Rick's Journal

Snow.  Ugh.  Must have been 12 inches out there and the plows had left a thick, icy, heavy layer at the top of our driveway, which is a miserable hill, as any of you who have seen it can attest.  It took me a couple of hours to clear the top near the street and I was about ready to fall over after.  Fortunately, the guy who plows our driveway had come right before the storm finished, so the rest of the driveway wasn't too bad, except for around Monique's car.  Getting her out yesterday was not fun.

Of course, the reason I had to get her out was so she could leave me for a week to travel for work.  :-(

On the bright side, I did some 7V plot work this weekend that was a lot of fun.  I hope the players who "benefit" from it enjoy playing with it as much as I did writing it.  i don't get excited about plot writing often.  It's not really my forte.

Oh hey, speaking of 7V, we had a couple of slots open up, so if you were thinking of playing the weekend of January 28, go for it.

The highlight of my weekend was learning and implementing some Excel manipulation through Access VBA code.  That's some interesting stuff right there, at least to me.

Monique has a problem at work.  She's due to roll out a new program to one of the divisions she works with this week in MD.  This is the workflow database that I worked on for a year and a half until this past January when they hired a full time developer.  He's done a great job, but due to medical reasons he missed a fair amount of time just recently and some of the reporting needs aren't what they need to be for this release.  So Monique asked me to come in this morning and help out on that front.

So I got up at 5:00 this morning and we came in to work on it.  Unfortunately, it's now 10:40 and Frank is still not here and not answering phone or email.  We're hoping he's well.  Also unfortunately, it means I've been sitting here for the past few hours unable to do anything productive since I can't get to the back side of the database to do any development work.

The good thing is that I've been working on some 7 Virtues stuff, so it's not a total loss, but still, 5:00 on a Saturday.  And Monique won't have what she needs by Monday morning.  *sigh*

Off to Martha's Vineyard this afternoon.  We're leaving at noontime today for tomorrow's wedding.  Should be fun.

I worked a lot this weekend on this database project for United Health.  I was there until about 8:00 Saturday night and about 6:30 last night.  I lost a good 6 hours to what appeared to be a design flaw.  Turned out it was crud in the sample data that should never happen in real life.  The bright side is that there's now all sorts of error trapping for unlikely errors.  *sigh.  The down side is that I wanted that project done this weekend and now I still have a few hours to go.

Are you kidding?  No way!.   It's been done by everyone else.  I want to write about something really exciting, like the weekend I just had.

I drove down Friday night to Virginia.  It took me about 6 1/2 hours, which is actually pretty good.  I left work early, so I was down there by 9:00.  I spent about an hour with Monique, apologized a lot, and then we went to bed.  Saturday morning, we were up at 5:00 to bring her sister and my cousin to the airport.  We went to an IHOP with them for breakfast.  Sadly, the heat was out in the place and by the time we finished eating our breakfast, the food and the coffee were cold.  After dropping them off at the airport, we went back to their house, where Monique decided to go back to bed.  This struck me as a good time to go on over to Steve's house.

I stopped at the local grocery store and picked up a whole bunch of snacks, a fruit tray and a veggie tray, and some blueberry muffins.  i figured nothing would go to waste and I was correct.  I was hoping to find a Dunkin Donuts on my way over, but there don't seem to be many in VA.  So sad.  As it turns out, I went within about 50 feet of one and didn't know it because it was facing out away from the very plaza I was shopping in.  *sigh*

Saturday consisted of Erin making breakfast for everybody (I felt like a hobbit having second breakfast) and much hanging out with cool people.  Nikki did both lunch and dinner for everybody.  Saturday night, we got in costume (mostly) and did a several hour in-game session as our Madrigal characters.  I caught up on Eurvein stuff with Petros and convinced Grum's Company to enter an entertainment competition.  I had a fabulous discussion with Valentine.  She actually managed to surprise me, both IG and OOG.  Most amusing.

Sunday was pretty much a mirror image of Saturday, though Cindy and Hope and Josh did manage to overcome inertia and lethargy.  They got eight of us out hiking the trails of one of the fine VA parks.  It was wonderful and I'm really glad we got out and about.  It was an invigoration walk through a beautiful LARP mod site (well, it should be anyway) where I enjoyed the conversation, exercise and fresh air.

Shortly after getting back, I had to say my farewells and head back to Monique.  Josh came with me and the three of us went out to dinner at the Cheesecake Factory.  It was a wonderful meal, good food, great company.  I don't spend nearly enough time with Josh and as predicted, much of the conversation was about children, his and mine.  Of course, mine are the same age as half the people I hung out with this weekend and his are barely older than my grandchildren, but it gave us common ground. 

I tried to get Monique to go in and see people when we brought Josh back, but she was really tired and just wanted more crash time.  We went back to her sister's house where she worked on finishing the third book in a trilogy she started that weekend.  i worked on the database on my laptop.  We listened to his and hers iPods.  It was so romantic.  :-p

Monday morning we headed over to her other sister's to pick up the flowers she forgot there on Friday.  We chatted for a while and I played catch and Connect Four with my nephew.  He won one.  I won one.  He didn't want to play a tie breaker.  Monique and I then headed up to Frederick MD where Monique is spending the rest of the week for work.   I got her luggage in the hotel for her and we watched a movie before dinner, after which I headed home.

I listened to an audio book most of the way, The Time Travleler's Wife.  I got a little over halfway through it.  It's an excellent book so far and I highly recommend it.  However, if you read it and don't like the second half or the ending, don't blame me.  I'm only recommending the first half so far.

Work today would totally ruin this post about a fine weekend, so I'll skip it for now.

The weekend was both fairly enjoyable and productive, an unusual combination.

Friday was a day off from Marlin.  They very unexpectedly gave us the day off, making for a long weekend.  I went into United Health Care with Monique and worked with her new db designer answering a lot of his questions for the aspects of this project that he is taking over.  Then I spent the rest of the day working on my part of the db.  I've got to say, I LOVE my new laptop.  This thing just flies, no matter how much stuff I have open.  It really boosted my productivity.

Saturday, Monique and I went into her work again.  While I was working on the database I was also loading some of my CD collection onto my computer to get on my new iPod.  It demonstrated again how much I love my new laptop.  I had only loaded a couple CDs on my old computer and every time I was doing it, the CPU was completely maxed out and I couldn't do anything else.  The new laptop not only didn't break a sweat, but also let me have several instances of Access and SQL server open while it was doing it.  Just out of curiosity I watched the task manager for a bit while I was working and never saw it go over 70%.  Wheeeee!  I know, I'm sounding like a geek.  Just let me enjoy it.

I hit a huge snag Saturday that really screwed me over, cost me several hours.  I'm going geek again.  Fair warning.  I have a query that needs to select only the first record that meets the criteria.  This is very easy.  There's a SQL statement that starts out with "SELECT TOP x" where x = the number of records you want.  In my case, I put a one there and SQL picks the first record.  Access however picked 2 records, which totally messed me up.  Of course, it only started displaying this stupid behavior when I started doing larger data sampling, so it I had to go way back to the beginning of things I'd worked on Friday to change things.  I spent hours trying to fix this unexpected problem and it set me way back.  There were times I wanted to cry.  It was so frustrating.  So much wasted time.

Sunday, we took down all the Christmas decorations and (mostly) cleaned the house before going back to more database work.  I figured out my problem from the previous day and made a bit more progress, but still failed to meet my deliverable goal for turning it over to Frank (the db developer at UHC). 

Flute choir rehearsal was ok.  We have a new member.  She is an excellent player.  We had several of our regular members out, so we were still a little thin on numbers.  And early on in the rehearsal, my head cork popped out of my bass flute.  Fortunately, Cathi, the new member had a bass flute and let me use it for the rest of the rehearsal.  I can see why she's not fond of it and doesn't want to play it herself.  The low octave is horribly unresponsive.  I guess I'm just going to have to get mine fixed quickly.  I think it's going to be time for a new one some time this year.  *sigh*

Not a bad weekend as weekends have been going lately.  Saturday morning Monique and I went into her work to spend the day with her new programmer, Frank.  I spent time showing him my methodologies and giving him overviews of the three projects I've done there so that he can take over on them.

The one that is currently in progress will be completed by the two of us in tandem and hopefully by the end of January I will have that monkey totally off my back, only giving occasional advice and consultation.

Saturday night, after dropping Monique off at home, I headed up to New Haven for the annual Fantasy of Lights to raise money for Easter Seals.  I ended up getting there a little late.  I hate being late for anything.  On top of that my sinuses were bugging me a lot, so I started into it not feeling all that nifty.  I suited up with the whole reindeer garb and the big gaudy Rudolph hat with the bright blinking nose and antlers.  In spite of feeling a little under the weather, I quickly got into the spirit and was soon greeting people with my usual holiday flair.  The interactions with the people are just loads of fun and I look forward to this every year.  Unfortunately, by 8:30 I was totally wiped out and I left early.  On the bright side, it was the busiest year I can remember to date in 7 or 8 years of doing this, so it was a good night for Easter Seals.

Sunday we spent most of the day working around the house, cleaning, decorating the tree, laundry, followed by a football game (Yay!) and a really good flute choir rehearsal.  We had a new member last night.  She hasn't played in two years, but she was enthusiastic and she has her own bass flute, which she thinks she'll skip playing for a while so she can get her C flute back in shape.  We finished preparing all of our Christmas music for the Ronald McDonald House Trees of Hope fund raise that we'll be playing at next Saturday.

I planned on working on Monique's database project all weekend.  How did that go, you might ask?

Saturday, we had a long, leisurely breakfast and talked about a fairly complex, scope creeping aspect of the project for a rather long time.  Then when we went upstairs to work, I had issues with virtual memory and performance that have been plaguing me for a while.  I am in dire need of a new PC.  This one is 5 years old now and maxed out on important things like memory.  Let's just say the rest of my day went into making my machine work better in the hopes that  Sunday it would work better for me.

Chris and Amy asked Monique to watch Elijah Saturday night so they could go out.  We decided to just watch a movie after dinner before going back to work.  Yeah, that didn't work so well either.  We watched 3 movies.  Guess how much work got done?  However, it was relaxing and a nice change of pace.

Sunday, as we were contemplating getting out of bed to do work, we started talking about Monique's sister Lise, who has been in the hospital for a couple of days up in New London CT, about an hour and a half away.  I asked her if we were going to go visit her.  It led to a talk of priorities and how ours are a little out of whack, since we've put work over family.  Guess where we went?  If you guessed the hospital, you're right.  We got home right around 6:00.  Monique was really tired and laid down for a nap.  I decided to read my emails, catch up on LJ, fun stuff like that while she napped.  About 7:30, she wasn't awake, I was tired, I went to bed.  Guess how much work got done?  That's right, essentially none.

However, for some reason, I'm feeling pretty darned refreshed this morning!  :-)

Friday night I was at work until midnight.  My successor's successor for the NERO update position (Perdue), came down to Marlin for training.  Unfortunately, he was 2 to 2 1/2 hours later than he was supposed to be.  Then we had database and computer problems so we got off to a slow start.  I figure we got about 1/3 of the way through everything he needs to know.  We'll get together again before an event to go through pre-event procedures.  The good news is that you generally only have to tell him something once.  He also took a copy of the procedures manual I created for my successor.

Saturday I spent some time hunting down the problems with the character database and talking Perdue through the fix on that.  I hate phone support. 

And I finally managed to complete and post my NERO weekend write-up.  I've only been writing it in little pieces for two weeks now.

Monique had asked me for information about projected growth rates on the database I'm designing for her.  I simulated it by adding several thousand records in 1000 chunk increments and monitoring the size of the database.  This took several hours to design the test data, emulate the actual import and do the measurements.  Monique was frustrated with this use of time, but I couldn't come up with a better way to give her the numbers.

Sunday was almost entirely spent on database design (except for a quick trip right after breakfast for us to get haircuts).  The db work was pretty fruitful and I'm happy with the actual progress I made on it this time.  Monique had a non-work project keeping her busy, so while we were together in the same room a lot, we weren't distracting each other from our projects because they weren't related.

We finished off the weekend with a couple episodes of BG.  We're about 2/3 of the way through season 3.

Very strange.  I usually have no trouble sleeping.  Considering how little I get, that's no surprise.  

This morning, I woke up at 3:00 and couldn't get back to sleep, so I got up and for the past hour and a half have been working on a database project for UHC.