Reed Me : blogging

Live Mesh to the, uh, rescue?

reedme — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 22:50:38 GMT

One of my alleged New Year’s resolutions was to clean out the blogging back log. I have a bad habit of highlighting something on a web page, whacking the Live Toolbar button for “blog this” and letting my witty repartee rot in a folder somewhere in Documents. No more! I will have the “now habit” from henceforth… Mostly. It’s the end of January and I’m just now getting around to it.

Live Mesh is helping me by giving me a central place to keep everything, so I can blog whenever I’ve got a spare moment:

between meetings on the tablet (if my boss is reading this, I never do this during meetings – honest!)
lounging @ home watching some poor excuse for a TV show that the TiVo knew that I’d watch anyway (in all fairness I haven’t watched the show yet, but Kurtz was actually funny yesterday, so I linked it)
waiting for my teammates to rescue me after zombies had their way with my corpse in Left 4 Dead (my Xbox 360 game backlog is just as bad as blogging backlog, but I’m working on that, too!)
sitting in the garage on my motorcycle and wishing there was enough global warming to melt all this “unusual for the Pacific Northwest” snow and let me ride!

I really wish I’d meshed up my Windows Mobile phone two weeks ago… so that I wouldn’t’ve lost those notes and pictures when a keyboard malfunction (while entering the PIN) plus draconian security policy erased them all. Doh.

Live Mesh means that all my PCs have my blog post drafts from the past several years that never made it past The Censors™. Heh. Also, I can never claim to have lost a favorite link, either, now that they’re all meshed up.

Tweeting AdventureWorks?

reedme — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 03:34:09 GMT

Earlier this week, the gravitational pull of Twitter got the better of me. Jimmy May emailed me that Paul Nielsen was trying to sort out the gender of the fictitious IT Manager of AdventureWorks (Jean Trenary) for the next edition of the SQL Server Bible and was tweeting on the subject. One thing led to another. (Doesn’t it always?)

I vaguely recall signing up for Twitter as “reedme” but twitter doesn’t seem interested in sending me a forgotten password for that user name... so I reverted to an older, darker user name for tweeting: DarthReed. Just so you know. More useless information is now available on the web with even greater frequency.

Anyway, here are the queries for anybody else who cares. First for the old school AdventureWorks OLTP database (with thanks to Gail in UE for writing the first one):

USE AdventureWorks
GO
SELECT c.FirstName , c.LastName, e.Title, e.Gender
FROM HumanResources.Employee as e
JOIN Person.Contact AS c ON e.ContactID = c.ContactID
WHERE LastName = 'Trenary'
GO

And then my “port” for the AdventureWorks2008 OLTP database (will like be the same for AdventureWorksKilimanjaro):

USE AdventureWorks2008
GO
SELECT c.FirstName , c.LastName, e.JobTitle, e.Gender
FROM HumanResources.Employee as e
JOIN Person.Person AS c ON e.BusinessEntityID = c.BusinessEntityID
WHERE LastName = 'Trenary'
GO

If my adventures in Twitter last beyond the end of my “trial month”, I’ll have to break down and figure out how to feed them into the sidebar of the blog.

How do I make a Mobile Tag for /dev/null?

reedme — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 00:11:17 GMT

I’m not going to say that the fact I broke down and joined Twitter in a moment of weakness today made me think of /dev/null... it’s probably just a coincidence. Meh.

A new tagging system? I wonder how much visual appeal had to the need for this instead of old-fashioned barcodes? If we can process these crazy tags on a mobile device, I’m sure we could do the same for bars.

Microsoft Tag - Linking real life with the digital world

Well, here goes nothing!

(No, that’s not a tag for /dev/null. It’s just a tag for this blog. Heh.)

Now that's funny! Air Force RoE for Blogging?

reedme — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 09:16:02 GMT

My tax dollars at work. Trust the military to "document" something that's already available from any reputable PR agent. Heh. I guess not everybody gets to be an astronaut, fighter pilot or superhacker in the Air Force.

The Air Force’s Rules of Engagement for Blogging (GlobalNerdy.com)

In all seriousness, though, I've learned enough PR by osmosis (and mandatory company training) that I'm going to keep my complaints about the Zune leap year bug to myself. I hate running to the so-called "music" that they pipe into the ProClub. It burns us, it does! I'm going to have to find somebody on the Zune team to challenge to a chess boxing match.

In other news, we've been using Netflix's Watch Instantly feature on the Xbox and the TiVo HD (mostly to compare them) to discover Really Bad Shows That We've Never Heard Of™ this week. Pretty entertaining stuff, if you like bad TV and movies, that is. We'd never heard of "Space Rangers" or Disney's "American Dragon" among others. I'd forgotten how bad the writing for Voltron was!

Merry New Year, y'all!

Bad data models can happen to good people.

reedme — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 08:00:50 GMT

What seems like one person's "good" natural key can make another person wish like the dickens that that somebody had used a synthetic key, eh?

I was happily blogging away (elsewhere), when I encountered this fun little, specific (but unhelpful) error from Windows Live Writer:

Server Error 0 Occurred
The post could not be added

After roundly cursing WLW, flaming my ISP for dorking around with my shared hosting environment and sundry other possible root causes, I came to learn that apparently the text of that error is what Community Server spews when you try to add another post with a title that's already been used once in your blog, and it's not WLW's fault at all (or the ISP's et al).

Windows Live Writer: Server Error 0 when Posting - Community Server

Now I can imagine the design session that resulted in the Community Server team or whoever designed the Metablog API deciding that the title of a blog post made for a "great key" value, but... Am I (the user) supposed to actually remember what titles I've used for all my previous posts? And figure out from that LAME error message that all I need to do is change the title by ONE lousy character just to get past the error!?!

#@$&ing bad data model!!!