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This is the main blog for Mike McBride Online, where you can keep track of everything I'm in to in one place.
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| Friday, June 13, 2003
Remember this Remember this from the other day, and remember how I said: "It's anonymously authored, and that's probably a good thing, since some people really do take themselves too seriously. :) " Now there's proof of how right I was. Good grief people. You would think having anything bad to say about blogging or any blogger was sacrilegious or something. What's next, the Spanish Inquisition? Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 1:15 PM | 0 comments | 
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Since you asked... Got an email yesterday asking me to think about linking to another blog. This one was actually respectful, nice, personalized, and gave me the impression that at the very least this person read my blog a little bit before asking. That's always good. My immediate response was still no, but with some caveats. Now that I was aware of this particular blog, I would check it out every once in awhile and link to anything interesting that I felt like I wanted to make a comment about. It's my opinion that linking to something specific probably drives more of my readers to look at the other site than adding it to my blogroll does. Am I right? Now, given that, what's the best way to get my attention? Leave a comment, or link and respond to something I say here. In other words, contribute to the conversation we're having here, and I'm much, much more likely to check out what you have to say there. (Gee I sound like Doc now with these "conversations" don't I?) And, remember, helpful information is always welcome and usually leads to credit being given, so keep that in mind as well. :) Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 8:36 AM | 0 comments |
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Thursday, June 12, 2003
Ugh Nothing like coming in and finding a laptop that won't boot and a bad video driver screwing with a monitor image waiting for you first thing. Fun, fun... Update: Got the laptop to boot, disabling the Palm HotSync software at startup seems to have done the trick. Bad Palm! The monitor is proving to be a bit more tricky, drivers weren't the problem, I'm thinking now it's electrical interference so we're going to move just about everything away from it and we'll see if it starts to clear up. (The problem has been on two different monitors and started manifesting itself a couple of days after the office was moved around, and then again a couple of days after the monitor was switched. May be something in the office..) I've also done a quick database tweak, written, run and exported an Access query, answered emails, done a little bit of data entry, and answered 2 different questions, all before 11:15AM. You'd think I'd have a short to-do list by now, wouldn't you? You'd be wrong..*L* Update 2:Found the monitor problem, it was interference from a magnetic paper-clip thingy. It was too close to the monitor and after we moved it the image cleared up almost right away! Let that be a lesson to you, and me, to check that first before you go switching monitors and all sorts of other things! Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 8:48 AM | 0 comments |
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Wednesday, June 11, 2003
Scoble and I have something in common A wife that keeps us straight. Think webloggers don't have editors? You haven't met my wife. "You sounded cocky today," she announced. "I think you're getting into 'the royal we.'" Oh, great, everyone is a critic. "Hey dear, why don't you write a weblog?" My wife does that too, the only difference is that she has a weblog too, so I can give it back. :) Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 8:33 AM | 0 comments |
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Tuesday, June 10, 2003
Cutting and funny.. Saw this over on Mike Sanders' blog today: Simple Guide to the A-List Bloggers. It's anonymously authored, and that's probably a good thing, since some people really do take themselves too seriously. :) Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 3:39 PM | 0 comments |
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Interruptions.. Not making the progress I want to so far. Had a few interruptions, and I'm expecting a few more, unfortunately. One of those "Mike can you tell us 'XYZ' from this data even though we never bothered to track the data that would actually tell you "XYZ" from the start of the project and have no idea how to get it now?" sort of things. That, of course, will lead to senior level discussions about why I can't "fix" the problem, even though the problem was created by design, a design which I was never even approached about until now. In fact, it's a design change that I have, in the past, tried to get people to implement ahead of time so we don't have this same "problem" every year. Nice... Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 1:42 PM | 0 comments |
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Swimming in Access Spent most of yesterday swimming in various Access databases, will probably spend a bunch more of today doing the same thing. Our membership database software is so difficult to use that whenever I have anything more than the simplest SQL functions I wind up pulling everything out into Access and doing the functions there and then importing everything back in. Most of this stuff is routine, I've been here long enough that the tools have already been built to do these functions, they just need to be updated once in a while. As luck would have it, this week I have the monthly search for members who haven't had a dues increase in 3 years, which involves running all the dues payment history through some Access functions, the yearly worker's compensation group roster came in and needs to be matched up with our membership, which is another Access tool that I've built to handle all the different permutations of that (It spits me out 4 seperate lists, depending on what it found in the match.), and the semi-annual update to our Legislative Districts came in as well. I built an Access tool that lets me take the raw zip code-district data that this company sends us, compare it against the nine-digit zip codes of our members and insert all the correct legislative districts into their records. And I haven't even mentioned the help desk database that I built either. I haven't had to use that one yet this week, but I'm sure I will, right? :) It's days like this that make it seem like I shouldn't have changed my old title of Database Admin., huh? But then, this is only part of my job, and it's not nearly as much a part of my job as it was the first year when I actually sat down and built all these tools. Now I just have to update the data, run the queries and do all the exporting/importing into our membership database. That's not much compared to the first year. More later.. Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 9:08 AM | 0 comments |
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Monday, June 09, 2003
Challenge-Response This story is an interesting look at the anti-spam "challenge-response" technique, which is now being offered to all Earthlink customers. I think it raises good points, especially when it comes to mailing lists being inundated with challenges. Personally, if I'm on a mailing list and I get a challenge from one of the members of the list, I don't respond. If you're not bright enough to realize that having a challenge-response system means some extra tweaking to make sure you don't annoy the hell out of mailing list members, I'm sure as heck not spending any of my time making sure you get my messages to the list. On the other hand, there are some cases where a challenge-response makes more sense and I might think about putting it in place. I just worry about people who view it as a cure-all without really thinking about the realities of what can happen. Sort of like all those people who think auto-responders are a cure-all and don't realize the infinite email loops they sometimes create on mailing lists. I can easily see the same thing happening here. Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 8:57 AM | 0 comments |
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Sunday, June 08, 2003
Google viewer Just saw this for the first time, the Google viewer, which shows you the pages in your result and scrolls through all of your search results so you don't have to actually do anything but stop it when it gets to the page you want. I'm not sure what I think of it yet, but it is an interesting twist on searching. What do you think? Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 3:32 PM | 0 comments |
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