Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy

• Ok, I'm a poseur because I've never actually seen an episode of Ren and Stimpy (I saw part of one... the square one was eating cat poo or something), but I like the phrase. Anyhow, Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy... it's raining really hard outside.

AOL Time Warner News

• In talks with EMI to possibly sell its majority stake in Warner Music Group
  http://www.msnbc.com/news/876519.asp

Go Bruins!

• I got an 88 on my mid-term for Modern Database Management. I'm kinda ticked... I thought I did better, considering it was only 50 multiple choice questions. We had two hours and I did it in 28 minutes. Perhaps I should have spent a little more time on it. But it was dumb. No diagrams, no application or demonstration of the knowlege of concepts, just tricky questions about definitions. I mean, call me crazy, but some short essay questions, or some data modelling diagram interpretation questions would have been cooler, and I probably would have done better. Future classes where we're actually building SQL statements and databases will probably be better for me.

The Suckage that is Sprint PCS^TM

• Sprint PCS sucks in Detroit/Grand Rapids (click here)
  
• Sprint PCS sucks in Baltimore/Washington, D.C. (click here)
  
• Sprint PCS sucks in Austin (click here)
  
• Sprint PCS sucks in Los Angeles (click here)

Remnants of Work^TM

• So, still working on the EMS (Events Management System). They're selling a really crippled web version. I'm not sure why. But simple stuff... let's say that I create a Reservation and reserve five rooms. Then I find out I want another room? I can't add it to the event. How dumb is that? Well, I finished my "hack" today. I determined that EMS records the email address of the last person to log-in as a cookie. So I read that cookie, cross-reference the email address against the webusers database, cross that against the Reservations table and present the individual with all of their upcoming reservations, with all of the bookings listed. Then they type in the reservation number from the two events and it combines them into a single event, turning the status of the remaining event to "Pending-Combined" so that the Event Coordinators can review and make sure everything's still ok. The second reservation, which now has no bookings gets dumped, with a status of "Cancelled-Combined". This will help us run reports later to determine how many times people had to combine stuff. (DEA is promising to allow you to add rooms to an existing reservation in the next release of their software, but we figure that's close to a year off.)
• I also hacked their menu today. My boss' laugh is a mixture of concern and glee when he sees what I can con the program into doing. I found an undocumented table, played around with the settings and figured out how to add stuff in such a way that the desktop client (that controls much of the web administration) recognizes my changes and adds them in. I, for one, appreciate the flexibility that they've built in, though it's somewhat annoying because they will consider it a hack of their system, probably. As long as it doesn't void the maintenance contract.
• tomorrow the we're turning over the reservation request process to the admins in each department. Right now there are paper forms that everyone fills out and then one person inputs into the computer. Usually the paper forms have mistakes and are incomplete, so she spends a lot of her time following up with people. Now that they can see what's going on before they request and are really a lot more involved in the actual request problem, combined with the fact that the computer won't let you forget information, it's going to be a much better process. Before their training, we had to figure out how to take the years of upcoming events already in the system and reassign them to each user so when they logged in, they'd see their existing events. I eventually had to write an ASP page that read in each reservation from a given group into an array and then updated each one individually with SQL statements since the information required to find out which events were which were in two different tables. We spent a long time trying with JOINS and other SQL trickery to no avail. Oh well.
• EMS 2.2 finally added a "comments" field. We will use that to feed information into our website's calendar and into our print publications. Only the dumb thing is, there's no mechanism for changing it once it's gone live. So that's another routine I have to build tomorrow.
• And I still have the Visio room templates to work on. Again, well-integrated into the client, completely lacking on the web-side. I have to figure out how they are referenced in the database, figure out some way to copy them, allow the users to make changes and then somehow still get them back into the database so that Campus Services, Operations and Security have the room diagrams in the client where they need them for reporting. Anyone else worked on a project like this?
• Lastly, you must be wondering why all the detail about a program very few people use on a blog that no one reads. I'm hoping that someone searching for ways to better use EMS will come across it and ask me some questions. It's dumb, but I derive a lot of joy out of sharing information I've learned.