How much nothing can one man take?

Sitting here in a sea of productivity, I have become a fainéant. I got so desperate to do something I got work from my dad. I am trying to automate a process of formatting a word document. I could figure it out if I wanted to, but I really need a book to do it. It is a lot easier to manipulate excel, due to the cell like structure as apposed tot the free flowing word document. Anyway, I am going to tell him that it can be done, but I can’t do it.

I have some good news; I got a ticket for Saturday to Fly from here to Columbus on Jet Blue. This means I will not be on the bus on the way there, but I will be on it on the way back. I had a great time at Yale last night as well. Wendy is great. She told me to talk to Ron about tails, and to mention that I have been taking with her for a while, and that she said that he could make me an excellent suit. The best suits she said were from an English company and they require a certain number of fittings to do it. We will talk on Saturday. I spoke to the Yale people and they have to move their comp to Sunday instead of Saturday. They should have updated their website with the info. I already updated it on our site. They had an issue with the gym. They believe that the shoes damage their floor and they will not let them use it. The Yalees were interested how we had so many people, how we get funding, space issues, as well as the way other things are structured on our team. Yale is a great team, and really friendly. I felt very welcome ever time I have gone, and I look forward to our two teams working together.

As you can tell I have lots of time to ramble about whatever pops into my head. For example, it really bothers me that our building has no windows. How am I supposed to know the weather, and if it has gotten dark yet? Time gets distorted when you sit inside with only artificial lighting illuminating my dreary workspace.

I could write more, but I am going to go find stuff for me to do.

Ahhhhhh!!!

I just got in and found out my boss is going to be out today and
tomorrow. I thought it was bad when he was out an e-mailed me an
assignment. I did not even get that. That means I have two full days
where I really have nothing to do and no potential to do anything
either. At least I got my trusty new iPod Shuffle to listen to
podcasts. I even brought my lunch today to be here all day so when my
boss walks by at least I would be here all the time. Now that was
pointless. Might as well go to the park, and take a walk down the
beach for lunch.

Now I got the egregious task of figuring out how to look busy without
just surfing the net or just staring at an access database, making it
seem like I first know what I am doing ans second that I am actually
doing something. At least I learned that if I use word to type my
e-mails first it would give the appearance that these rants are in
some way productive to my job, which so far has not amounted to much.
Well at least this gives me some time to write up some things about
the web 2.0 league thing. We just got to make sure that the site
would not obfuscate people how to use it. It should be an intuitive
interface that is easy to use.

So Boagworld keeps pounding in my head web standards are the only way
to go. Variable width is the preferred way have a website, but a
fixed width will do if you have your reasons. Sorry that was just a
rant (unlike the rest of the e-mail which is me bloviating (apparently
this word in not in the word dictionary).

Well back to looking busy to try and figure out how to look busy.

Paid for bordom

So I have been sitting here starring off into space for about an hour
and a half. I did 20 minutes worth of work today after my boss came
over and tried to do something and then left me to figure it out. I
did that real quick and have been basically been sitting here running
queries in different way and seeing I get the same result. I have
also been able to catch up on almost all the podcasts that I have
missed in the last few weeks, as well as those from before I started
listening to podcast that I wanted to listen to. So really, I am
getting paid to stare at a screen, and listen, to how to use a mac,
linux and develop and run websites. Apparently I am doing a good job.
My boss told my recruiter that I am doing an excellent job. I would
have never thought doing job is doing an excellent job. I wish all
jobs has this as a criteria for success.

Nothing to do

So, once again I am at work, and once again I am bored. I came in at
around 7:30 so I can leave before 4, but my boss does not get here
till 8:30-9. This means that because he gives me such simple tasks,
as setting up a table on Friday, I have nothing to do today while I
wait for him to show up. After that I have to figure out how to tell
him I have nothing to do. I figure I will kill some more time while
he comes to me, and asks how things are going. So this morning I was
able to set up my blog to accept e-mails as a form of submission. I
figured might as well post these pointless e-mails for anyone to see.
At lease I will give others with nothing to do a little useless tidbit
about my life. I also had time to look for a financial app for the
Mac, so I can start keeping track of all my finances. I was going to
spend my spare time here, to create an access database to do that on
my own, however my Mac would not like that. The version of openoffice
I use does not seem to like to import access databases into it. It
would have at least given me something to do for half an hour.

Well I got to get back to looking busy. At least I have my shuffle to
mask some of the conversation in the next row about the stupidest
things. I don't know how people that talk about what they do could
ever get a job here. I guess that is why the bosses sit away from the
employees. By the way I took my bottle of wine with me. If you are
interested, we can drink it on Saturday before Brown if you want.

Bored

So since I work in the same building as my dad, he has been coming
over to me and asking me if I know how to do things. It is a little
annoying since I have my own work to do sometimes when he comes over.
Plus he has his own people that should be doing his work. I will give
this to him, he comes to me when they can not figure it out. Anyway,
he wanted a way to convert pdf files to doc files, and I found one way
with a program that is apparently installed only on my computer.
Anyway, after it was done he was complaining that the files were not
quite what he wanted. He wanted all the header and footers to be
automatically made so that he can change it on one page and they all
change. He had a guy doing it by hand, and I suggested that he should
write a visual basic script to do that. I got these blank looks from
his and the other guy, and I knew that I had to get out of there. It
was almost as if I had said something so evil that they wanted to hurt
me. Apparently suggesting thing that make people feel stupid is not a
good idea. I did not realize that neither one of them had never wrote
a script before in VBA.

Anyway, I just had a problem in a spreadsheet that has over 20000
entries, and i wrote a little script to fix it, and it only took me
five minutes instead of prob two hours to change it manually. I love
knowing how to do these things. I wrote you because you prob know how
long people do things because they do it by hand instead of just
writing a little script to do it. Anyway, I really wrote this to kill
some time since I know have it thanks to my script.

Boreed (Alex's Responce)

That is a great story teddy. Its true, once you know how to use a
computer (ie program, script, etc) you become more productive than
those who dont

Boreed (My Responce)

I found out that the program I found works almost as well as the
people they were paying 50,000 to manualy redo pdf files into word
doc. for that kind of money I would have thought they could just buy
full adobe pdf software to do that for them from the source.
Companies do weird things.

SQL Question (Alex's responce)

Select price from table two except select price from table one.

If the except command does not work, try this:

Select price from table two where not exists (Select * from table one
where two.id=one.id)

It should be something like that.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/office/program/access/default.aspx