April 9, 1993
Dear Everyone:
Once again, the dreaded
Daylight
Savings Time snuck up on me. My
first inkling of impending disaster came when I checked the weekend
schedule for the mainframe (intending to do some work on the computer,
unless my host was scheduled to be down for routine maintenance).
Someone had added a little
reminder that the clocks would have to be set back that weekend.
Once again, I had to track down
each and every clock and appliance with a timepiece included in it both
at my place and at “Jeannie”'s. Once
again, people are telling me how I can spend time in the evening doing
things I have no need to do. Like
puttering in the garden. I don't
have a garden. I have exactly one
(1) live plant. Needless to say,
it was a gift. And, it's at my
office.
We're still getting a little bit of rain here in California.
It keeps taking people by
surprise. For one thing, they're
not really used to the concept of water falling out of the sky.
It's so…wet; and
inconvenient. They've only been
tolerating it because it was the only way anybody could see to get over
the drought. Now, when it rains,
people say, "What, again?
But the drought’s
over!"
It's no use telling Californians that "April showers bring May flowers."
Their response is: "Flowers??! The flowers come
up in February. What's May got to
do with anything?"
This is been a busy week, Project-wise.
There's the Destruction Approval Project:
Everyone and his dog has been feverishly thinking up roadblocks
to throw in our way. Nevertheless,
with the theme from
The Terminator
playing in our heads, we're determinedly rolling along like
Arnold
Schwarzenegger. Nothing's
going to stop us from going forward; unless, of course, CRMIS has a
stroke on us. In which case,
"We'll be back."
Then there's the BUUS Project. No,
it doesn't stand for "Better Understanding of Unicorns Society".
It stands for "Boxes Using
Unmatched Series". And now you
know as much as you did before. Sometimes,
for reasons best left to the professionals, Boxes can get attached to
Series that don't belong to the Owner of the Box.
These unfortunate attachments can
cause quite a social problem in CRMIS. Who
has the strongest moral right and/or responsibility towards these errant
Boxes: The guy who owns the Box,
or the guy who owns the Series?
That's what we’re trying to find out with this Project.
Step One was to find out who all
the players are. “Miranda” did
that. Step Two is to try to get
printouts of all the Owners and Boxes and Series and put them together
in a way that makes sense, so that the Owners can see the errors of
their Boxes’ ways.
This means running hundreds
of reports. CRMIS doesn't like
running hundreds of reports. Frankly,
CRMIS doesn't like running more than 30 reports in a night.
I determined this by counting the
number of reports that didn't run after the first night.
Next, there's the “Tiddly” Department Ad Hoc Reports Project.
These "little" projects usually
start with an innocent phone call. Someone
in “Tiddly” wants a special report that isn't available among the
standard (or "canned") reports. It's
part of my job to try and create the report in a part of CRMIS called
"Ad Hocs". These reports are
exceptionally tricky because, not only does the computer do
exactly what you tell it to
do (knowing full well that that isn't what you
want), but it also doesn't
always let you know what the fields really are.
Sometimes the label on a field
can be a bit ambiguous, like "Case". Does
that mean Case Hold, a 3-character field?
Or does it mean that a box has a "flag" on it (a 1-character
field) to indicate that one of any number of cases is attached to the
box?
Run the report and wait to see what you get:
Either "no data found", or…a
report the size of a
Volkswagen.
Obviously, the way to avoid these
problems is to stop answering the phone.
Of course, none of these critically vital Projects will stop me from taking next Monday as a well-deserved Vacation Day.
Love, as always,
Pete
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