:: Venting Insanity ::

:: Friday, July 25, 2003 ::

really tired
I have news stories, but I already posted a bunch of them on my forum, so you'll just have to go look there if you want to see them. I'm too tired to post them double.

long day
It's surprising how tired being bored can make you. I actually started playing a game of solitaire today between trying to look busy so Ken didn't get pissed. But, since Diane won't give me work to do, I have no choice but to sit there and pretend to be busy.

Of course, I did get a few more things over the past few days. Now, I write up the dictated letters, put together manuals, file the spec sheets and control sheets, enter them into this archaic method of using a Word document as a database... Yeah. Everything's in Word documents. Someone got the bright idea to write it up that way instead of putting it in a spreadsheet or a real database.

It's the worst method ever.

There's a million things I could do with it, but they've sold like hundreds of machines a year since the mid '70's. There's no possible way of actually fixing the problem unless I work some severe overtime. Maybe I will someday. We'll see how it goes.

In the meantime, it's extremely confusing in it's current form. They have different customer lists that are sorted in different ways. All they need is a good SQL Db with a few tables and some well written queries to sort the whole damn thing out. I could probably write them a nice little VB program that integrates with Access to make one. I just need to do it when I have nothing else to do. Unfortunately, my spurts of boredom aren't long enough and are interrupted too often to do anything like that in a constructive manner.

I'm still having trouble concentrating on getting Word to use a VB Script macro to automate printing serial number labels. Of course, it doesn't help that don't have any help files installed for me to research it with. The MSDN library website sucks as far as older versions goes, too. Everything they have works with Visual Basic.NET and Office XP. We have Office 2000 and the Script editor is a watered down version of VB 6.0. The documentation is there, but it's hard to fish through the links. Half of them point to the documents' old locations.

anyway
Anyway, we had a huge rush on work at the end of the day again. It's so slow in the morning, it's annoying. The printer didn't deliver the new paperwork for one of our machines until the end of the day, so we were rushed to put together a group of new literature packets to send out to the reps. Then, we had to print up labels and letters, stuff them all into envelopes, and try to stamp them. We stamped the local stuff, but the international stuff has to go to the post office. Ken said he'd do that Monday.

And here I was hoping I could go and do it... {{sigh}}

phone calls
John S called today! Yay! We talked online the other night, but he hasn't been home a lot. He spends a lot of time at his girlfriend's house. Of course, I'm not so sure what the deal is with that. He doesn't seem like he really *wants* to be majorly loyal to her. I'm getting hugely mixed signals here, and I'm not sure what to do on that.

snapple "real fact" # 161
The first TV network kids show in the U.S. was "Captain Kangaroo".