Victory!

I shouldn’t be so proud of myself, but…

On Monday our Quality Coordinator came to me and asked if I could add a customer to our database because she had an ATR request from them and couldn’t enter it. I told her I’d see what I could do and went about my business.

My business soon became finding the customer already existed in the database and not having a blessed clue about why the application couldn’t find them.

I’ve told you before about how the existing pages were built on very old technology, and while the working was clever and works, sometimes it works better than others. When I checked into why the page didn’t work, I couldn’t find the reason. At all.

Four days later, I finally was provided the solution by God. He’s really good to me like that, and every once in a while He really pulls something phenomenal off. He led me to look into the base query which the page uses to access the data it’s supposed to display. Turns out, that query didn’t return this customer for some reason. (I still don’t know why.) So I went into the server, copied the database to my local machine, and started working with the query designer.

Fortunately for me, this is built on Microsoft Access databases, and I have the lovely QBE – or Query Builder Environment – to work in. It’s basically a graphical representation of the tables, which I can use to select the data and what conditions I want to use for filtering, etc. When I was finished at about 3:30PM, the query pulled the customer when searched by customer number.

I tested by searching by customer name, and it still didn’t work. *SIGH*

I was about to give up and tell her she can’t use that feature for this customer when it dawned on me: I needed to look at the page and see what it did with customer names. I found the query had to be adjusted slightly and when I did that, badda-bing! She worked!

WOO! I almost shouted.

The thing I hate MOST in my job is having to tell my boss “I don’t know.” I prayed, I almost wept, and I’ve been under so much stress about this I couldn’t sleep well.

Well, tonight, I’m going to sleep like a baby.

And tomorrow, I’ll realize I’m going on vacation Monday and have only about two weeks to finish Appmageddon.

I’ll get stressed about that when it’s time, I guess.

For today, I’m going to revel in victory and enjoy setting up my out of office auto-response tomorrow.

-jdt-

Well…

So, here I am. It’s been a week since my last update, I think, but you likely didn’t notice, being I’m not that interesting anyway.

Still hammering away at the programming deadlines and issues. I’m still working on wrapping my brain around all this to become efficient and good at it, or at least able to be competent. I’m still not there. At least, I don’t think so, but I did make some progress.

I’ve not written a word of fiction, even though it burns a hole right through my heart, and I know I tend to slow down during October and the last quarter of the year. The thrill of the better weather and holidays coming makes it hard for me to concentrate. So it’s critical I get something out there, find someway to make something happen in a positive way. I have to keep my hand moving but… well, time. You know the drill.

So I wanted to set aside part of Sunday to create a new eBook to publish on Kindle, but I can’t seem to make that happen. I just don’t have the time to set aside, and when I do, it seems like a monumental effort. I don’t have the energy. So where is the convergence of time and energy? Huh? I asks ya, where?

Well. Never mind that, I’ve enjoyed learning about computer programming and I’ve been hoping I haven’t forgotten all I learned about writing fiction, or outlining, or any of the good things I’d picked up so quickly over the last several months.

And as for work? Well, I’ve crept close to finishing one of the more challenging projects I’ve been saddled with, but then another was piled atop which takes my breath away in its scope. So huge. So important. And I don’t think I’m there, skill-wise. I’m terrified of it, and the end of the year is my drop-dead deadline on that one. *Sigh*

From stress to worry and back again. I wonder when this ever gets fun?

But enough bellyaching. How was YOUR weekend, y’all? Sound off and let me know!

It’s Official, and Officially Finished

Well, it’s finally done — officially, that is.

Today we received our new chairs for our team. We got new “hi-tech,” “ergonomic” chairs (mine is less comfortable than the old leather one I had before), and now, we’re all matchy-matchy. Isn’t that nice.

So, the relocation of our business group is concluded. Tomorrow (Thursday), my boss returns from his sales-a-palooza and will empty his office over the next couple of days. We got his chair for him today, and parked it in his coat closet new office.

I also finished something today. I did it, without having to resort to calling someone, asking on the Internet, or copying and pasting my predecessor’s junk and tweaking it. Somehow, I made it work all on my own, using the new technology, and I feel pretty doggone good about that.

I don’t know why, though. This is what’s expected of me, and I have to deliver.

No writing lately. I’ve been too busy, and all day today I was fighting back a migraine, so no dice there.

We’ll see what tomorrow holds.

Talk to you on the far side of the sunset.

-jdt-

Moving Day

Today is moving day. Well, this afternoon and tomorrow morning. I’m losing the only office I’ve ever had in my career. Along with me, all of my boss’s staff are losing their offices too. We’re effectively being run out on a rail and moved into an area where we cannot be isolated as a business group anymore. We share the space with the other remaining division in the building.

Matter of fact, I’m going to be positioned as the last cubicle in our group and will abut the other division’s personnel. They will not have a barrier to prevent them from seeing over my shoulder as I work on sensitive divisional data and do my Internet research, which will probably look suspiciously like surfing the web as I struggle to learn computer programming and continue to complete my projects.

I know it sounds childish to be throwing a fit about an office, but it’s more than that. It’s the idea the division was told to do whatever they wanted without consideration for our business group. We weren’t allowed to get our OWN building, though. And even if we did, I probably wouldn’t have been permitted to have my own office. At my echelon, it’s cubes or bust. So who knows, maybe this would have been the same for me either way. At least in our own building, we wouldn’t be interspersed with the other division.

I expect to have complaints against me from this point forward as I cease being in privacy when I swear and decry. I have to learn to restrain my mouth, which after almost 50 years, will be challenging. No more joking and teasing and being familiar with anyone because, God knows, it might just f**king offend someone.

If you can’t tell, I’m not happy about this. I will NOT be happy about this. I will do my best to maintain a positive attitude, but I don’t have to, and cannot be forced to, like it.

I’ll be offline for a while as I struggle with this. Hope you all had a good weekend.

-JDT-

Life and Fear

I’m a little worried about my work.

I’ve not had a great success in a long time, but I’ve also been trying to learn a new programming language to implement and save us a ton of work going forward. I’m trying so hard to modernize the intranet site I support and bring it into the 21st century (it’s built using mostly stuff which was current last in something like 2003). But I’m flustered and not able to get my head around all of it for some reason.

When I do, I really feel like I’ve accomplished something great, but the fact is, I have no idea how much more tolerance for my slow progress my boss will have. We have something on the horizon which is forcing us out of our current office location into one which puts us smack in the middle of the other division with which we share the building (it’s their building, we’re only tenants). While a lot of that pressure (because we’re losing our individual server rack too, and being co-located into the same rack with the other division’s servers, I was facing the daunting task of making sure we have all the right naming conventions in EVERY.SINGLE.PAGE) has been removed from me, I still have the incredible pressure of trying to do stuff I don’t know how to do in a programming language I barely know.

So, when I get a few minutes to myself, I go through a progressive “agony wheel” which goes something like this:

• I want to write fiction, so doing fiction writing is what gets me at the computer keys every weekend and evening.
• I feel I should be doing more to learn this language thing, so I draw a sigh and go to the online training sites I have memberships to.
• I get distracted when I think of something more interesting and go look it up.
• I get guilty again and go back to the training sites.
• I open up Scrivener with a niggling idea at the back of my head, ready to be dropped into an outline template so I can start developing it. Scrivener wants me to name the project first thing before it even launches, which puts me off, then I realize I haven’t done anything yet, so I…
• Get guilty again, worse this time because it’s coupled with panic about how far behind on my projects I am and how some of them are due on September 1, so I get a nasty adrenaline burn in my gut and
• Go back to the training sites.
• Lather, rinse, repeat.

Now, this may not be every time, but it’s a fair amount of time at this point. Also, because of things which have recently occurred to me as a writer, including a reader review which shot holes in my confidence in my talent and writing skills, I slip into “analysis paralysis,” and do a lot of either staring at the screen or trying to figure out whether I’ve gotten the best ending for my books (especially that last, based on how the reviewer tore me up).

Result: I didn’t do a lot of writing over the weekend. If you’ve followed my blog for a few years, you might remember a story in which I decided to dabble in literary fiction called Sharkey – the story of a young man grieving the death of his friend and mentor. It really isn’t a “story” because I did so little except write what I felt were amusing flashbacks of vignettes with Sharkey being who he was in relation to other characters in the book. It got a lot of love from those who read it, but I didn’t have any real goals for it.

Until lately.

I decided to see what my new Dramatica story theory lessons might do if I ran Sharkey through those filters. What happened was, I got almost a full outline from it. I have a few odds and ends to work out, I think, but the Dramatica theory of story is so strong – and I know so little about it still – I was able to develop a fuller, richer story and plan out the map of the throughlines. All that’s left is for me to take the throughlines and develop their markers (called “signposts”, logically enough, since this is a roadmap through your story) into sequences.

So, I have grandiose plans but nothing in detail yet. This is, believe it or not, deliberate.

I almost want to resort to index cards on the floor again. My wife has been advocating my doing that for years. She actually wanted me to use different colors for each throughline, but the colors are horrible and garish, and I can’t abide them. White it is.

But which story to do this with? Hm.

More on that on my fiction blog.

How was your weekend?

-JDT-