The Tao of Jace

At some point in the last two weeks, Amazon unleashed a vinyl store, and I’m just finding out about it today. In case you were wondering, there goes my afternoon.

We have a help desk here at my company. It’s a help desk that all users of the entire global operation can call for things like password resets, email server issues, connectivity issues, etc. For years this help desk was located at a typical midwestern town in Ohio. Recently, our service provider has begun outsourcing the first option (password resets, outages and printer problems) to some unknown company in India (probably Sitel, but I’m not too sure about that). The associates in India are, shall we say, incompetent, at best. What once took a five minute phone call now takes 75 minutes on the phone with a hardly understandable individual and a day to replicate through the clouds of networks.

The vendor contracted to service our company’s computer needs, however, is not the only company to do this. We have begun outsourcing some pieces of our processes. I think this is one of the poorest ideas a company can implement. Customer service is immediately presented as a second thought when you are forced to speak to someone in a different country. It personifies a company’s greed. The customer should always take priority over saving a few dollars an hour. A company will protect a more loyal customer base, ensure a higher level of service quality and foster growth of new customers simply by refraining from outsourcing.

For those as yet unaware, the wedding went off without a hitch. Except for me and Mandy getting hitched, I guess. Wow, I didn’t used to write so bad. Shucks! It seems marriage has had a negative influence on my writing! Curious, to say the least.

One might think that such an important change in one’s life would give one an awful lot of material on which to write. One would be wrong. The only thing I really have to say is that if one more person asks what married life is like, I’ma have to go postal. Marriage is like, the same as it was before being married, except I don’t have to take Mandy to someone else’s house after a date. And we havea the sex with God’s blessing. And I can grab her butt in public, and, though she gets embarrassed, it’s totally legal.

The only weird thing is hearing “Mandy Gregg", and the occasional “Mrs. Gregg". It’s creepy. Her name’s Mandy and there’s no need to use her last name except in legal circumstances.

So that’s what’s going on with me. Oh and I got “promoted” to Operations Support Supervisor. It’s the same job with a little more money (about as much as I got on big OT paychecks, but salaried so I get ‘em all the time now) and a whole lot less to worry about (no clocking in and out for lunch, etc.). I’m still a corporate whore, though. Woot.

So, there has been a rare occasion in which boredom has set while I’m working in the office. Granted, after Nick and Robert left, boredom hasn’t shown up in a long while. But just before Nick took off, I decided it would be fun to build a chat program in MS Access. Yeah, Access. I’ve been working on this in any free time at home, so it hasn’t taken more than 8-12 hours of actual coding. But there’s a lot of this I’ve already built for other tools at work, so that’s not a real estimate of how much time went into it.

I probably know what you’re thinking. Things like, “Why would anyone use Access? For anything?” and this is a question I’ve asked many a time. Especially to managers in my company who complain about a lack of scalability and poor performance, though they insist on using Access for everything. I can say I have been rather impressed by what can be done in Access. You actually have the opportunity to build on a true enterprise scale if you’ll take the time to write the code and you don’t depend on access to create the link to the backend. This provides an impressive ability to scale even if you’re using an Access backend instead of a SQL Server (or Oracle, MySQL, etc.) backend. Twenty or more users can all access the application’s data at the same time without any noticeable delay, if you build the architecture. That being said, here’s a little more information about how the database and application work together:

Since they won’t give me a SQL Server to play with, and it’s against policy to put one together myself, I’ve built a fairly useful class to handle all interactions with backend Access files. It deals with location and login information for getting to and accessing the backend, SQL statements for all the updates and returning record sets, and that sort of thing. There’s a wrapper module, that I call mdlDatabase, that the application actually uses that sets the common database path and login information and this is the module that returns all the record sets to the application.

I’ve also got an encryption module that handles the standard issue encryption/decryption/hasing functionality. The login information is stored as a low-bit(40, I think) MD5 hash, and the display names use some weird encryption algorithm that isn’t too bad. No idea if it’s a standard or not, so it’s probably not, but it does use a common seed to start out the encryption and each letter after the first uses the previous letter’s encryption as a seed. Not incredibly sophisticated, but it’s not something people I have to deal with could break. I found both of these functions on the Internet and adapted them to meet my needs in mdlEncryption.

There’s another module that handles all of my common tasks. Here common means tasks that are common to all of my applications. Tasks like making sure the currently running instance is the most up to date version of the application (it checks the backend to see if there’s a new frontend available and where it’s located, then copies it to the local location and creates a VBScript to overwrite itself), some basic error handling, and a few other things.

I’ve got another module that handles application specific functions, so it’s basically a wrapper for any stored procedures (queries, really) that I need in the application. This module (mdlFunctions) is responsible for doing most of the work that the forms are used for like inserting a chat line in the database or getting the most current messages in a chat room.

Then I’ve got my user module. This module handles all my user specific things from informational requests like GetUserDisplayName, to updating passwords and creating new users in the database. This is the part that I’ve had to work most on for this database. I once built a class for handling this stuff that had a complete rights management sub-system that was role and right based. It was pretty slick, but I’ve changed the way UserIDs are based, so I started over. I’ll be adding this back before too long, though.

Right now the tool uses a single form to control and display a single chat room available to all users. I built the structure so that it can handle multiple rooms, but we haven’t had a need to use that yet. Next on the list of things to do include adding a private chat feature so two users can chat securely, adding a buddy list to show who’s active and inactive, adding preferences, adding a rights management system, adding a menu building system that will create a menu based on the user’s rights and preferences, and adding sound and visual indications of new messages.

Once again, I have to say I’m impressed by how much one can do in MS Access. You’re really only limited by your creativity and dll libraries. If there’s any interest, I can post some screenshots and maybe some code. If you’re interested, let me know in the comments.

It is high time that someone establish and promote excellence in verbal etiquette. That is, here’s a list of stupid things people do, and how to correct them:

1. Using pronouns without antecedents - I don’t know who the hell she is when our conversation has only just begun. Use names, as that is what those nifty inventions are for, jackass. See? That’s your new name, you know, if you think I can read through the vast emptiness of your mind, along with an example of how to use names.
2. Completely misunderstand your/you’re, their/there/they’re or its/it’s - The distinctions here are indeed subtle; but, with minimal application of your mental capacity, you too can figure this out. Just stop using contractions especially if you haven’t figured them out yet. Which is encouraging, seeing as most of the morons responsible for this faux pas are high school graduates. If you’re still having trouble, understand that your, their and its denote possession. That means there is some object or attribute in the sentence that belongs to the pronoun’s antecedent (see the point above). The only other thing to remember is that there will always be something you can point at, though your pointing may require the creation of various abstractions like graphs and time-lines. The other items are contractions and should be used accordingly.
3. Stop making assumptions regarding the knowledge of other people - I have a very specific example: Don’t expect me to know who all is on your team when you request some application for everyone on your team. There’s a whole lot of people on a whole lot of teams, and I don’t busy myself learning the position and association of each person to each team for the entire world. Disclose, plainly, who needs what so that I can get it done and get you off my back.
4. Quit driving so damn slow.
5. Use turn signals and turn lanes properly - you shouldn’t have to slow down in the traffic lane unless you’re in the presence of morons or other variations of the mentally inhibited, that is, most Midlanders. There is, however, no excuse for not following these guidelines when not submerged in a sea of stupidity.
6. Edit: Don’t ever interrupt someone - I’ve recently begun ending my side of dialog anytime someone interrupts me. If whatever it is you have to say is so much more important than what I was already saying, then please, by all means, share whatever trite comment is trickling through that canyon between your ears.

Following these simple guidelines will ensure that the net stupidity of the world is greatly decreased leading to happier, fuller lives for all of humanity. Or at least it’ll lower my blood pressure.