For the last few weeks I’ve been baking bread. It’s been a lot of fun, and much of the bread has been great!
It started just before Christmas when we got a Kitchenaid mixer that my wife had wanted for a while. I decided to try it out on bread dough.
I’m in the middle of a long (6 months or more) project to upgrade all of my reports. I’m doing this for two major reasons. We’re gradually migrating the data warehouse from SQL Server 2000 to SQL Server 2005, and as I move my projects to a new 2005 server I’m trying to review my code to take advantage of new SQL 2005 features. At least as important is the fact that we’re in the process of putting in a new billing system, which means that most of the data sources for my programs are going to be changing.
Many of my programs involve pulling data from our data warehouse, manipulating it a bit, and presenting the results to the user. Because it can time to get data out of the data warehouse (anywhere from a few seconds to 30 minutes for more complicated queries), the program can easily look like its frozen while the user is waiting. In the case of Excel macros, a running query can freeze up not only Excel, but make the whole computer seem sluggish.
Read more . . .
I recently realized that next month (January, 2009) will mark my 30th anniversary in publishing.
I got my first publishing job in January, 1979, when I interviewed with the personnel director at G. P. Putnam’s. I had decided that there was no point in continuing with my graduate school studies (the job market was awful, and I was getting pretty tired of academia), so I had this vague notion of becoming an editor.
One of the programs that I’m happiest with is an Excel add-in that I call Sales Macros. It’s a set of Excel macros that I wrote to automate all sorts of tasks commonly performed by folks in the Sales department.
We have several different online systems that will provide information about our titles - but most of them work on one title at a time. So if a rep or a sales assistant needs, say, updated prices for a spreadsheet full of titles, she would need to look up each title individually. But with Sales Macros, the whole spreadsheet can be filled in with a single operation!