Daynote ,Svenson

MM-v     Wednesday

2000-01-05

At last there was a bit frost on my car again. Although, at just 0°C that is hardly worth calling cold. The best part of it is that the day remaining predominantly dry.

I finished and tested the last of the HCC_ programs that I do before Peter returns (he is home with a variety of flu). Only one program remains but I can solve that in one of two ways. I'll let him decide. Heck, that is his job, he is the architect after all.

An interruption from Belgium caused me some trouble. They got bitten by the duplicate-S3 problem. That was first experienced in Spain and later in France. We know the symptoms, duplicate keys in the statistics file (causing a program crash) due to duplicate entries in the trigger file (which is illegal but doesn't crash) and we can solve them but we don't know the actual cause. The trouble was not in understanding the problem but rather in explaining it to Robert, the manager in Belgium. He is no fool but he doesn't know all the details that happen behind the scenes. And he doesn't want to delete records if he is not sure about something. On top of that he is typical for a Belgian company. He is French speaking with reasonable knowledge of Flemish (better than expected, and he makes the effort) but no fluency in English. So we talk in Flemish but that way he is not always clear. Because he is French speaking I answered a few questions in French but that doesn't make things any clearer. I got him so far that he removed the offending trigger records so the crash doesn't repeat.

I am astonished by the web.
Tom has a problem with the hosting of the Dainotes.com (and his own) domain at iTool. I am hosted there as well and I haven't had a problem (yet). His problems are not technical but rather administrative. They seem to be less than straight forward in handling their customers. He mentioned, in a mail to the Daynotes back channel that he was fed up with it and that he would pull his site of the iTool servers and on his own box as soon as possible. He doesn't want to pull the rug out under the daynotes.com site but h doesn't want to be involved with iTool any more. All that was not a cry for help, he was just asking for an opinion.
The result was that he got all kind of offers and advise from all the daynoters. In no time flat. He also got an apology from the iTool boss.
The power of this web is impressive. Scary too.

While exchanging some mails with Tom I started wondering when he actually sleeps. I got mail from him at 2h37, 4h03, 5h11 . Nice and convenient for me but all trough the night for him. So I asked him. Well working from home without a fixed time schedule has its advantages it seems. He sleeps whenever he has time and need for it. (before I get flamed: I know that is not 'whenever he likes')

And I learned from Delanae how to make an espresso-fudge-shake. Which turns out to be a kind of milk-shake with espresso and caramel ice cream in it. (and chocolate).

If anybody tripped on my daynote for Yesterday. Sorry but I simply could not resist the temptation. If you are really interested in the actual daynote you can always read the HTML source code
<< short >> it rained; one old problem in Austria resurged; I did some geograpy-scanning. << /short >>

Adios