Chris

I'm slowly making changes to both our website's backend database and the SQL statements that the site uses.  For lo, I'm tired of it always being shitty, but the chances of me having a week to make sweeping changes are exceedingly low.

Today, I changed a query in the PHP:

From: INSERT INTO table VALUES ('name', 'email', null, null, 0)
To: INSERT INTO table (colName, colEmail, colUses) VALUES ('name', 'email', 0)

Why?

- Knowing where values are going is good.  Lord knows we don't comment anything around here.
- Makes it way easier to add or remove a column.
- Why waste time always inserting null values?
- It's good SQL practices, goddammit.

If this gets changed, then the part of me that's always annoyed by our site will be less annoyed.  And that will be Good.


In case you ever wondered what pleases me, this is an example.

I now have one virtual machine with GoldMine 8, ACT! 10, and Lotus Notes 8.

*blinky*

- Work today was good.  Finally got around to having that meeting about the bug tracker, which means hooray, implementation.  The tracker was developed with SQL Server 2k, but I'm using 2005, to get used to it.

- Amanda at Pandagon reviews the book Born to Buy, by Juliet Schor.  Excerpt: "I found the book to mostly be fascinating, especially the second part where Schor conducts a research study on two populations of children, one in the city of Boston and one in a suburb, to see what kind of effect this increasingly commercialization had on the well-being of children, and found strong evidence that kids who watch excessive amounts of TV and otherwise engage in excessive amounts of participation in marketing to children suffered strongly for it both physically and mentally, and more to the point, that the engagement with the commercial culture caused the depression, anti-social behavior, excessive weight gain, lowered grades and other ill effects on children."

Interesting.  My wishlist for books is incredibly huge.

- You know, I like bagpipes fine, and don't understand the antipathy towards them.

- I have 700 tags.  oO

- Whuh... why is Faye's shirt sparkly?  [eta] Uh.  Well, it was sparky...

So at work, I've been, among other things, cleaning up addresses.  Getting countries to conform to three-letter abbreviations, doing the same for states/cantons/provinces/&c, and so forth.

I took a nap today, and dreamt about the queries I was using to restrict the results to just what needed cleaning up.

I... yeah.

* Magic is doing well.  She had a brief period of diarrhea, but that was largely due to me switching her to Purina Naturals.  It's $5/bag, but she goes through a bag every two to three weeks, so whatevs.  Her appointment today was fine; they said she's looking better.

* I am ignorant of VMware, so imagine my surprise when I found that there's a "How much memory does this use?" setting.  I scaled it back, and lo!  VMware no longer eats memory on my computer nearly as much as it used to!  I now have a thoroughly useless pile of shit sitting under my desk.

* I'M KNITTING TEETH!  Ooo.

* I may have a laptop!  A functioning laptop!  Ooo.