jarandhel

Just a reminder: if you can, today, please eat out at CPK.  They're hosting a region-wide (MD, VA, & DC) fundraiser for the ALS Association DC/MD/VA chapter.  Print out the flyer you'll find on my original post and give it to your server to have them donate 20% of your bill to help support people and families living with ALS in the region.  This is the second major non-profit I've worked at that works on fighting a particular disease, and I really have to say that I'm astounded by the efforts this organization makes to actually help the people directly and indirectly affected by Lou Gehrig's Disease.  As an employee of this Chapter, I've personally gone to people's houses to drop off free health-care equipment for them to use.  That's the kind of thing donating to the ALS Association will enable us to continue, and it won't cost you anything beyond the price of your meal.  So, if you can, grab a friend or two and head on over to CPK sometime today.  Both I, and the people you'll be helping, will appreciate it.

I'm probably not going to be posting from work for the foreseeable future, unless it's via email. Livejournal has been blocked by my work. This has happened before, and always cleared up within a few days, but this latest blocking has been going on for a while now. I'm not sure when, if ever, livejournal will be available to me from work again. So don't look for many posts or comments from me during business hours. I am attempting to arrange things so that, in case of emergency (should I need to notify as many of my friends as possible quickly), I can still post to LJ via email, but I won't be able to see my friends list from work at all.

1) I do really well when I stop thinking about what I can or can't do, what I do or don't know, and just jump in and focus on finding a way to do something.
2) I do even better when someone tells me the thing I want to do can't be done, when I damn well know it can be and is actually not that hard.
3) Awk is a very simple and nice language to program in when you're dealing with parsing a text file full of fields of different information into a more easily understandable format or auditing various data points within such a file.
4) Awk does, however, have two main weak points I've found: a) its support for multidimensional arrays sucks ass; concatenating subscripts into a single subscript is an ass-backwards way to provide (pseudo)multidimensionality. b) It doesn't seem to iterate through arrays in a logical order when using the "for (x in array) {do}" syntax, going neither numerically nor in the order they were originally created.
5) It's not hard to port a simple shell script using awk over to Windows.
6) The ability to do this does, however, suddenly make you a computer expert in the eyes of Windows users, to the point that immediately after demonstrating the script people will start saying they need to get you to their house to take a look at their virus-infected Windows machine for them.
7) IT staff at my job apparently prefer to tell my boss something can't be done if they can't do it using the tools they are most comfortable with rather than seeking out ways to do it.
8) People in office jobs seem very confused by technology, even things they use on a daily basis. My boss was not aware you could paste multiple email addresses into a groupwise email in one go. (It just requires semicolon delimitation.) By providing a script that collates a pdf full of email fields amidst other information into multiple semicolon-delimited lists of email addresses, I've made it so we can just copy and paste an entire events worth of participants into a single email in a couple quick motions, rather than needing to transcribe them by hand from a printout. This vastly increases our productivity, decreases our error rate, and the script even counts them for us so we don't have to go back and do it by hand to record on our logs. Oh, and it picks out those accounts who don't have email addresses but have asked us to mail them, so we can research them quickly and easily rather than needing to spot them on our own.

Have I mentioned that if they gave this project to anyone but me, they'd probably still be counting the 2478 participants in the first pdf report we received by hand? My script, even in its more basic original form, allowed me to count all of the participants for each event, separate them into four categories for the four kinds of packets we are mailing, and start fulfillment for them about five minutes after I got the report rather than sitting around counting all of them by hand while already in a major time-crunch to start mailing.

Geeks rule. ;-)

Edited because I just realized that I forgot to include the thing that made me start writing this post in the first place:

5.5) When porting an awk script to run on windows from a Mac, one finds that tab formatting is not universal, and an entirely different number of tabs is required on Windows in order to make it display the same way it does on the Mac with the original number of tabs. Also, every quotation mark needs to be filled out in triplicate. ;-)

Hey guys, just wanted to let people know that I'm not going to be available much tonight. Just got assigned to a new project at work and while it comes with a dollar an hour raise it also comes with a LOT of prep work, particularly in the next couple days. I'm probably going to be up to my eyeballs in it once I get home. Sorry if I drop off the radar for a little bit, this is just taking priority at the moment.

I'm not going to be around much this week, thought I should give people a quick heads up before I disappear, starting this evening. I have a truly insane work schedule:

Tonight, I start work at 8pm in Manassas. That's about an hour, maybe an hour and a half away, depending on traffic. It's at a Borders, so I'll probably get out of there around 2am. Home by 2:30 (that time of night, no traffic to contend with, so a MUCH shorter trip than during the day.)

Tomorrow morning, I have work at 7am at the Pentagon City Mall. (Champs). No idea how long that will take.

Tomorrow evening, I have work at 9:30pm at the Pentagon City Mall. (Limited). Also no idea how long that will take. Or how much sleep I will have managed to steal in between these three sessions.

Tuesday, blessedly, I have off. People may actually see me then, if I don't spend all day unconscious.

Wednesday starts the Nightmare. Wednesday Morning I have work at 6am at JC Penney at the Springfield Mall. Probably between half an hour to 45 minutes to get there, maybe a full hour I'm not sure, I haven't been there before. JC Penney takes a long-ass time in my experience, so unlikely to get out of that until 3 or 4 that day unless we have a LOT more people than we usually do.

Wednesday Evening, 6pm, Ross in Alexandria. (Alexandria has a fucking ton of Rosses, this is the third one we've done there.) Usually get out of there between 12:30 and 2:30, depending on how well the store is prepped. The last store we did was prepped fairly well. The store before that was a nightmare.

Thursday Morning, 6am, Victoria's Secret in the Springfield Mall. No idea how long one of those takes, I've never done it before, but I doubt we'll get out before 11 at the very earliest, more like 1 or 2pm.

Thursday Evening, 6pm, another Ross in Alexandria. Not really sure when I'm going to have the chance to get much sleep on Wednesday and Thursday, it seems likely that I'll be up for around 48 hours working. Yay. :/

Thankfully, after that, I don't work again till Friday Evening at 8pm, at the Bag n Baggage at the Pentagon City Mall. So I should be able to get some sleep at last that night and during the day. Still, this schedule is really going to suck. I'm not likely to get much sleep this week, let alone have time to talk with folks, and I'm definitely missing Open Study. Oh well, there's always next time. If anyone needs me for anything, I think everyone has my cell number, or can get it from those who do. I trust their judgment as to whom it should be given.