Ok - so I didn't do much with my free time while my wife was away visiting her new in-laws and I haven't done much since she was back.
I don't really consider myself in a slump - just not being terribly productive.
Yesterday, a seasoned professional (probably with 30+ years in IT) comes to my desk because he has heard that I know a fair bit about Access and he can't get it to import a 150MB text file as it is giving him some weird un-diagnosable error. I repeat the same steps he has and sure enough - the error message is nothing but gibberish.
I offer to verify that every record has the proper number of fields and also to truncate a particular field he suspects, but has no proof is the culprit. I indicate that I have *nix tools on my machine and he is interested in knowing how since they are "locked" down and chuckles saying he could do it if he had sed.
I reply with - why do it in sed when you have Perl.
You should have seen the look in his eyes when I began writing the program. You see - this was a get it done as quickly as possible so you can take your wife to the Social Security Administration Office type problem. I used every shortcut and then some. He looked at the resulting gibberish - mentioned a few programming lanugages I had never heard of and said - "that" is going to fix my problem?
It did ;-)
Re:first exposure
jdporter on 2004-09-15T16:26:07
RAD: Radiation Accumulated Dose
So perhaps more appropriate here would be:
REM: Roentgen Equivalent for Man
;-)
