I’m 24, sitting in the offices of a major oil company (strike one). Wearing a button-down long sleeve shirt, blue jeans (strike two), and Vans (strike three). Chewing on a toothpick (strike four) while blogging (strike five). Before going to a meeting to talk about databases (strike six). When I get back, I’ll do budget analysis (strike seven) until I go home around 5:00 (strike eight).
Oh, the things you do you didn’t expect to be doing ten years ago.
Non-DRM playlists work in WMP 11. They just don’t work if you’re running over SSL without a valid certificate. All media players appear to fail obscurely when this happens.
To-do list: get a real SSL certificate.
From here:
If you evaluate Greenspan from a conventional perspective, you’d have to say that he was successful in that he kept the charade going. He fooled people long enough that trust in the U.S. economy’s health was maintained. In other words, he was able to manufacture bubbles when they were necessary and get away with it. In the short run that looks beneficial, but in the long run it’s very dangerous, just delaying the inevitable.
When you keep interest rates lower than the market rate by creating new money and credit, that is inflation. That’s the source of much mischief, and he did this continuously. When the interest rate is 1 percent, you know it’s way below the market rate. When it’s 6 or 7 or 8, you can’t be certain it’s not higher than the rate would be if they had a totally hands-off position. But for the most part Federal Reserve chairmen keep the interest rate that they control lower than the market rate, and therefore they are running an inflation machine.
The incentive is always short-run, because Wall Street enjoys low interest rates. They see it as a positive sign psychologically, and it plays a role in keeping stock prices high. The majority of people still believe this is the road to prosperity, that with lower interest rates businesses do better and banks do better and everyone is going to be happy. What the Fed does is just a form of central economic planning that this country and its business community have come to accept and that I reject.
I’m not happy with this, but this will be motivation to do something even more different in the near future.
I’m beginning to be at peace with not being able to control what songs I have in my brain at a given time. And, given that work is a pretty big chunk of my weekdays, this is a big thing to give up on.
I admit, I listened to Sarah McLachlan pretty much non-stop this morning, and I have a pair of Vertical Horizon songs stuck in my head, not even singles at that: “Candy Man” and “Sunrays and Saturdays.” I don’t even particularly like “Candy Man,” and “Sunrays” is kind of the quintescential (ooh, I miss my Firefox spellcheck) Amicable Breakup song.
I will barely even utter the name Rush anymore, after “The Spirit of Radio” being stuck in my head for multiple days straight. I’m trying to type this paragraph as quickly as possible to avoid that happening again.
“Sunrays” even includes “We’ll get to know ourselves again” in the lyrics, just to show how quintescintially (ha!) it is a breakup song. That’s the part that just played in my head, and I think the CD has a skip.
I have trouble getting Mute Math stuck in my head, and that is generally what I’m after this week. So, we’ll see how things end up by Thursday.
I didn’t realize just how slooooow bzip2 is, especially on a very limited 800MHz computer. Don’t back up a few gigs of mail with it right before you’re planning to get to bed.
Or, just count on the Cowboys to drag the game into overtime to give the tarball time to be created.
Could we just make a decision on the subjunctive in English, because I only use it for one of three reasons:
In other news, I have very lengthy, varied, maniacal dreams. Part of the festivities last night involved Meta renouncing rap to embrace soft rock ballads. I thought that was pretty hilarious.
It’s already clear I should have bitten the bullet today and gotten in at 6 AM.
Definitely setting up for a long day today.
For the record, I am sick of this site design. Woof!
As EZ-E (as a true accountant) could tell you on more certain terms than I, the first few days of the month are extremely busy on the financial side, especially at the quarter boundaries.
However, as a Business Analyst in my role, there isn’t a whole lot to do until all of the accounting is finished, which means this is a top-notch opportunity for long-term projects (as are the last few days of the month).
But, I don’t have the tools yet to do what I want to do. So, it’s a little awkward until things get into a better flow.
Most of my project ideas either involve programming or a spaghetti-bowl of beaurocracy. I’ll let you guess which one of the two I’m most excited about.
My first success was found with VBScript, which I would say is a bit ignominious. After browsing around on the web for other ideas, it seems like it would be best to stick with this cute little toy language for the duration.
This opinion seems confirmed in that VBScript is one of the only languages known to many commercial (finance/accounting/etc.) employees, as it is the language of Excel macros. What else would I use? COBOL?
I wanted to use Python, since it is database-friendly, knows how to speak in CSV (comma separated values), and has some formidable string processing functions, but it’s just too hard to deploy under lockdown. There’s this “Moveable Python” distribution that costs 5 GBP via Paypal (lets you run Python sandboxed on a USB stick), but… meh.
Perhaps the best way to kill a quality project in the business world is to get overly esoteric. Dogfooding is the ethic at Microsoft, but in the non-tech world you’re expected to recycle your used dogfood. I’ll let the mental picture be all yours.
The story with SAP, et al., is that any well-trained squad of monkies can fill it up with data. Perhaps a better-trained ape could get the data out in the same form it was inputted. Once it’s familiar, it’s not that hard.
The trick is assimilation, explanation… the coveted “slice and dice.” With a good mix of data processing programming, some Excel automation, and database skills, you can really tear it up in making these things happen.
I’ll tell you the truth, and I’ll tell you this is widespread: many of the most “advanced” usage cases of SAP-based data assimilation are done via MS Access. Like, SAP-to-Data Warehouse-to-ODBC-to-Access-to-Query. Someone in Germany should be held accountable.