Why I Love My Job

I love my job. I like the people I work with, the work that I do, and the boss I report to. But wait, there's more!

You gotta love a job where people play cribbage at lunch and bring in Krispy Kreme donuts for coworkers to enjoy for free!

The idea behind this one was a fund raiser card... you spend $10 on a card that allows you to get a dozen regular glazed KK donuts when you buy a dozen.

Too bad I'm not supposed to have donuts.... :-(

Free "Black" - Christian Fiction / Suspese Novel

Ted Dekker has been kind enough to offer "Black" to be read for free, online. "Black" is part of the "The Circle" trilogy. The free ebook requires Macromedia Shockwave Player.

Caveate Lector: you'll want to read the other two books when you finish "Black".

I won't ruin it for you... We own all three, and Cathy has not finished yet, so all I can say is that I was stirred to consider how I am living my life as a Christian by the time I was partway through the third book.

And, I've really enjoyed the reading.

Oh, if you decide to purchase the books for yourself, there is a 50% coupon for "Black" on the web site (look under "special offers" when you click on "Black") and a $3 coupon for any book in the trilogoy.

Update on Cathy's Liver

OK, this news is a couple days old for those of you praying for Cathy... She got more results back from the doctor, and apparently she has "slightly elevated alpha proteins" which is a possible flag for liver cancer. It is only slightly elevated, and her sonogram showed nothing out of the ordinary, so we're not worried about it.

The big news is, contrary to her previous intentions, Cathy has scheduled herself for a liver biopsy. This will give us a much clearer picture of what to expect. If her liver is already damaged after having HCV less than two years, Cathy may decide to undergo the year treatment. This would involve weekly, self-administered shots of Pegasys (pegylated interferon alfa 2a) and Copegas (ribavirin). It's a good thing they're self-administered, as needles just plain freak me out. Recente studies (2004) indicate that the cure rate is about 46% for Cathy's HCV genotype.

We'll update you as we know more, of course.

New Way to Post Photos on Blogger

There's a way to post Blogger photos without going through the Hello Blogger Bot now.

Basically, when you create a post you can use the built-in image upload tool just by clickon the photo button (you know, the one that used to say they were working on it?).


This is a great improvement... and I am gratified that the very first uploaded photo was the cat Bruce. I'm hoping that means that categories are coming next.

Geeks and Nerds Are Better

One of our conversations about wedding photos grew into a discussion of how geeks make superior boyfrieds. I just got our wedding photos digitized and printed at Costco, right? While the resolution is not quite what I asked for (I'm hoping they'll make it right by re-scanning the negatives), we do have our wedding photos now. We got one CD with each roll of film, and during the course of explaining to Cathy why I was unsatisfied with the scan resolution of our photos the conversation turned to our early years of marriage and our engagement.

Cathy lived a very different life before she accepeted God's offer of forgiveness and rescuing from the sin that entangles all of us. As such, she knew some people who had also left an entirely different life behind to embrace the good news offered by Jesus Christ. Some of these friends are girls, and one of them was a bridesmaid.

Cathy brought up a conversation that these two ladies had while planning our wedding; apparently, they both thought that geeks would make better boyfriends. That is to say, they concluded that they used to think "bad boys" made for interesting boyfriends, but not for extended periods of time. For the man who is husband material, reach for the geek.

Naturally interested (I am a geek), I asked Cathy for some specifics. She indicated that your average geek would be interesting, interested in his woman, likely more intelligent, able to cope with true intimacy, and be a caring, concerend provider who intended to grow old with the woman who loves him. I added that geeks also had the advantage of holding successful, stable jobs; apparently that did come up in converstaion but was overshadowed by the interpersonal aspects of geek-girl relationships.

Coincidentally, the New Yord Daily News noted why some women select nerds as hubands (printer-friendly) and the benifits of doing so. Cathy doesn't wear t-shirts, or I would get her one of these (photo).

Free Wireless Internet at "It's a Grind"

I'm finding free wireless hotspots very appealing these days. I'm thinking about switching to Cingular Wireless for the wireless service... But, anyway, as the post title implies, I'm telling you about another free wirelss hotspot.

The coffee house franchise "It's a Grind" offers free wireless Internet access while you sip your coffee.

The location closest to us is open from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily, so Cathy & I may spend more time there. It's not too far out of the way from our communting route, and the combination of good coffee and wireless Internet access is quite a draw... :-)

More on "No Time"

Well, more of the same... I was forging ahead on emailing my SQL backup reports when, at 13:30 today, our customer service system stopped responding. I hear someone comlain, "hey, I can't log in!" This was followed by my manager saying, "hmm... did someone change /etc/profile? ... Oh, /lbin/copyex is not responding." A few seconds later, I discovered that the entire /lbin filesystem was just plain gone.

Three hours later, I think we've figured out what happened... two disks in our three-disk RAID5 array died within a minute of each other. In terms of probability, that's a fairly unlikely scenario.

(For the unitiated, non-UNIX / non-Apple user... that's bad. It's like setting up a backup for your hard disk drive, and having the hard disk and the backup go bad at the same time.)

It'll be a long weekend for somebody... And I was planning on blogging an insight I read in Mark 9. And, I have been so busy I haven't even been able to keep up with my friends. Maybe next week...

Update: it is 17:30... and our server is back up and running. Maybe I'll have a nice weekend afterall.

No Time!!

I have had absolutely no time recently! Our personal web site, http://leeandcathy.com, is terribly outdated; it just redirects to the blog for now. I had plans to install my own web photo album (to get away from possibly objectionable materials on some other photo sites) and to my this blog over. If Blogger doesn't get categories soon, I'm gonna scream, or write my own (but I don't have time).

At home, I am struggling to keep up with the cats, the remodeling, the dishes... whew... I need a vacation! Cathy is just as tapped out... I think tonight we'll take a break and watch a movie... maybe "Hitch" starring Will Smith.

Transact-SQL Backup Scripting

Boring technical stuff ahead...

Lord, have mercy! I just spent the entire day trying to update the SQL backup script we use at work. Since I wrote it, hardly anybody else around the office understood it.

I finally decided that the end user must be able to read the backup log and understand, at a glance, whether their backup worked or not. That took me a long time to do, but I finally managed to get a summary report that makes sense. It simply states "suceeded" or some other state with no further details. Frankly, I'm glad if most clients check their backups at all; I do not really expect them to read the backup report beyond the date and the status.

Previously, my coworkers would come get me everytime we went to restore a client's database since they did not understand the backup mechanism. I'm going to teach our in-house tech class next week, so I'll be planning on explaining how the restore works, and how to check the backups.

Next: automatically emailing the backup log to an end user from within Microsoft SQL Server; ugh!

Audio Blog phone number changed

If you were thinking about using Audioblogger, the phone number has changed to 415-856-0205, a San Francisco, CA number.