I became DarcKnyt back in the dim, distant days of Internet past. Back when it wasn’t always safe to be oneself on the ‘net, because clever people – far more clever than I – could figure out scary things like how to become you. Later, this morphed into actual identity theft, wherein credit cards could be taken out in your name over the web and your life could be irrevocably ruined because of malicious losers with big brains and small testicles.

Also, I didn’t necessarily want anyone I dealt with to know who I am. I met some women on the Internet whom I would rather forget. Forever. But one of them I will be with forever, so it wasn’t all bad.

Why the spelling? Well, when I first dipped my toe into the Internet’s icy stream, it was through America OnLine. Good ol’ AOL…remember them? Anyone?

I had a couple of choices back then: AOL, or Comp-U-Serve. Now, Comp-U-Serve was the older sibling, but fading fast in the middle 1990s, so I chose AOL instead. This was so long ago, there was no such thing as “broadband” for home. You could start your own ISP if you wanted, but your customers all needed modems and phone wires to connect.

Anyway, AOL allowed you to choose your own ID, and Comp-U-Serve didn’t. But there was a catch – you could only have something with eight characters. You’d be amazed how much text speak was forwarded in those days with everyone trying to fit something unique, suitable to them, and catchy, all in eight little alphanumeric characters…no special characters allowed.

And so, since “Dark Knight” wouldn’t work, and “Darkknight” wouldn’t work, and “DarkKnyt” would work but was taken… well, I ended up as the “DarcKnyt” of lore and fame.

And I remain him to this day.

But, I’m also J. Dane Tyler, author. And I’m a father now, and a husband to a loving and committed spouse, and I’m an employee and many, many other things besides the DarcKnyt. And I’ve been lots of things here, in my little corner of the Internet, I probably wouldn’t have been if I’d stayed the DarcKnyt. Things like afraid, vulnerable, weak, amiable and phlegmatic. Those things go much better with the person I was before the world humbled me, before my path brought me around such a hard road, and left me tired, old, and fat.

But there’s been a lot of joy along the way. A lot of love. My son and daughter have changed how I see the world forever. And they’ve changed my willingness to present the cape and cowl any more. I don’t think I’ll ever stop being DarcKnyt when he’s needed, but for the most part, I feel it might just be okay to be…me.

So, I’m turning off the lights in the Batcave today, and locking the vault forever. I can’t say I won’t be back, so I won’t detonate the self-destruct mechanism. Just in case. But for now, I think it’s time to move into a new place and experiment with being the man, instead of the mask.

Goodbye, old friend. I’ll miss you.

If anyone is interested and doesn’t yet have it, please use the Contact Me page on this blog to receive the new address. That way, only those who care what might be under the mask (like you haven’t already seen it) will be there, in the new home.

God bless you, and goodbye.

-The DarcKnyt

Yesterday, I was ridin’ high coming into the day. I’ve been blowing away the tasks assigned to me. Sure, it takes me months to solve the riddles sometimes. Sure, I do some mumbles and humbles and get beet-red when I have to say “I don’t know  how” in staff meetings with my boss and associates. But every macro I’ve had to tackle I’ve knocked out of the park.

Even when I thought I didn’t.

So late last week, the ATR coordinator asked me to look at a problem she’s had with one of the screens she uses. I told you about this – it printed the serial numbers over and over, remember that? Well, I hit that one out of the park too.

Then I came back today and decided I’d have another run at getting the email attachment problem solved. You might not remember this one. Back in the summer we decided it might be a nice feature to be able to attach files to our outgoing email messages to divisions and customers. Sounds easy, right?

Yeah, not so much, it turns out.

Well, for the last – what? six, seven months? more? – I’ve been banging my head against that particular wall. This even came into play before Appmageddon. But I couldn’t do anything with it. I just…couldn’t get it to work.

Yesterday, I opened up that page again and took another look. I saw something I didn’t notice before. Well…that’s not exactly right. I guess I just didn’t see it this way before.

I tweaked. I tested. I tweaked again. Tested again. And you know what?

Shut the front door – I got the email. AND the attachment!

VICTORY! VICTORY FOR ZIIIIIIIMMM! Praise the Lord Most High, for clearly this came from His inspiration. Know how I know that?

Because I have no idea what’s different now that it works when it didn’t before. NONE.

There were a couple of routines I saw, and I recognized a bit of what they might be doing. I changed the references a touch, thinking, “Well, maybe it should be this instead of that.” And voila! Success. Sweet, gratifying success.

OH, I danced! I danced like Snoopy dances, and at my weight, that’s quite the spectacle.

I ran to my boss and bragged, “Hey, I beat your man GW again! I got the email attachment thing to work! I did it!”

I chatted and beamed a moment, and then went back to my desk. I deployed the solution to the production web server. Then, I had a meeting to go to with my boss and his staff members. During that meeting, the ATR Coordinator had to leave for the “Kaizen Event” I mentioned to you before. The meeting broke maybe an hour later, and when I got back to my desk, guess what?

I had an email from the ATR Coordinator.

She said, “We have issues with the intranet. I can’t send any notifications to the divisions. It’s giving an ‘Empty Path’ error now.”

My sphincter tightened so fast and so severely I gained an inch in height. You couldn’t have driven a toothpick in it with a ten-pound sledge.

Okay, I thought, stay calm. The error indicates the message can’t be sent without an attachment now. So…so…what’s that mean?!

OHGODWHATDOESTHATMEANFORTHELOVEOFCHRISTHELPME!!!

Or, you know, something like that.

So, this was like, two o’clock. I putzed around with other solutions but they weren’t going well. Finally, it hit me like a ton of bricks.

Before, we could send messages but not attachments. Now we can send attachments but not messages without them. Solution – put both scripts on the page and have them execute at different times.

Okay, how do I do that?

The way I did it was simple, and a little stupid, but then, so is this entire way of working with this crap, in my view. I simply put two buttons on the page. The first one calls the original script, and sends the message without attachments. The second one uses a modified script, takes the object in the file box (which I added), and embeds it as an object. (No, I didn’t come up with that code; neither did my predecessor though. He borrowed it from the Internet, so we BOTH stand on the shoulders of geniuses to do what we do. So there.)

Then the script sends the message through the local email client running on the machine being used.

Done!

And tested. And tested. And tested. It sends through the Internet, sends through the intranet, and sends the attachments faithfully.

Score!

Appmageddon just got a little less scary.

Now, back to the NAFTA database macro. I have to automate it. And I did; problem is, the automation through the database itself is ssssslllllllllooooooowwwwww. So I did it through an Excel spreadsheet instead, but now have to figure out how to get the two together. Two-step process, maybe? I’ll see.

But the process took something like half an hour through the database. The exact same code, copied and pasted to the workbook’s code editor directly from the database’s editor, runs in eight seconds from the workbook.

Uh…this is a no-brainer.

So, I’ll see what happens there later. For today, I have month-end reporting to do, weekly reporting to do, and I’m still way behind on some of these things.

See ya next time.

-jdt-

For now, I want to celebrate the joyous Easter coming.

And I have some reason to celebrate. Yesterday at work, I had some cool things happen, and only one bummer thing.

See, on Wednesday I had someone come to me and ask me if I could adjust one of the legacy intranet pages because it showed serial numbers for our return requests from customers. Some of our manufacturing divisions require a serial number before they’ll authorize a return. When we put that data into our system, it’s called up when we do prints of the requests. Long story longer, no matter how many serial numbers you enter, it shows up ten times. And, if you put in more than one, only the first one shows up…ten times.

An interesting conundrum. I found it more interesting when I learned my predecessor had been informed of the matter but never resolved it.

When I looked at the print page, I saw the matter. A loop was the problem.

(Aside: In programming-ese, a “loop” is a block of code which is executed multiple times, so instead of writing the code over and over again, you write it once and instruct the program to do it over and over until a condition is either satisfied or stops being satisfied.)

See, the loop was told to execute ten times. A counter was set to 1, and the loop was set to run until the counter became 11 (incrementing ten times). That same counter was used to extract the index number of the serial number data. So let’s say there are five serial numbers for five units being requested for return. The counter (called “x” in this case) was set to 1, like so: x=1 (complex programming code, eh?) Then the loop was told to run until x=11, like so: Do Until x=11 (wow! Can you handle that technical jargon there?!).

Okay, then the serial numbers were selected by saying “Put the serial numbers in this HTML table cell where the serial number = SN(x).” Then the counter gets incremented by one (“x=x+1”, more super-intense computer code), and the loop repeats. Got it?

So, for some reason (and I’m still not precisely sure why), the code never worked correctly. Instead of getting serial number index “x” like it was supposed to, it got the first one it came to and then repeated that cycle over and over again.

I knew what to do, though. And damned proud of myself I was for knowing! I changed the loop to say, “Do this stuff UNTIL THERE ARE NO MORE SERIAL NUMBERS, regardless of how many there might be.”

This is called a “Do Until” loop. Instead of saying “Do this until the counter is incremented ten times” (and ten wasn’t random; the page in which serial numbers are entered only has slots for ten of them), my code says “Do this until you don’t have any more records in the serial number spot” and then finishes. Got one serial number? It goes through the code once. Got ten? It goes through ten times.  And, should I ever improve the page, if you input 40, you’ll get 40 out.

So I made the alterations and tested the code. It failed. Programming error. I left on Wednesday night feeling pretty dejected and stupid. I woke up a couple of times on Wednesday night – as is my habit, due to bladder requests or thirst or whatever – and every time I did awake, this problem was running through my head. I have no idea how that happens, but it happens occasionally. So when I woke up Thursday, I went to work thinking about the problem and still didn’t have any clue why my loop didn’t work and his did.

Feeling sort of inferior and humbled, I looked at the problem again. And I noticed something… a missing piece of the code. When I altered the loop, I forgot to tell the computer code to advance to the next record, if there is one, and do it again. When I added the simple line “recordset.movenext” to the code just before I told it to loop through again, BAM! Success! The page loaded perfectly and ran flawlessly, and ONLY shows the existing serial numbers once!

And now, it shows ALL the serial numbers, not just the first one over and over.

VICTORY!

Okay, great, on I go. I spent the better part of last week working on two things: a NAFTA database macro which would automatically perform some tasks rather than having to perform those tasks manually, and a page which shows the number of times one particular customer is changing their orders. (The sales team for that customer, and the quality representatives for that customer, will be in our location for what’s called a “Kaizen Event” to improve quality communications. We’re using it as a chance to provide ammunition to our sales team to get the customer under control. Long story, but it’s something we have to do; their people can’t keep up with the changes being made, how are we supposed to do so?)

Well, I got the new web page built using the new, “better” technology, and tested it repeatedly. Then I set it aside. I finished it about 4:30PM last Friday, and figured I’d deploy it this week. Well, I sorta forgot, so when it came up again, I scrambled to get it uploaded to the web server.

And it bombed.

For the next two hours, I cursed, banged my desk, pulled my rapidly-graying hair, and stormed to the bathroom to fume. The test server simply won’t provide me with the error messages and I can’t remember what I did in production to get it to happen. So, flustered, I deployed the new application to production to see if I could find the problem.

I almost screamed it was so simple. So, I quick-fixed the issue and BAM! Success!

VICTORY! …and I copied the fixed version to the test server as a back-up and they’re working fine. The requestor is very excited to arm our sales team with this data next week, and I’m pleased it worked as intended. Phew! Close one!

Finally, time to turn my attention to the NAFTA database macro.

*Sigh*

I still don’t know what’s wrong with it. So, two wins and a loss. In the grand scheme of things, I suppose that’s not too bad.

There’s always next week.

I hope you have a happy and joyous Easter if you’re celebrating, and I’ll see you Monday or thereabout.

God bless you.

-jdt-

I’ve noticed a tiny bit of trickle-down to other stories, too. Not much, but a trickle of trickle. I’ve sold a handful of not-free books, but I’m not going to be able to retire on my writing’s earnings anytime soon. Still, it’s something, and the more readers with my work in their hands, the better.

I might’ve done a better job pimping the book on this blog too. I don’t know how many “followers” I have, but every little bit helps, so I might just do that next time.

For the record, it’s called Shudderbugs and already has a five-star review! W00T!

Speaking of reviews, my buddy and loyal fan Raga has posted a review for me too, on The Case of Lenny Tiggleman – in which she appears as a character! Thanks, Raga! God bless ya, darlin’! I really appreciate it.

Other than that, I did absolutely nothing over the weekend except shoot off a message by my buddy Bryce, who hasn’t responded yet. I hope to hear back from him about helping him get the sequel to his novel “Oasis” out in early April. Hey, B, let me know what’s up, brother.

I’ve got to get back to my training videos, but LORD HELP ME, I can’t seem to find the motivation to do it. The prospect of sitting through them and taking notes excites me about as much as the idea of having my gums scraped.

On the other hand, I’ve fashioned yet another book cover for a new short story I’m mulling. I hoped the cover would spark inspiration. And it would be sci-fi/horror, maybe. Something scary in space, y’know? And it would be a short story, so I can peck at it a little at a time. But I really need to pump out a full-length novel sometime. I just can’t ever seem to block out enough time to do so. Can you say “time management”? I knew y’could.

Anyway, I hope you had a nice weekend, and Bob, I hope your bachelor party was a blast, bud. I’d have been there if I could.

Take care and see you next time, everyone.

-jdt-

I have plans, for a change! How ’bout that?

For one thing, I’m going to try and give my buddy Bryce Beattie a read-through on his story “The Journey of St. Laurent”, sequel to his pulp-horror novel “Oasis”. Can’t wait for that!

Next, I’ll be doing what I can to help my wife clear her cardboard boxes out of the house so we can set up the new school/craft area I just spent a small pail of money on. (AHEM!)

Maybe some grocery shopping, if need be.

Finally, Saturday (tomorrow), March 23, my newest short story eBook will go live on Amazon Kindle for FREE! It’s called “Shudderbugs”, and contains not one but TWO stories with photography themes! The book will be free from March 23 to March 27, and then it goes to its regular price of 99¢. So get your copy while it’s free!

Here’s the cover:

If you do pick it up and enjoy the stories (they are older, though, and my writing has changed a LOT since then), please consider leaving a review on Amazon. It helps us, and makes me feel better. I mean, when it’s positive, anyway. But be honest! Always be honest!

Anyway, have a good weekend, and I’ll see you on Monday!

-jdt-

He says it’s because she coddled the boy, wouldn’t let the father discipline him. Now there’s defiance, contempt. Once, he related, the boy tried to get out of a moving vehicle. Another time, they drove to a the local strip mall to go to a drug store, and he got out and walked home. Not knowing or caring – the details were sketchy here – they decided to walk home too. Apparently, the car sat there overnight and to get to work the next day, he had to walk to the strip mall and pick it up.

He spoke to her of a day when he’ll make enough money on his job to walk out, leave the house to his wife, and not look back. I didn’t listen closely. I didn’t want to know. He wasn’t talking to me, only in proximity to me. I overheard most of it, and all of what I gathered were in snatches, pieces and bits I wasn’t willing to put together.

I got the gist even if I didn’t want it. A man with either hopes or plans to leave his family behind him.

When he walked away, I was careful not to let him know I heard. I’m sure he knew, though. I’m only one cube with no real walls away from where he spilled his bile. He surely didn’t care who overheard. But when he was gone, back to his own work location, I shuddered. I closed my eyes, and shuddered.

And then I prayed for him.

When I finished, I realized how grateful I am for what I have. A spouse who is a friend, lover, confidant, and partner in all I do. Supportive of me in everything. A son who, despite his questions about why things are the way they are, not being quite grown-up enough to fully grasp why things might vary from one situation to the next while being too grown-up for "because," still obeys. Still seems to respect me. Still honors me, even if he doesn’t like me. A son who has given his heart and soul to our Lord and King and who honors Him by cooperating with me. A daughter who seems to enjoy my company. A family who greets me at the door with shouts and hugs and kisses.

And when my eyes burned with tears I had to hide my face, because it meant so much. Yes, in that moment, but always. What I have, what I sometimes take for granted, is so precious, so special, so rare and delicate, and I am willing to defend it.

With my life, if necessary.

Today, I am grateful for when a man who is terribly unhappy at home reminded me of how terribly happy I am at home.

We had a major upgrade — a full build — to one of our enterprise systems. Everything went swimmingly over the weekend, when the new build was deployed. Then came Monday morning, when, you know, people tried to use that system.

And it promptly crashed.

As of this writing (about 11:46AM my time), there’s no resolution to the issue. They keep sending out updates, but there’s no fix in place yet. Nice.

So, to prepare for the new system — because, in theory, it will eventually be resuscitated — I’ve had to do a few things alongside my regular Monday morning reporting routine. So I’ve been haggard. And last night, my charming, trailer-trash neighbors decided to have some sort of outdoor gathering at all hours of the night, not to mention the banging and thumping like someone dribbling a bowling ball. So today, I’m tired and a little grumpy.

Nevertheless, I’m only halfway through my day and still busy. I’ve finalized a VBA macro already, and tested it (enough…I hope). And now, I’m off to launch my IDE so I can fix some pages I “fixed” last week which, y’know, aren’t fixed.

Over the weekend, I became the proud owner of a brand-spanking-new digital SLR. It’s a Nikon D3100, and so far, I love it. Now, I just need to learn to take pictures. Then the REAL fun begins…Photoshop the pics to make ‘em look better! W00T! Can’t wait there.

I also have to get back into my training videos in a more serious way. I’ve really slacked off on how diligent I am about them for a few reasons, but primarily I’ve been doing Photoshop work and (re)publishing my stories on Kindle to keep interest up. So far, so good. I didn’t get one done last weekend though, so this week I’ve got a pair of stories going up which should make me feel better. It also gives me an excuse to do Photoshop work. How bad can that be?

I’ve decided I love Photoshop, and if I could be a professional retoucher and ebook cover designer and charge people enough to make a living at it, I’d be happy doing it. Unless, you know, it ticks me off. Then it’d suck.

Anyway, I hope you had a nice weekend, and, you know, I’ll see you next time.

-jdt-

I grew up in California, as most of you know. When I was young, we had a service called "Time." Time was a specific phone number you could call to get the current time in ten second intervals. A nice lady read the numbers off to you so you could set your clocks and watches, and have a friendly voice to talk to when you’re lonely. It didn’t cost anything — back in those days, all calls were local, which will give you an idea of what time period I’m talking about here — but later, when things weren’t so local anymore, they had different area code numbers for Time.

I don’t remember when I first heard the term "POP-CORN" for it. I don’t know whether I had emigrated to the Midwest yet or not, but I do remember being confused about it until someone showed me the number. It was Time, complete with the same lady’s friendly and familiar voice, but the phone number translated to the alpha-characters P-O-P-C-O-R-N. So, whatever area code you lived in, you could dial POP-CORN and get the time and date.

I guess the advent of cell phones and time synchronization via Internet, satellite and even atomic clock has made POP-CORN obsolete. Our phones update their times automatically now, and even update for Daylight Saving Time. Our computers do the same, so long as we have an open Internet connection available for them. And we generally use those to set our other devices which aren’t smart enough to do so automatically, like coffee makers and (oddly) alarm clocks. And what’s up with wrist watches that can’t do that by themselves? If a tiny cell phone can house the computing power it does and still do the updates automatically, I don’t see why a tiny transceiver for satellite can’t be built into a wrist watch for such a purpose.

No matter what, though, I’ll remember fondly the days of POP-CORN and the warm, friendly lady’s voice who told me tirelessly what the current time was in ten second increments. Another piece of my youth which has passed into the twilight of memory.

Kind of like my flat stomach and 29 inch waist.

Have a good weekend, y’all.

-jdt-

If you don’t know — and why would you, really, unless you’re an artist? — deviantART is MySpace or Facebook for artists. It provides a community and showplace for artists to display their work and, if they get lucky enough, receive feedback on their displays. Comments, however, can’t be moderated or controlled — anyone can say anything they’d like, not only to the artist, but to any commentator as well. (This is an issue, in my opinion, and something dA needs to look at modifying.)

Now, dA allows almost anything to be posted as "art" — things which could be considered masterpieces, or at least the work of modern masters — to borderline pornography, to children’s drawings (or worse) can all be uploaded. The medium isn’t very limited either. Raw Photoshop files can’t be uploaded, but they can when converted to PNG or JPG images. SWF files can be uploaded, too, and so can film clips (!) and short films in various movie formats. It’s wide open.

Among the many visual art pieces out there, of course, are photography and photo-manipulation pieces. Paintings done traditionally can be photographed and uploaded, or pieces created digitally can be converted and uploaded. And writers have their own creations there too.

There’s no problem with providing artists a way to get their stuff seen. But until recently, writers were treated as second class citizens in the art community.

I wrote about this extensively before. I don’t remember whether here or elsewhere, but for the most part, attention isn’t evenly divided among artists on art communities. The priority seemed to be hand-created artwork (whether traditional or digital), then photography and photo manipulations, and then any other visual art remaining. When all is said and done, writing and literature is at the bottom of the list.

Before I stopped actively posting on deviantART, things were being done to help level the playing field, but honestly, not much inroad has been made in that regard. For one thing, a lot of writing is ignored on art sites because people go there for…well, artwork. The problem lies, in my humble opinion, with the definition of "art" as a base.

Words are the most abstract form of art there is. Think about it. If I write the word "hand", your mind can visualize an actual hand. But that’s because you’ve been taught to associate that particular word with that particular object. It took training, practice, and a lot of positive encouragement for you to learn the letters H-A-N-D mean the five-digit appendage at the end of your arm. But the letters H-A-N-D don’t look anything like the thing they describe, and therefore, it’s not considered "art" — despite the fact it’s a series of lines which describe an object. Just like a drawing would, or a painting would, or a series of pixels might.

The art of language is so abstract, it might take several thousand words to describe what a single drawing, painting or photograph might render. It is, to borrow an analogy from the immortal Mr. Spock, akin to building sophisticated electronics with stone knives and bear skins. Yet, when the discussion of artists comes up, the writer is left out in general. Oh, great writers are discussed with similar tones, but honestly, they’re not often considered in discussions of art.

I suspect this is due to "art" being defined as visual creations of a less abstract nature. In general, we admire most images which closely represent the objects of which they are representative. That is, in Homer Simpson speak, things which "look like the things they look like." The more true the image is to the object it represents, the more we (typically) like it. But, even more abstract "visual art" — you know, paint blotches and swooshes all over a canvas and hung in the MOM in most major cities — finds more favor than the abstraction of words.

Literature, as a result, is classified on it’s own, separately from visual media.

Should it be?

Your voice matters to me. Tell me what YOU think.

-jdt-

And even MORE good news – starting today and going through the Ides of March (which is March 15, 2013, if you don’t know), it will be FREE for the downloading! After that, it goes back to its regular price of 99¢, so get yours while it’s FREE!

Click the image to get yours today!

-jdt-