[Rant] Minor Rant III: For a Few Hollers More

My County does emissions inspections it's 45 bucks for it, if I lived one County over they don't do emissions and the inspection is 20 bucks
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Boy I sure love nagivating the minefield that is telling the owner that his wants are unreasonable. I get told at 10:15 that Owner wants a multi-way conference call that takes place at 11 to be video.

We don't own any webcams. It'd have taken me an hour just to go down to best buy and buy some. And even if I busted my hump and got that done, we'd have had to set up skype (and get the not-here people to do the same) and just cross our fingers that it'd all just work the first time.
 
Boy I sure love nagivating the minefield that is telling the owner that his wants are unreasonable. I get told at 10:15 that Owner wants a multi-way conference call that takes place at 11 to be video.

We don't own any webcams. It'd have taken me an hour just to go down to best buy and buy some. And even if I busted my hump and got that done, we'd have had to set up skype (and get the not-here people to do the same) and just cross our fingers that it'd all just work the first time.
And after all that, assuming everything fell into place and video was working, it would likely add nothing to the conference call.
 
Got bloodwork back from hospital on my wife. Apparently, her body has decided to reject her childhood rubella vaccination? I guess? Either way, she's showing negative for Rubella antibodies. And Rubella is bad ju-ju for pregnant women.

So she has to get the vaccination again, we have to wait 3 months to get cleared, and THEN she can get implanted with this embryo... I really feel for the poor family in Denmark... these folks have already waited 6 months in this program... I just want them to be able to hold their baby...
 

fade

Staff member
My daughter's teacher's son died this morning. He was 13. He had a four-wheeler accident over the weekend. It's funny--I'm choking up about it, and I don't even know the family beyond open house night. It just seems so needless.
 
My daughter's teacher's son died this morning. He was 13. He had a four-wheeler accident over the weekend. It's funny--I'm choking up about it, and I don't even know the family beyond open house night. It just seems so needless.
Nothing shakes a parent more than news like this, especially as the number of similarities between your kid and their kid increases.

--Patrick
 
Our DBA needs to be stripped of her access and then shot (non-fatally, so she can think about her actions), and she needs to never ever ever be able to ever ever touch SQL ever again, no matter what company she works at. Ever. Over the weekend she decided that she really needed to change a price-related feature on a cabinet (which she's not supposed to be touching, because making changes to the pricing breaks everything and she's been warned more times than anyone should ever have to be warned), which, because she changed it, broke everything, so engineering couldn't save drawings all day Sunday and for the first three hours today. In fact, we almost had to send all of the engineers home early, because they couldn't do anything. But she got it fixed just in time for them to get some work done. Then she changed something else. We're not sure what she changed yet. All we know is that every single part in our system that has a "height" dimension is now 30" tall. All cabinets, 30" tall. All doors, 30" tall. All drawer fronts, 30" tall. You want an 8' tall wardrobe cabinet? Best I can do is 30". You need a light valance at the top of your cabinets that's 5" tall? Sorry, you get a 30" tall light valance. Now, everything that's already drawn is safe, unless the drawings are opened and re-saved, at which point the dimensions automatically revert to... 30", but we can't run any of that through the saws, because the saw program will open all of the drawing and machine code files and change the height on everything to 30", so we can't run the saws tomorrow. The only way to fix this (reasonably), is to roll back to yesterday's db backup (at which point we'll have to re-fix the pricing issue from Sunday). Why the fuck do people allow this woman to touch SQL?
 
Our DBA needs to be stripped of her access and then shot (non-fatally, so she can think about her actions), and she needs to never ever ever be able to ever ever touch SQL ever again, no matter what company she works at. Ever. Over the weekend she decided that she really needed to change a price-related feature on a cabinet (which she's not supposed to be touching, because making changes to the pricing breaks everything and she's been warned more times than anyone should ever have to be warned), which, because she changed it, broke everything, so engineering couldn't save drawings all day Sunday and for the first three hours today. In fact, we almost had to send all of the engineers home early, because they couldn't do anything. But she got it fixed just in time for them to get some work done. Then she changed something else. We're not sure what she changed yet. All we know is that every single part in our system that has a "height" dimension is now 30" tall. All cabinets, 30" tall. All doors, 30" tall. All drawer fronts, 30" tall. You want an 8' tall wardrobe cabinet? Best I can do is 30". You need a light valance at the top of your cabinets that's 5" tall? Sorry, you get a 30" tall light valance. Now, everything that's already drawn is safe, unless the drawings are opened and re-saved, at which point the dimensions automatically revert to... 30", but we can't run any of that through the saws, because the saw program will open all of the drawing and machine code files and change the height on everything to 30", so we can't run the saws tomorrow. The only way to fix this (reasonably), is to roll back to yesterday's db backup (at which point we'll have to re-fix the pricing issue from Sunday). Why the fuck do people allow this woman to touch SQL?
I'm sorry, I know this must be frustrating for you... but shit that's hilarious. :D
 
Oh believe me, if this hadn't come at the end of 51 days of complete and utter bullshit coming at us from all directions, it would be funny. Just like our finding out that if the engineering modeling system didn't have a specific part, it would default to something it did have, by discovering that 250 cabinets couldn't be pushed to the shop last week because we didn't have the right boardstock would have been funny. Or, like finding out that the system includes cabinets that have been shipped complete when figuring demand for materials for the rest of the job would have been funny. Or, like finding out that we can't even specify which specific job materials are for on the PO/receiving side of the system because "it doesn't matter what job something is for, so long as we have enough material for the day", would have been... no, that was always fucking stupid.
 
Mind, this is the same DBA who set up custom views in the new system using SQL "SELECT" queries that she swore she had worked with the software developers on, and they couldn't possibly be the cause of all of the slowdowns we'd been experiencing for the first 5 weeks after launch (but isn't it odd that every company she's worked at has had these same issues because their code wasn't optimized right after a major launch), only to have us hand her scripts over to the devs and the devs say, and I elaborate:
  • "What the fuck is this shit?"
  • "Why are there so many loops in here?"
  • "Why would you convert Int to String here?!"
  • "Why are these dates set up as Strings instead of DateTimes?!"
I don't think she's ever met a loop termination clause that she likes (or understands). And, though I truly, truly pray that the day never comes, part of me cannot wait until she tries to delete a row and kills the whole table, or the whole database.
 
That she wouldn't have access would imply that we had another database for her to work on. A database like, I don't know, Test?
 
A lot of companies have a developer database and a production one for exactly this reason
Yes, and we should have a test database, but the people in charge of the new software (our conversion team and DBA) have apparently decided that it would be too much work to maintain two databases, so we'll just do everything in Prod. What could go wrong?
 
I love sharing your rants with my husband because he's a programmer and he gets violent twitches reading them.
 
See, I'm a programmer and I don't get twitchy reading these, but that's only because it reassures me that no matter what I do, there's someone out there working hard to make me look good. (Don't get me wrong - I am good. But the contrast these people provide moves me from "good" to "wizard like".)
 
Yes, and we should have a test database, but the people in charge of the new software (our conversion team and DBA) have apparently decided that it would be too much work to maintain two databases, so we'll just do everything in Prod. What could go wrong?
runs nightly:
BACKUP DATABASE <dbname> to disk ='D:\DB Backups\<dbname>.bak'

runs weekly:
RESTORE DATABASE <test_dbname> FROM DISK='D:\DB Backups\<dbname>.bak'

I get a nightly backup. I get a fresh test database weekly. Runs automatically in SQL Server Agent. So much trouble. ;) (of course, the actual SQL is only slightly more complicated than that. But only slightly. I think I wrote it in 5 minutes. And I'm not a DBA).
 
runs nightly:
BACKUP DATABASE <dbname> to disk ='D:\DB Backups\<dbname>.bak'

runs weekly:
RESTORE DATABASE <test_dbname> FROM DISK='D:\DB Backups\<dbname>.bak'

I get a nightly backup. I get a fresh test database weekly. Runs automatically in SQL Server Agent. So much trouble. ;) (of course, the actual SQL is only slightly more complicated than that. But only slightly. I think I wrote it in 5 minutes. And I'm not a DBA).
But people are incompetent and a google search is too hard.
 
My mom just gave me my brother's old Dreamcast from the attic, but the only game in the box was NBA 2k! HALP!
 

GasBandit

Staff member
My mom just gave me my brother's old Dreamcast from the attic, but the only game in the box was NBA 2k! HALP!
Oh man, I've got a ton of old dreamcast games (and a functioning dreamcast, last I checked).[DOUBLEPOST=1416943996,1416943926][/DOUBLEPOST]You can get a used copy of Soulcalibur for the dreamcast for under 10 bucks including shipping.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B00000K125/ref=dp_olp_used?ie=UTF8&condition=used[DOUBLEPOST=1416944054][/DOUBLEPOST]Same goes for Sonic Adventure (back when Sonic games were actually good)

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-list...?ie=UTF8&condition=used&qid=1416944009&sr=1-1
 
I could write a book about all of the problems we have around here, from computer systems that aren't really designed for the type of shop we run, to personnel problems, to the just ridiculous amount of rumor-mongering that goes on around here on a daily basis, to bizarre decisions by the county that require us to beam broadband from our neighboring building to our shop, because they won't allow CenturyLink to run fiber to us; but it would be a very boring book, in general.
 
I will say though, my company doesn't have a development database. They just trust us to quintuple check any non select statements before we execute them and it's worked as long as I've been there.
 
Had what seemed to be a cardiac event while driving home. Apparently, my blood sugar is 427 right now. Waiting on a ride to the ER because I can't drive myself and my wife's car decided it doesn't like batteries. But the paramedics and firefighters were nice. Whee.
 

Cajungal

Staff member
Had what seemed to be a cardiac event while driving home. Apparently, my blood sugar is 427 right now. Waiting on a ride to the ER because I can't drive myself and my wife's car decided it doesn't like batteries. But the paramedics and firefighters were nice. Whee.
Jesus man, keep us posted. Feel better!
 
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