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Went to a Brewer game earlier today, Quinn's first. Went for a walk around the Terrace level with my brother-in-law Jeff and his daughter Shirley. Went through the children's play area, got some balloon animals (Quinn named his Rickie Weeks), and got our photo taken. Went to the Web site after the game to see how the picture turned out. Probably won't be ordering it.
Our basement can be damp sometimes - like after a torrential rain - but the corner where we keep the washer and dryer was always dry. So we put down a couple of sheets of linoleum on the floor, just to make it a little more welcoming if you wanted to shuffle loads of laundry in your socks.
Then we had a winter with near-record snow. And then the thaw, which brought water to the damp corner of the basement, and then some. Some water ran over by the dryer, and my wife foolishly decided to see if a lot had accumulated under the linoleum. She called me at work, anxious and disgusted.
A few days before this happened, I walked into the men's bathroom in our office one morning, only to find one of our staff - a woman - in there, pouring something down the drain in the middle of the floor. I related this disturbing incident to a few friends in the office, only to discover that one of them was no stranger to the custodial arts. "Ah, Backdown," he said. "I remember it well." I asked him how to deal with the mold problem. TSP? Sulfuric acid? Arson? Bleach, he said, mixed with water.
That evening, I pulled up a corner of the linoleum to see for myself. It looked liked a horde of caterpillars had gone there to die. It takes a fair amount to gross me out: I grew up on a farm with three brothers and I've worked in fast food. We have four cats in our house, I assume that every horizontal surface has been exposed to cat butt. And mold is friendly stuff, right? It struck me that if I could cultivate a species of mold that only ate cat vomit, my life would be vastly improved. So this mold didn't freak me out overly much, but it had to go.
We sent off our boy to spend the night with the grandparents. My wife gathered equipment for the expedition: rubber gloves, scrubbing brushes, contractor-grade garbage bags. Side note: if you need to dispose of something toxic, disturbing or otherwise embarrassing - say, 40 square feet of moldy linoleum - contractor-grade garbage bags are the way to go. Heck, you could dispose of contractors in them.
It's not often that we have an evening to ourselves, so we decided to go out for dinner. I failed to convince my wife that my cat-vomit-devouring mold business was a sure thing, despite a catchy name (Mold For The Home®). We had a beer to steel ourselves for the exciting Friday night we had in store. Then we headed home, suited up and headed down the basement stairs.
We've been thinking about moving to the suburbs next year, so maybe discussing the mold problem could come back to haunt us. More importantly, I should stress that I won't be putting any further effort into the designer mold business.
Honestly, the cleanup wasn't all that bad. We cut the linoleum up into strips, rolled it up and carefully placed it into the garbage bags. We kept spraying everything with the bleach to keep things from spreading, then we scrubbed the floor and hosed it down. For good measure, we then bleached, scrubbed and hosed everything a couple more times. Except for the bunny suits, we treated the whole process like an asbestos removal. (Which I have done before. No, not in this house - the only problem here is mold. And the damp basement. And cats. Maybe a few wolf spiders.)
My wife recently started a venture as a professional organizer. I think this is a perfect fit for her, and things look promising. Recently, she's been 'practicing' by working with family members to help them clean up clutter, and she's been taking before and after pictures as she goes.
Recently she was featured in an blog at OnMilwaukee.com. The article included a couple of photos of our niece's bedroom closet. When the article went online, my wife excitedly called people in the family and told them to take a look.
"Tell your brother that his daughter's bedroom is on the Internet," I said. "Hmmm... I guess that's not something that a parent would generally want to hear."The other day, there was a small breakthrough. We asked him why he wasn't eating something on his plate and he said he didn't like the taste. His mother and I beamed at him - I think we may have sent the wrong message.
On the other end of the spectrum, people who normally stick to Word, Excel and PowerPoint don't much care for Access either. The other day I was talking to someone at work who said she hated Access. To me, that's like saying "I hate this hammer" because I dropped it on my foot. You need to learn how to use it, and when to use something else. Granted, Access has a slightly steeper learning curve. OK, maybe using Access is like baking a pie, I dunno. Work with me, people.
I also work with Microsoft SQL at work, as that's what powers our clients' databases. (There's a learning curve for you - it's like trying to figure out the controls of a Russian nuclear submarine.) MS SQL has a feature called DTS (Data Transformation Services) that we use to export data from these databases to various Web sites. You design a query to select the data you need, then you export it and ftp it to the Web site.
When I put together a query for a DTS package, I often build the query in Access first, since I'm more comfortable with Access. Then I have to translate the query into SQL, since Access uses some SQL commands, but the syntax is usually different. And Access has some functions that don't directly translate to SQL. Once I translate the Access query into proper SQL, I can compare the results to make sure I've done it right.
You can imagine my surprise when I discovered an Access query that executed faster than its SQL equivalent.
The difference seems to be an Access function that doesn't have an exact equivalent in MS SQL. In this particular case, there's a field called 'product_code' which may contain a space (such as ABCD EFGH): if it does, I want to ignore the stuff that comes after the space (so the query should return ABCD). In Access, I used the InStr function. If there's a space in the product_code, make a note of where that space is, then truncate the product code at that space:
Product_Code2: IIf(InStr(1,[Product_code]," "),Left([Product_Code],InStr(1,[Product_Code]," ")),[product_code])
For example, given ABCD EFGH, the space is the fifth character. The 'Left' function will then take the first 5 characters of the product code. Even as I type this, I realize that I screwed up - I should be taking the first 4 characters, not 5. But you get the idea.
In MS SQL, I used the CHARINDEX function. The end result is the same, but CHARINDEX apparently is slightly slower at finding the space.
Product_Code2 = Case When CHARINDEX(' ',a.PRODUCT_CODE) > 0 then LEFT(a.PRODUCT_CODE,(CHARINDEX(' ',a.PRODUCT_CODE))) else a.PRODUCT_CODE
Somehow, Access is faster at finding the space in that string of text.
I called over my friend Scott, one of those people who generally looks down upon Access. He stared at the code for a while, then walked away wordlessly. But I didn't crow about it - after all, I work in IT, which essentially means that I am always wrong. If the Access query is faster, that just means that I didn't do a good job designing the SQL query.
When we first become aware of evil, it's pretty simple: That bad kid took my toy. Maturity forces us to confront more evils: teachers scold, bands sell out, lovers betray, politicians lie, nations oppress, mechanics smirk, hospitals gouge, tax assessors scheme, termites eat.
But it appears that older people start to see things in simpler terms again, and evils fall into a distinct pecking order. Eventually they coalesce into a single point of darkness, from which all evil emanates. My mother-in-law blames hip hop. My friend Pablo's dad blames everything on Al Gore. Another curmudgeon I know points to badly formatted HTML.
I like to think I'm a couple of decades from choosing my personal Root of All Evil, and a lot could change by then. I suspect I'll blame nanobots, climactic change, or maybe the zombies. Then again, I think all of these will be traceable back to Karl Rove.
