Spanked

Violation of PRIMARY KEY constraint 'PK_tblDealerZips'. Cannot insert duplicate key in object 'tblDealerZips'.


SQL server just spanked me. Hard. What an amateur I am.

Quote of the Day

In every horror movie about inbred freaks there's always one mostly normal family member who is too scared or too helpless to get away and live a normal life.

I feel like that family member

Kidney Shaped

One of the nice things about working for a company with the mental illness of hoarding, is that I was able to find this strange table in an empty office that is perfect for my new coffee maker.

A Lesson for You Kids

If you look at Facebook while at work, you could possibly get kicked out of your office for "violating a trust."

All those smoke breaks you've never taken, the lunch breaks you skipped to finish The Project, the time spent at home on the VPN...ah, well. A warning would have been nice.

Now I've got to cozy up near the Troll Doll. Better dust off those headphones and put on my best surlyface. Come on, economy!! You can do it!

Spaceman and Troll Doll

Stay tuned.

Swamped

I am completely swamped at work. I've spent the last month and a half completely dismantling the interface of our CRM and I have to have it released to production by Monday. Missing three days last week didn't help.

Stalking

We had another interview today. I wanted to ask her if her neighbor's 1972 Camaro was for sale, but I didn't.

View Larger Map

Looking for a Few Good Developer

We're trying to hire a new .NET Developer. Most of the resumes we've received have been less than inspiring. The interviews, save one, have been, well, awful. I need one of you wicked awesome programmers that I've worked with in the past ten years to make a life changing decision and move down here, over here, up here, and take this job.

In the spirit of 1997 here's a short FAQ:

Why would I want to work with you, when all you do is complain about your various jobs and your coworkers?

First of all, if you are reading this, then you are not one of the people I have ever complained about. Second, this is a blog and I play it up a little for dramatic effect. Third, the number of actual individual people that I complain about I can count on one hand. Not bad for a professional career nearly spanning three decades (hehe, I love how that sounds).

Why would I want to move to Richmond? You always complain about your white trash neighbors. That doesn't seem too appealing.

Well, I'm sure you made better financial choices in your twenties than I did, enabling you to buy a house in a redneck free zone. Of which there are plenty.

I don't particularly like you. I mean we worked together well enough, but I don't know if I want you to be, you know, the only person in a strange city that I know.

Ouch. That hurts. I promise not to fraternize with you outside work after I give you an initial tour of the city. Ok?

Office Space

I've had some cool offices and some decidedly uncool cubicles, but my new space, a reclaimed dumping ground, is the best so far.

The Golden Hoard

You've heard of the show Hoarders on A&E? I think they could do an office version. Sorry for the poor quality of some of them. I was using the camera phone. There's actually a lot more, but it's in locked rooms so that visitors can't see.

Access Denied

I ate a ton of pistachios last night, so my right index finger is a little chewed up from opening the shells, which is causing my fingerprint authentication doohickey on my computer some trouble.

Simple, Really

I liken my current project at work to changing an outlet because someone wants white instead of beige.

First I turn off the power because otherwise messing around in there will get me hurt. This causes anxiety to others because they have things to do and they want to know how long the power will be off. A reasonable request and the answer is 'not long, it's easy.'

Once I get the cover off of the outlet I realize that the outlet box is broken and the only thing that's been holding the outlet in place is paint and some spackle. I have to do the job right. If not for the satisfaction of doing the job correctly, then simply for safety's sake. Nobody will see it, the little devil on my left shoulder says, but I will know it's there, I explain.

I go about cutting the nails that attach the remaining portion of the outlet box to the stud with a hacksaw or maybe a sawzall. Of course, the drywall gets damaged in that operation, so I enlarge and square off the hole in preparation for creating a patch.

Ah, but I spy something in the wall cavity that looks like mold. I know that I can't leave that in there. It's a health hazard and just by glancing at it I am now subject to full disclosure if I should ever decide sell to sell my house.

A bigger section of the drywall is removed to facilitate cleaning the mold and that's when I discover the source of the moisture that is causing the mold. A slow but steady drip from a pipe feeding the sink in the upstairs bathroom. That has to be fixed, no ands, ifs or buts about it.

So, I repair the leak and begin killing the mold with a bleach solution but the studs start to fall apart as I wash them because they are almost completely rotten.

The wall is gutted and rebuilt, the drywall put back on, the joints spackled, sanded, primed and painted, the outlet hooked up and the new white cover is slapped on. Power is restored and all the affected parties say is, "What took you so long?"

More Useless Comments

Not one, but two useless comments. For one line of code. For one line of code that is self-evident to, I assume, anyone alive.

'return to overview page
'redirect user to the overview page
Response.Redirect("overview.aspx", False)

Polyester Leisure Suits

I did a little Disco ASP work today. Wasn't particularly fun. It's funny how Disco ASP can run untouched for a long time and then suddenly break catastrophically for no apparent reason. Debugging it is the worst...

BWAAAAAAAAHHHHHH

They've been sandblasting the overpass right outside my building. It started the week before I went on vacation, apparently continued during my vacation and is still going on now. It's a diesel powered trailer mounted sandblaster and it's freaking loud. I thought that I would get used to it, but I haven't.

On the bright side, it keeps Thing 1 awake and I can't hear her phone conversations as much.

Updating Resume

I am updating the objective on my resume to read:

To work for a company where no-talent clowns who show up late, leave early, use office hours as their private social networking time, take long lunches, follow absolutely none of the accepted coding standards, release code into production that is buggy, ugly and non-functional, expect others to pick up their slack and are generally a drain on the production of their coworkers are not tolerated.

Useless

I love useless comments in code.

'load the repeater
LoadRepeater()

'self-explanitory
SortTheRepeater("DateTransmitted")

'just like it says, all was good and we need to refresh the right sid iframe
RefreshRightSide()

Scary

A Good Challenge

Deciphering somebody else's javascript which controls iframes within tables within iframes within tables within iframes.

The title of my post could have easily been "Not Fun", but I am trying to be optimistic. Plus, when I do finally finish what I am working on I can turn around and yell, "You SUUUUCK! Get off the stage!"* to the person behind me.

*That's from a movie**

**I would never actually say that to a person, but you know that already***

***Well, I hope you do

Standards

I'm not a big stickler for standards when it comes to programming. I don't care what prefix you assign to the IDs of your controls or how you name your variables. Just be consistent. And not sloppy. I hate sloppy. If you delete more than one line of code, delete the blank lines too, please. There's nothing I hate more than seeing 6 blank lines in the middle of a function.