!) :) with IE7 Beta2 at home and it actually looks pretty good. The XML that is being read is different than that of FF. In FF, there are 21 child nodes in the XML, roughly half are null and all values are null but in IE7, it is reading the nodes that I would expect it to read but their values are still being read as null. I’ve got some more web surfing to do to figure that one out.

Work bitching…

Holy sheep shit Batman! I’ve got too many projects…not that I’m complaining…a lot… ;)

Anyway, I’ve got some price increase activity, some damage claim bugs, splitting the PT for the eventual deletion of the GLGLE and GLGLX tables (to be replaced with the newer, fancier (and shinier) GLGLI and GLGLO tables), not to mention bugs in my contact management website (a new user can’t even create an account!) that I want to fix asap because that’s my pet project.

Ugh. Now I’m getting pressure to move this stuff in tonight since there will already be stuff moved in and big table recompiles and it would make someone’s job easier…

I’m also waiting on my other monitor! How long do I have to wait for that thing?! I’m totally ready for that! We should all have dual screens. Did I mention that the new mouse I got for work (Logitech LX7) kicks a lot of ass?

EDIT: ok, I just got my second monitor! “so why aren’t you busy setting up your new rad work PC pete?” Well I’m glad you asked/thought that question… Whoever ordered my monitor *cough*Thomas*cough* didn’t order me a video card! WTF! So I have my second monitor at my desk…in its pretty brown cardboard box just screaming to be used but can I use it?! NOOOOOOOOO, not without a second video card I can’t! I hope i get one soon…very soon. *sad face* :(

Website (lack of) update

I haven’t been able to do any new *major* development/re-development since Sunday when Meri and Aaron got back. I know there is a ton to do and are a few cool js frameworks I want to implement/try out. I just can’t find the time!

I knew when they got back that my nights of staying up till midnight or 2 am to work on the site were gone but I figured I would be able to work on some of this stuff during my downtime at work.

Between the Renewal processing, Month End reporting, converting the General Ledger file from A to B (there’s a lot of research involved) and help test the Damage Claim process in DQA, I can’t even work on little things at work! I need like 10 more hours in every day so I can work on my newest obsession. Oh well. I’ll do what I can, when I can.

Misty invited Meri, Aaron and I to come over and have dinner and then Barry and I could geek out on some PHP coding stuff and we’re definitely interested. That needs to happen soon. Meri told me to invite Barry, Misty and Malia over for Aaron’s birthday party this Saturday and then after that was over, they could stay for dinner and Barry and I could do our geeky PHP talking thing. I have “borrowed” at least 2 ideas from Barry, unbeknownst to him: logging visitors and creating a “dev” environment…so that I don’t continue to break the site with my latest ideas. ;)

I am DONE with the Damage Claim project!

Well the heavy development is now complete! I found one minor issue that will take me all of about 5 minutes to fix but other than that, it’s complete. Now comes the hard part for this project…TESTING. Crystal’s gonna have fun testing that out.

…

I’ve fixed the minor issue and all is done. Now I get to check it into DQA and wait for the world to cave in next week when testing begins.