Lots of little stuff

From Bellybuttonporn

Well it's been like a couple of weeks since I've updated this. Sorry, my bad.

Let's see, a bunch of little stuff has happened.

I still haven't unpacked a lot. Here's how my usual day goes:

Wake up between 6:30-7. Shower, eat some cereal, dress, take the dog out. Go to work. Work till 5. Take the dog out. Watch TV and catch up with the intarweb, take the dog out. make dinner, eat. Take the dog out. Go to bed.

There's time in there to unpack, but I fail to find the motivation.

So I hung out with that girl from my childhood. I guess I'm just not very impressive in real life. We haven't really talked since. Oh well. No big thing, I suppose.

Work is still going alright.

Ok, so we made an IVR for a client, a major medical healthcare type company, and it gets about 100-120k calls a day. So it's pretty big and complicated. We have to provide reports for the client. Basically, how many calls we took, how many were clients, how many were providers, what sort of things they did on the calls, that sort of stuff. The way we get these reports is by having programs, written in perl go through the logfiles generated by the IVR and pick stuff out. That is then stored in several different places to be used for different reports and such. We have a script that generates an excel spreadsheet (via perl no less) and emails it to the clients. It's all pretty slick, aside from some questionable coding I noticed, but I'll fix all that eventually.

So Chris, the guy who is in charge of reporting, is going to a different team. Let's see, who else on the team knows perl and is pretty good at it? Yeah, I'm in charge of reporting as of the 20th. Scratch that, Chris took yesterday and today off, so now. My first act as the "reports guy" was adding a couple email addresses for people at our client to recieve the daily reports.

I've also been working on a centralized way to say which reports go to which people. Currently each script controls who recieves teh email it generates. So to change the recipients for a script, you have to go find the script, find the variable, and add the person, and hope to god you didn't cause a syntax error. I've created an include script with a few common functions (logging, a die() wrapper, that sort of stuff) and added a function that will read a common file and using the name of the program determine who to email stuff out to. So the idea is that I just have a text file somewhere with the name of each program and who recieves teh email. It ignores comments and such too. So since this file isn't a program, it can be edited by anyone with little chance of it breaking big stuff. Now I just have to modify the scripts to actually use it.

Also I've been (slowly) creating a catalog of what each script does, what files it needs, what files it creates, etc. It will be not only handy for myself (who has to control everything) but also just a good idea to finally have around.

I also plan on auditing the scripts. I've already seen lots of goofy stuff (whoever wrote half of these scripts was not comfortable with perl). Here's an example:

$STRINGY = "$VAR1,$VAR2,$VAR3,$VAR4";
@FIELDS = split(/,/ , $STRINGY);
somefunc(@FIELDS);

So first we've got a costly conversion to string, and a concatenation into a string. Then another costly operation to split it up by commas, then the function. This could be rewritten as:

somefunc($VAR1,$VAR2,$VAR3,$VAR4);

To save a hell of a lot of time and effort.

Also note the capitalized variable names. Ugly as sin.

Last weekend Blaine came over to Omaha to visit. He showed up Friday and we played 5-Color then got up early Saturday to go to a Magic ptq. It was sealed-deck, so I didn't need to own any of the new cards. Over all I did a little bit better than breaking even in terms of the cards I got versus what I paid to get into the tournament. I also picked up a couple boxes of an older set that was ridiculously cheap.

This weekend I'm going back to des moines / ames to give my mom some of the money I owe her and try to get more of my stuff out of my place. Also I will be grabbing my server and bringing it here to Omaha.

My server was down for a few days because something got bumped with it or something, and everyone in Ames was gone for spring break. Sorry about that. This is why the server's coming with me; when it breaks I can fix it quicker.

A few days ago I went and bought new earphones for my mp3 player, so now i can rock out to music at work. It has increased my productivity. No, really.

Oh, I did get my tax refund, so that's good. And today is payday. Alright then.

I really need a girlfriend. No, not why you think. I've gotten a pretty bad case of bacne lately :-/ Need some help. Ok, and that other stuff too.

I plan on buying world of warcraft this weekend. Almost everyone plays it, and a couple of people here in Omaha do too. So it's not like it'd be a 100% excuse to never go outside and do anything or meet people (I am perfectly capable of doing that already) because I'll be playing with a couple people from Omaha anyhow. Or I'll hate it and just not renew my subscription.

I'd really like to go back to school, to law school. I keep waiting for this mythical "when I have money", but let me tell you, bills fucking suck. If I have to have a job to make money, then hopefully I'll at least have one that pays me $ridiculous.

Stay in school as long as you can.

If you have someone special, hold on ot them tight tonight.