Archive for April, 2006

“Breadcrumb” is not a universal concept

It’s amazing sometimes how you use a term so often as part of your job that you just assume everybody will know what it means. Even people who’ve never worked in that industry.
Just today, I was talking to a fellow engineer about the portal site we’re building and I mentioned how we should put […]

New York Life has horrible customer service

The 401K from my previous employer is held at New York Life Investment Management. I was told to expect a rollover package from them within two weeks from my last date of employment. But three weeks after leaving I still hadn’t received it so I looked around on their Web site, the only […]

Got Lotus Notes to sync with my Treo

My current employer uses Lotus Notes as the messaging solution. It’s a nice enough system but it’s something of a niche product and as such is not generally supported by 3rd-party software like the Palm HotSync. Which means I haven’t been able to sync my Notes calendar with the calendar on the old […]

Quick trip to Fry’s

So yesterday I got my Kentucky state refund, they always beat the federal refund. Yes, this means I only turned in my taxes last week, which is pretty late. I mean this coming Monday is the final deadline. Anyway, thanks to the power of direct deposit the money just showed up yesterday […]

Chemical warfare on my lawn

Okay, I’ve given up–clearly I am not capable of taking care of a lawn. It’s weed-filled, and there’s dead spots that refuse to green up despite my seeding/fertilizing/watering efforts. So I’m hiring some professionals, a company called ChemLawn.
I think the name says it all–they lay down various and sundry lawn chemicals to […]

Weird how familiar Portal seems

So I’m in my third week at the new job, trying to soak up as much as possible about developing in Oracle Portal. The weird thing is, even though I’m totally new to a lot of the technologies (J2EE, Oracle Forms, PL/SQL, etc.) there’s something strangely familiar about Portal. The reason is that […]

Pan-handler fraud here in Louisville

TechRepublic’s office here in Louisville is out in the suburbs on the eastern edge of town. So when I was working there I only occasionally saw panhandlers. Pan-handling generally requires interacting with people on foot and out in the ‘burbs people are rarely ever on foot. It’s all about driving the car/SUV/mini-van.
Now […]

Java inconsistencies strike again

Don’t get me wrong, I really like the Java programming language. But sometimes it has these weird inconsistencies that just drive you crazy.
Like this morning, my co-worker was struggling with a HashMap where it wasn’t returning the value he expected. He was printing it out in a JSP but kept getting a blank […]

I’m in the closet today

Literally, that is. Fixing up the closet in the spare bedroom. I bought one of those closet kits, the kind that has a shelving tower and a couple configurable poles for clothes. To replace the rather spartan one-shelf-one-clothes-pole system the previous owner had installed.
The thing is, when I removed that old shelving […]

Got my first Oracle Forms to execute

Strictly speaking, my new job does not require that I build Oracle Forms. However, the portal we’re building will eventually need to encapsulate Oracle Form objects on a page. So I figured I should try and understand more about Forms. It only took me about half the day but I finally got […]