August 16, 1991
Dear Everyone:
“Jeannie's” new address:
XXX J Wood
XXX St. Matthew Pl., #103
Concord, CA 94518
Today is Moving Day for “Jeannie”.
Actually, it's Moving
Week as she's been boxing
"little" things and taking them over to her new place all this week.
But today the movers arrive to
carry the quote big stuff unquote. She's hired your basic, generic
“two-man-and-a-truck” although, for all I know, that could be the actual
name of the company.
Last night, I helped her take apart the stereo and
move the pieces to the hall closet of the new place.
And this morning she planned to
take her cat to stay at my place while the movers are in-and-out.
She also got pet doors to be
installed in the patio and garage doors.
The people who are selling the place to her even offered to
install the patio door for her, since they have to replace the existing
screens anyway.
All this makes for a very busy day for her.
And, since the movers
move beds, they don't make
them up, she's coming over to my place to spend the night.
I haven't actually timed it, but
I'm betting that her new place is less than 5 minutes by car from mine.
Well “Jeannie's” been lugging “small” things back
and forth, I've been spending my evenings reading about Paradox®.
This is a database management
software that I've had on my PC for months, but which I never have time
to learn to use. In theory, it
can do wonderful things for me, if only I could learn to talk to it.
It can, for instance, allow me to set up tables and
link them together. So I could do
a query on a particular Owner Code in the Destruction Table (all batches
belonging to a particular owner), then have Paradox go look at another
table and pull up the owner's name, then look at
another table and give me the
name, address and phone number of the person to contact.
Since we have thousands of owner
codes and hundreds of contacts to keep track of, this could be quite
useful.
It could even run a list of all the delinquent
Destruction Batches, linked tables and find the contacts, and produce a
mailing list of people to send a “cattle prod” letter to remind them
that they haven't done their Destruction Reviews yet.
This alone could save many hours
of time for me and other people.
If only I could find the time to learn how to use
it. So, I finally decided the
only thing to do was to take the User Guide home with me each night and
read it on the BART train and in the evenings after I finish with my
chores.
If you ever need a cure for insomnia, I could
recommend the Paradox User Guide. It'll
put you to sleep in next to no time. The
only problem is: I keep trying to
program things in my sleep. The
other morning, I woke up keying things on my “PC" only to discover that
that was my clock radio.
Seriously, I have picked up on a lot and I'm going
to put it to the test tomorrow when I'll come into the office and spend
the whole day, uninterrupted by pesky things like regular work, and try
building tables and running reports and such.
It should be interesting.
In other news…
Those who pay attention to such things know that
Masterpiece
Theatre is celebrating its 20th anniversary by rerunning some of
its most popular old programs. One
of these is
I
Claudius, the story of the first four Roman emperors as seen
through the eyes of the fourth, Claudius.
Well!
Some people have to wait 13 weeks
to see the complete series, but not those of us in the Bay Area. KTEH,
the San Jose public television station, decided instead to run the first
seven episodes back-to-back a week ago last Sunday, from the beginning
on through until the death of Livia. This
was great fun and made following who all these people were easier,
because you didn't have a week in which to forget who was what and
heaven help you if you missed an episode.
Little did we know, however, what those devils the
KTEH were really up to. Last Sunday,
having got all of us hooked, they trotted out the last six episodes
complete with (shudder!) the dreaded pledge breaks.
Every episode ended with about
ten minutes of gimmee, gimmee, gimmee. On
the plus side, pledge breaks do
give you an opportunity to run to the bathroom, juggle the laundry and
take out the garbage. On the
other hand, they're a pain to have to sit through.
And
The Lion in Winter
won't cut it anymore. That one’s
been used so many times that some young people have never seen it
without pledge breaks.
They think the Kings of England
and France are supposed to
stop their verbal dueling so that announcers can peddle paperback
editions for $40.00.
However, the little devils may have outfoxed
themselves this time. Part way
through the day, they got a flood of angry calls from irate people who
announced that not only were they not going
to give KTEH any money, but they were going to do their level best to
have the programming director fired at the very least!
You see, there is a reason why
Masterpiece Theatre is usually
shown on Sunday nights, after the kiddies have been put to bed.
Let's face it: the producers of
I Claudius probably never
intended “The Caligula Years” to be broadcast at lunch time on a Sunday
afternoon when the little darlings could be expected to be up and about.
FYI, I have the entire series (13 episodes),
complete with pledge breaks, on VHS tape if anyone is interested in
borrowing it.
Love, as always,
Pete
PS. No, you can't borrow just the Caligula years.
P.
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