September 07, 04 by kenrich
Today was a little bit hectic. I guess that’s typical for the first day back after a 3-day weekend. I got two things accomplished today including one e-mail blast and fixing the re-ordering of records in a web form. Not really too much to crow about there. On the positive side, I did get a lot of work done on an automated spam mail processor, so that was pretty good.
One of our clients is having problems sending out e-mail. It’s the
weirdest thing because noone else is having the same problem including our employees who send out quite a bit of e-mails every day. I have tried contacting the RoadRunner support to get some indication of what might be going on. The error message she is seeing: “471 4.5.1 Please try again later”. What kind of error message is that? It gives no clue what the
possible error might be.
My old boss came back today unexpectedly. I think he had a meltdown on his computer at home or something. And he was planning on returning to our office a few times a year from his new home back east. So I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised.
September 06, 04 by kenrich
Today is the last day of our long weekend (Labor Day). On Saturday, I took my daughter to her first day of pre-school. She was very excited to finally be able to go to school. I will need to bring some school supplies with us the next time.
I haven’t been doing any programming this weekend. It has been a very relaxed weekend. On Friday I was troubleshooting some mail issues that one of my clients has been having. One problem was a banned IP address on our mail server and the other issue seems to be a problem with Time Warner/Roadrunner not accepting mail from our domain. Still trying to find the root of that problem.
I went shopping yesterday at the produce market and my wife bought 10
seedless watermelons and about 20 grapefruit. This is good because we both like them very much and they were very cheap. We spent the whole day yesterday going shopping all around here.
The weather here is very hot, about 95 degrees here yesterday. It looks to be much the same here today. We’re going to do a lot more shopping again today.
September 03, 04 by kenrich
So today I have been relegated to data entry because our clients are too lazy to use the site administration tools that we have setup for them. Course, I can’t put all of the blame on them. If I am guessing correctly, our boss probably didn’t even notify the client that these tools had been made available to them recently.
As is typical for Friday, my boss has a lot of little emergencies for me to work on. I am never lacking for work around here (which is a good thing.) I am definitely looking forward to the three-day weekend. Don’t really have any big plans yet, but one thing I plan to do is to get the new version of ASP Nuke launched (finally!)
I spent some time today unloading my Visual Studio project and then
clearing my cache and reloading it. All in an attempt to get our C-Sharp project to compile locally. Still not quite there, but I feel like I am making progress. I will probably need to start learning everying there is to know about Dot NET. It’s tough to market your job skills when the technologies you are proficient in are nearly 6 years old.
September 02, 04 by kenrich
Today is a pretty hectic day. It’s funny when people bring you 5 new
projects to work on at the same time and then act surprised when you don’t get it done in one day. Everytime a boss or project manager walks by me, I always hear… “Is it done yet?”. I am getting directions from 4 different people for 6 different projects. We have 4 generals here and only two soldiers.
The funny part is half the time I have no idea which project they are referring to. Sometimes I just pick one of my favorite projects (such as one which I have made some definiite progress on) and respond “yeah, almost done!”.
One thing my former boss did which was pretty cool was limit each of us to a specific division. But with all of the programmers who have left and with our new boss here - I am left to work on all different projects often at the same time. And my computer here is an old Pentium III - 1GHz which doesn’t allow me to open five different solutions in Visual Source Safe. Oh well, at least my boss
has a 3GHz Pentium IV with hyperthreading so he can send e-mails for new projects to me faster!
September 01, 04 by kenrich
Well, today finds me in my new role as e-mail blast administrator. This will be my role on every Wednesday from now on. Since a friend of mine just left the company to works somewhere else, the task has fallen upon me now. I can’t say it’s all that difficult. It simply involved cutting and pasting text from a Word file to an HTML and text e-mail and then cleaning up the formatting. I have most of the work done already. Currently, I am delayed because our mail server has gone down and I can’t get the information I need to finish the setup and mail the next person in the chain.
On the personal side, I have switched my attention from ASP Nut
temporarily to ASP Nuke (yeah, funny how my sites have a similar name
huh?) I haven’t made any updates to ASP Nuke (an open-source web portal application) in over a year and there are some major fixed that need to be made. Also, this new version will see the introduction of support for the MySQL database (a free database server for Windows and Linux).
I am going to give ASP Nuke a quick “once-over” and then build a package for Source Forge. It should generate a lot more traffic and attention for my site since the main drawback it currently has is that it only supports Microsoft SQL Server which costs quite a bit of money. Not exactly the type of thing you want to tie a free software project to.
