virtualadrian.com

So I sent myself a SOW to work on at home, and saw this in google ads. Apparently I should purchase a pig slaughtering device ….

I was poking around MSNBC.com reading about how our economy tanking is taking out other markets around the world, and then I ran into this picture…

Doesn’t it look like they’re all talking into Hot Dogs ?!!?! I couldn’t help but laugh at that…

I recently read David Allen’s Getting Things Done and it was a great book! Most of the books I read are techie books and I felt a bit foo foo reading a productivity book. Far be it for a sophisticated and intelligent nerd like myself to admit I needed administrative help. It wasn’t that I wasn’t gettin ‘r done coding wise, much to the contrary that was and is going great, however I have about 50,000 people needing 5 billion things from me at any given point in time. This could include sending an e-mail about some issue, contacting a customer, setting up a meeting, going to a meeting, turning some tax form in, paying a bill, etc. I honestly don’t know how I functioned prior to this read.

Now don’t get me wrong I had gone through the seven habits of highly effective people and tried to set up a little system based on that, but it hardly worked out well for me. I did not know how to capture the things I needed to do, where to put them without much effort, how to build a general filling/refference system and so on. I ended up mucking up my calendar with the things I had to accomplish(mostly Next Actions), I would have to rearrange my calendar every time I wanted to capture something… took too much effort and my calendar looked like a computer monitor after a good unexpected sneeze…

I knew for a while that I needed help I just didn’t know what type of help I needed. I had heard someone mention the whole GTD thing but I never really looked into it. Everyone always yakked about lifehacker.com, 43things.com and so on ( not that I am an avid reader of either site now, but the book was great ), I just never looked into it.

So down to business… The few things that I gleaned from the book that help me:

1. Have a collection device with you 24/7/365, you never know when you are going to get a call, idea or meet someone. For me this used to be a PDA ( old old old pocket PC ). I bought a case for it from http://www.proporta.com/, awesome site. I got a case that was crafted from aircraft aluminum and fit perfectly to my PDA, I even sat on it and nothing bad happened. Pre-iPhone I had that and my wallet in my back pockets and my phone & keys in the front ones. I wanted a case that was molded to my PDA, I didn’t need to store business cards and other junk in it. I just wanted something that was mildly bullet proof and snug. So I got this thing: Aluminium Case (HP iPAQ 2200 Series)

2. I use Outlook/Exchange 07 primarily since they’re both pretty feature rich and work provides it. Set up categories in your Mailbox much like the book shows(Example below). This will help you find things and keep a clean Inbox. Be sure to keep this simple, don’t go all out and set up 50 billion subcategories… after all… you want to remember where you put stuff. Also don’t be afraid of that delete key, I know how much crap you get that you don’t even need to read. Cc and Bcc should be disabled for some people… you know the ones I am talking about. The ones that like to blow smoke up everyones nose and copy half the stinking company or department just to prove self worth. Most of the time you have to reply to these folks just to save your own hide and copy everyone yourself,and thus perpetuating the Cc/Bcc curse, or you are one of the other victims that wasted one to two minutes of their lives,which you will NEVER get back, reading something you didn’t have to read.

3. Using Outlook you can right click E-Mails that you get and add “Follow Up” tasks. So try it. Right click an E-Mail, go to Follow-Up, hit Add Reminder ( I think, I’m doing this on my Mac and don’t feel like hitting the VPN ), there you can set when you want the system to remind you about this actionable e-mail. This again is a way of collecting, I used my PDA ( prior to the iPhone ) and task list to do #1, and this. So I have 2 collection methods. You don’t have to have a PDA or iPhone to implement this system, you can have a Franklin planner but for me it’s a great deal easier to be digital.

4. Create a physical filling system where you can put all the papers that land on your desk that are related to projects. Personally I have a folder for each project, performance reviews, and so on. I did this at home too and re-filed all the stuff I would have never found. I have Contracts, Home Related, Bank Related, Tax Related and so on. It is nice to have someone doing work on your house ask to see their estimate they didn’t believe they wrote and see the look on their face when you don’t even sweat finding it. I use Hanging Folders with Manilla folders inside them so I can just grab the Manilla folder and run. You do have to label an item twice but I like that way…

5. Set up a 3 Basket system on your desk. In Basket, In Progress Basket ( WATCH THIS CAREFULLY!!!! DO NOT LET THINGS BECOME STALE HERE AND STACK!!!! ), and Out-Basket.

6. Keep your calendar sacred. Do not crowd it with To-Do items. Set up your lists that the book tells you to for that.

7. I keep my Projects list, Next Actions, Errands, Calls etc. all as Tasks in Outlook. I sort by category and minimize projects if I don’t particularly care to see that list because my Next Actions is full. It’s pretty cool when you can give your boss an exact list of what you are working on. Right now I can tell you if I were at work on a Tuesday exactly what I would be up to… after glancing at my iPhone ( PDA previously )

So by now you are wondering why I called this GTD with the iPhone because I’ve managed to mention it only three times. Before we dive into that, I have to say this: Buy the GTD book linked above, the afore mentioned behaviors are only what I gleaned and your system may be radically different. At any rate here goes…

I used to have to carry a phone and a PDA, the iPhone now integrates with Exchange. I can get my E-Mail 24/7/365 from work and my personal account, and if you’re like me you have to control an urge to respond to some flamers until you get in the office and not wreck your personal time… but you can just take some Fukitol ( the joke ) and chill.

So now you have your Calendar, Mail, and Contacts in your pocket… but you still need your task list. Well that doesn’t really get delivered via the Enterprise Integration, I believe Tasks are only stored in Outlook and are not punched up to the Exchange box. Which presents a problem, if that is that case I want to shake whomever thought that up… But not to worry, there is a way around that.

Sign up for a ToodleDo account, this is an online personal management system. You can just use this if you don’t have Outlook/Exchange. So now you have to sync your Tasks in Outlook with this system. That is where the ToodledoSync Application comes in handy. You install that and it will take your Outlook tasks and punch them up to the web. Nifty! Now what? You need an iPhone App … I recommend Appigo ToDo, it’s ten bucks and it works. There are two free apps out there but I didn’t mess with them.

Doing those few things I have my Lists ( in the form of Task Lists ), calendar, email, capture device, iPod, phone etc. all in one device where previously I was carrying three to five. So far I am loving the iPhone.

That is all… time for me to go do some fishin’ … Comment with suggestions…

Yes… I’ve gone and done it. I dropped Verizon and went to ATT for the iPhone. So far I am loving the device… Then again I’ve only had it for a few hours however it looks like it has successfully replaced my previous iPod, phone and PDA. So

iPod +

=



My pockets feel so much lighter … in that there is only one device in them now and it cost a few hundred bucks….

So I went and installed Vista on my Mac Book Pro, moved a project I was working on to said Vista partition. Then I got the following error:

I tried a few of the suggestions found here :

http://geekswithblogs.net/marocanu2001/archive/2008/05/20/annoying-visual-studio-2008-little-bug.aspx

and a few other spots. I even installed a bunch of other IIS components … So I finally rebuilt the project. My project was working just fine… then I went and put it back in IIS. To create the Virtual Directory from Visual Studio I had to run it in admin mode :

So I did and then I restarted due to some update. When I got back I started Visual Studio and tried to load my solution, then BAM! Error was back… So what did I do? I started VS in Admin mode and reloaded the solution. Worked like a charm… If there’s some bug fix I’m missing or some other junk leave that in the comments… I can’t imagine I’m the first to find this.

On a side note … if you are looking to take screen shots in Windows with a MBP keyboard here are the shortcuts… rather some interesting articles

MBP specific:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1220

All:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1167

Also in Vista there is the Snipping Tool which can be rather usefull….

I had an interesting problem. I have to do a compare between our development database server and source control for all stored procedures and if needed sync them. So the way I was going to do it was to script out all stored procs and use WinDiff to compare the folder I dumped to from SQL Server and our Source Control folder. Problem was how do I script like 2000 ( yes two thousand ) stored procedures to individual files !? I am pretty sure that in Enterprise Manager you could just right click the whole selection and say script to files or something of the sort. In 2005 that functionality seems to be missing. Well it’s not… It just got moved. After some Googling ( yeah, that’s a verb now ), I found this blog :

http://blog.sqlauthority.com/2007/08/21/sql-server-2005-create-script-to-copy-database-schema-and-all-the-objects-stored-procedure-functions-triggers-tables-views-constraints-and-all-other-database-objects/

This shows how to script the database entirely, triggers, constraints, etc. I just wanted the procs. So what to do?? Well if you look through his tutorial, you don’t want all the objects in the database so where he tells you to check this box:

Don’t … Leave that blank since you don’t want all the objects.

The next screen will have a whole bunch of properties, I didn’t really touch those… least I don’t think I did. Just hit Next and you will arrive at this screen where you want to select Stored Procedures :

Hit Next to go to the following screen where you will see all of your stored procs. I chose Select All since that is what I needed but you can pick and choose here.

Once you have chosen which procs to script out you can hit Next. You will arrive at the last screen. This is where you specify a folder to script the stuff out to:

On this screen you want to specify that you want to Script to file, you want one File per object, and then the File name or in our case the directory. If you are doing file per object just put in something like C:\SQLDump\ . That will dump all your stored procs to that folder.

That’s it… just get ready to wait if you have a lot of procs. The server I did this on had a few thousand so that took like 5 minutes.

Two responses before the comments get posted

1. I took the screens off of our Dev server so thats why I blanked out some of the information.
2. If this seems painfully obvious to you I am sorry… I searched for how to do this and all I found was a lot of people complaining that they can’t script stuff out anymore and how SQL Server 2005 is a step back.

Anyway, if you want to compare what you scripted out with another source, just use WinDiff to compare directories. I had to use this Bulk Rename Utility to name the scripted files the same as the source files.

PS: Big thanks to Pinal Dave for the initial post on how to script that DB out that got me on the right track!!

I am not sure but if I did this on my motorcycle I wouldn’t be around for long :

So I had a recent need to take a bunch of rows that I select and turn them into columns so I could put a string together for a specific column. What am I talking about? Well say that you have a table called Employees.



(4 row(s) affected)


At this point say that what you want to throw back to your application is :

“Adrian, Ryan, Dan, Bruce are online!”

So you are probably thinking cursor in the stored proc or loop on the application side. That’s where we can use a recursive trick to save ourselves a bit of time and cursor writing. Don’t worry it’s not hard.

(1 row(s) affected)


That’s it no cursor or special stuff to do. It works because of the way you are assigning @EMPLOYEE_LIST to itself. Kinda like a recursive CTE… only without the CTE I have only done this in SQL Server 2005 so if it does not work in 2000, or 2008 ( although I would assume everything from 2005 should move up ) you may end up with a cursor or some loop.

Note: Watch the result set! I haven’t tried this with a few million rows, but I would assume you may bog down the CPU if you try to do this with a few thousand rows or something. The last thing you want is a few DBAs at your desk giving you the stare LOL

So I was watching this video on You-Tube

The dude is pretty funny so I watch his show. This is outrageous! I know I work for the competition but for crying out loud! How can you sue a brain damaged woman and her family and leave them in the poor house, and still sleep at night?

Message of the day STOP SHOPPING AT WAL-MART! Their products suck, most stores are a pit, and the company is EVIL! Quit giving these MONSTERS money! Here is the link to the article on CNN:

http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/03/25/walmart.insurance.battle/index.html