Wisdom from Scott Adams

Whenever asked about my website, I always jokingly respond with “I have it because I am very important to people!” or the like. This afternoon I received an email sent out to those on the Dilbert mailing list (I know, I’m awesome) and within it there lies the truth I’ve been claiming all along:

People who are trying to decide whether to create a blog or not go through a thought process much like this:

1. The world sure needs more of ME.
2. Maybe I’ll shout more often so that people nearby can experience the joy of knowing my thoughts.
3. No, wait, shouting looks too crazy.
4. I know, I’ll write down my daily thoughts and badger people to read them.
5. If only there was a description for this process that doesn’t involve the words egomaniac or unnecessary.
6. What? It’s called a blog? I’m there!

The blogger’s philosophy goes something like this:

Everything that I think about is more fascinating than the crap in your head.

Well, that’s how that goes. In other news, we had band practice last night, complete with a manager, a lead guitarist, and a techie for said lead guitarist. Meghan has been doing a fantastic job, and I was really broken-hearted when she shot down an item from the set list that I have been really looking forward to performing – but I don’t hold it against her. She is the manager after all. If we are going to survive the turbulent waters of rock industry, I can’t let things like this get to me. Especially one day after we signed her on as manager.

meanwhile, several kilometers away in reality…

Here at good ol’ NPH I am making some good progress on a (somewhat tedious) job to report on the ID life of numbers in our database. This has so far meant rummaging through 500 tables in search of incrementing numbers which may someday hit a data precision ceiling and explode. Oh, you want an example? ok. Right now, each of our webpages has a set of Frequently Asked Questions which are dynamically generated from our database. Each question in the database has a unique number assigned to it. Right now, we have 2080 different questions in our database, and a quick study reveals that we only generate about 15 new FAQ’s a year. This particular field is only set to be 6 numbers wide, and thusly will no longer be usable after it hits 999,999. This should happen in about 66,528 years.