I'm resolved to post more frequently to my blog. Why not? Afterall, I'm pretty sure no one else is reading it but me, especially after how infrequent my posting has been. Perhaps I'll just use this as a repository to store my credit card numbers so that I can get to them from anywhere I have access, without having to carry them.

It's almost noon on a Saturday. I've been up close to three hours, but probably longer. I had to get up at 6 and feed the cat a pill before taking her to the vet at 10 today. I also am wrestling with a problem in my head that's been preventing me from sleeping... my job.

I work for a large church in Communications and Information Technology. We just got a new piece of software called EMS Enterprise. EMS stands for Events Management System and Enterprise is the fanciest version. It's from Dean Evans and Associates. I only mention this so that if someone's searching and finds this website, maybe they'll be able to offer me some suggestions on how to improve the system.

We had EMS Professional before and I guess it worked well enough. But, it's labor intensive scheduling everything for the church, so we're trying to automate the system and allow departments to do some more of the legwork themselves, but seeing what's available and putting in requests via the web. The only problem is that the Windows client for EMS is so much more robust than the web version, so we're trying to figure out how we can improve it. Fortunately, Enterprise uses SQL so we can go in behind the scenes and add some of the functionality we want. Unfortunately, I'm a real novice with SQL and am having to learn as I go.

Some of the problems we're coming up against is that once you make a request, you can't add rooms or dates to the request via the website. Another is that the client has Visio support built-in, which lets us diagram each room. But the web doesn't, and we'd really like to move away from all the paper and let people do their room diagrams (for where chairs, tables, podiums, etc., should be) online as well. So we're trying to figure out how to get that stuff in and out of the database. (Which unfortunately takes attachments and actually puts them inside the database. Yikes.)

But today I'm sure I'll think of it some more as I do my readings for class (Database Management Theory, a beginner's course that teaches almost no SQL, at least so far). But it's a nice quiet day and I'm thinking of just putting in a movie and chilling as I try to beat the rest of this danged cold.

Cleaning out my mail today, I stumbled on this from my friend Kevin's brother Jeff. Kevin is currently in Kazakhstan with the Peace Corps. because some dared him and he couldn't think of a reason not to. Jeff and I were talking about what to send Kevin in care packages and I thought this little snippet was great, worth saving...

James; I have never met you, but I wanted you to know I feel I have met you from what my brother has told me about you. You ARE his best friend and our support from this end of the world will help him grow as he experiences this journey. One of the last things I told him was that I hope he finds what he is looking for: You know what? I know he will with this support you and I and his friends give him.