Joe's New Blog

Nothing special, this is just my third effort at writing a blog about my life and what goes on in it: Hobbies, cooking, work, maybe the occasional book or DVD review, and so forth. Nothing really noteworthy, but this is sort of a little subset of my world...

Friday, October 3, 2008

Yes, I'm still alive...

So, I've definitely not been keeping up on my hypothetical daily postings to the blog. But to review in general, I did find a job, doing database programming at Denton County MHMR, the mental health and mental retardation authority for the county. It pays just a little better than my old job back in Oregon, which is nice, and considering the fact that Texas doesn't have an income tax, I'm actually doing quite a bit better than I was back in Oregon from a financial point of view.

Musically, I've played with a couple of people around the area, but I've kind of dropped out of touch with them, unfortunately. I really should call back Alan, the one guy who I played with several times. He likes 60s and 70s sort of folky-rock, which is all right with me. Not really sure why I dropped out of touch with him, but it's been a couple of months since we talked. The other group I played with mostly did the sort of Def Leppard/ZZ Top kind of thing, which doesn't really appeal to me all that much. I'd really like to find a band that wants to do originals. Maybe I'll start perusing Craigslist again to see if anything comes up, or maybe I'll put up an ad myself.

The programming job I'm doing right now mostly entails me gutting a bunch of Access databases which my predecessor designed and moving them to SQL Server and ASP.net webpages. It seems that the guy who did the development before really didn't know a whole hell of a lot about database design or anything at all about writing actual code in Access. There are tons of temporary tables where there should just be queries, lots of episodes of pulling data out of the SQL server back-end database wholesale, then running sets of delete queries against the data to remove the parts he didn't want. And there are a ton of arcane steps to do things, because if it couldn't be automated in a simple macro with queries, he couldn't do it without user intervention. So most of the applications are getting completely rewritten from the ground up, because it's less work to start over than it would be to try to refactor them to make them work well and have normalized data. Definitely a chore, but they seem happy with the work I'm doing there.

I'm watching the baseball playoffs now, in addition to trying to get a few things caught up on my e-mail, but I do plan to actually keep up a little better with the blog in the future, though. For now, though, I'm outta here...

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