Mexican Food Snob

Test post from the Mytouch phone.

5 day vacation coming up! I need to use one or two more vacations before the year is out -- I'm almost reaching the maximum allowed of 120 vacation hours. The only reason I don't like to use my vacation days is because I worry that my automated jobs may get an error while I'm out.

Last night I made onion soup. At first I thought I had too much onions, but by the time the onions were caramelized, I wished I had doubled the amount.  I've never tried onion soup before, so I was a bit worried that a soup that primarily consists of onions would be tiresome and not very fulfilling.  But this stuff was tasty, cheap, and easy to make!

 So today I noticed for the first time that there is a very annoying subtle, quirky behavior with how SQL Server imports excel spreadsheets. Yesterday I had imported a spreadsheet that my co-worker sent me (I originally provided her with a CSV file, and she made her changes, and re-saved as an excel spreadsheet (XLS)).  I also imported a related file, that I was asked to merge with the data from the excel file.  Pretty easy, two minute job -- or so I thought.

Well, today I was running a query to create a summary of the data, when I noticed that some of the APNs (Assessor's Parcel Number) were NULL.  I was thinking "wtf?"  So I double-checked the results, to make sure I was looking at records that were supposed to have the APN populated, and everything checked out.  Some stress/panic set in.  The next step, then, was to find out at what point the APNs got NULLed.  I initially figured that somehow the individual fields got scrambled when my co-worker modified the data.  A quick check on the excel spreadsheet would reveal whether this was true.  I opened up the file, and all the APNs were there -- although some of them did get mangled by excel's formatting.

More stress.  So then I had to backtrack one step further; by checking the results I gave to my co-worker.  Maybe, I thought, I somehow fucked up the sql view.  But everything was fine there too!  Now I was really getting stressed, and so I started scratching my head (my head gets itchy when I'm stressing).

What could it be?  I figured, if it's not my co-workers file, if it's not the file I sent her, then it has to be that somehow the data is getting corrupted during the import process.  Maybe somehow I missed an error message when I imported the data?  So I tried re-importing the data into a brand new table, and the exact same thing happened -- all the records got imported, and the import wizard displayed a 'import  successful' message.  But clearly, the data was still corrupted.

I tried to determine which fields were affected by comparing her modified data with the original data by using SQL EXCEPT.  I executed the query, and compared one of the records against the original record to try to see where the difference lied, and as I found which field had problems, I'd remove it and start over again.  I ended up with 7 or 8 fields that were corrupted.  If it had just been the APNs that were affected, I could have just replaced the mangled data with the original data, but there were too many fields affected, and there was no unique field to merge the individual record back to the original data.  I'd have to find several fields to uniquely identify a record, but that's painful, and there wasn't enough time to do it anyway.

I did not have a lot more time to research the issue, so I ended up re-using my original data, and merging it to the additional data my co-worker sent.

After I got some free time on my hands, I did some googling, and found on Microsoft's Books Online an import/export wizard sub-topic (Excel Source) on importing excel data.  And this is where I found my little nugget of information under the "Usage Considerations" heading:

"Missing values. The Excel driver reads a certain number of rows (by default, 8 rows) in the specified source to guess at the data type of each column. When a column appears to contain mixed data types, especially numeric data mixed with text data, the driver decides in favor of the majority data type, and returns null values for cells that contain data of the other type. (In a tie, the numeric type wins.) Most cell formatting options in the Excel worksheet do not seem to affect this data type determination. You can modify this behavior of the Excel driver by specifying Import Mode. To specify Import Mode, add IMEX=1 to the value of Extended Properties in the connection string of the Excel connection manager in the Properties window. For more information, see PRB: Excel Values Returned as NULL Using DAO OpenRecordset."

The problem is the user is not given, at the very least, a warning that this has happened.  Who knows how many excel spreadsheets I've imported, and I've never received any type of error or warning about it.  I trusted the import wizard that it copied the data exactly as it is found on the spreadsheet.  What shocks me is that I did not notice until today.

Somebody called my dad today and told him that Jamie, the baby, and I were in Tijuana, and that unless he paid $3000, they wouldn't let us cross back.  But my dad told the caller that it's all lies, since I would have told him we would be going over there.

Whoever called, didn't really think it through.  My dad could have easily called my cell phone to verify that I am, in fact, at work and not being held for ransom in Tijuana.

I made this last Saturday. It's yet another recipe taken from How to Cook Everything.  It tasted delicious fresh out of the oven, but it wasn't so great after I microwaved it on Monday for lunch.

And tonight I tried another recipe: stir-fried spicy beef with basil.  I prepared it along with some with rice, and green beans.  You're probably thinking, who cares what you ate last night.  But I'm just jotting it down as a sort of self-motivation to try out cooking more often, and at the same time keep a log of what recipes I've tried out.  The point of me wanting to cook more is I want to eat out wayyy less, and hopefully save some money in the process.

I enjoy my job. 

Monday I made cheese enchiladas. Had it for dinner, and took it for lunch twice.



Tonight I tried out a new recipe from How to Cook Everything. I was originally going to simply follow the "Chunky Vegetable Soup" recipe, but decided to try out the Mulligatawny recipe variation because it includes curry.  I've loved curry ever since I went to an Indian restaurant with my co-workers.  Hopefully, The Ant Monster likes it -- he is an extremely picky eater.

I bought a new cookbook: How to Cook Everything. Above is the first recipe I tried out. It tasted good, but I think it would be best served as a sidedish.

 This morning I bought The Fellowship of the Ring. I tried to get started it on it, but for the life of me I can't stay awake long enough to read a single paragraph.  I'm sure that once I bring it to work, I'll breeze right through the chapters.  For some reason I can read just fine at work, without getting the slightest bit bored or lethargic.

July 9th was my 2 year anniversary at my job.  The manager made my performance review just another insignificant blip in the day.  I expected that he would talk to me for a minute or two -- tell me where I'm doing well, and where I need to improve.  Instead, I came in to his office, shut the door, sat down for a few seconds, told me to sign the performance review paper, and almost as an afterthought said there'd be a raise, and mentioned that while other people are getting laid off, I'm getting a raise.  Of course, I expect the raise to be lousy, since I imagine he would've made  a bigger deal out of it, if it was the least bit significant.


In other news, I've been filling my down time at work with reading books.  In the past 3-4 weeks, I've read Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, and I'm 95% done with Xenocide.  I'm loosely using this list as a guide to which books I should read next.

So this is my first post in almost a year!  Not much to tell though.  The totster, though, he's almost 1.5 years old!   He already knows how to walk, he's learning how to run, and pretty soon he's going to start uttering his first words.  This evening, as he and I were heading to El Pollo Loco, I kept saying "ABCs," and he would try to imitate it: A - B - C...   eh - eh - eh

This year I'm getting a decent refund, which I'm expecting to receive by this coming Tuesday, at the latest.  As soon as I get it, I'm going to pay off my credit card.  I'm so excited!  Since late 2006, I've been unfortunate to have a balance of at least $1000, that at at one point reached $5000+. I stopped using my credit card a few months, and started paying as much as I could handle, and finally I will be free.  Now I will be able to start saving money every month.  I hope to save up at least $6000 every year, and hopefully, if all is well, I can use these savings as a down payment for a house.

Following the footsteps of suicidal4vida, I've decided to make the switch to wordpress: jerarquia.wordpress.com.

I just played Wii Sports Tennis, and it's SO MUCH FUN.

"Benjamin Sargent died with his eyes open, fists clenched and strapped into a car seat after eight days without food or water, the county's top prosecutor said Wednesday."


What a terrible fate this baby met.

I really wish Google Picasa had Flickr's "Calendar View" feature.  Or at the very least, some kind of offline tool that will let you do this.  I've been searching on google for the past hour and a half for such an application, but I haven't had any luck.

I did read somewhere about this feature being implemented in the 3.0 version of Picasa, but the article didn't seem to reliable, and I couldn't find other sources to confirm this.

Wtf is it with some guys spitting in the urinal right before peeing?  And today on two different trips to the work restroom I saw: One older guy leaning forward and supporting himself by placing one hand on the wall while he was pissing.  Another guy was pissing with both of his hands behind his head while he was looking at the ceiling.  And he didn't wash his hands after he finished.

This past Saturday I drank too much vodka, and as a result I forgot 95% of what happened that night.  Basically my memory of Saturday night is  the first 15 minutes of being at that club, a few seconds of me throwing up in the parking lot, and then waking up at 5am in my bed.  That was the worst.

The accountant from my job learned that I had taken a few accounting classes in college, and since she likes me, I think she wants me to become her assistant, even though my job right now is completely unrelated to accounting.  I'm excited because maybe it will mean more money!  Another exciting was that my manager liked  some charts that shows average to for job deliveries and some other stuff, so then he asked me if I could create something similar for the project manager.  I like being busy at work, but I know that if they're asking me to do more stuff, then when my one year review comes around, I'll probably get a raise!

I suspect that compared to my co-workers, who started at the same time as me, the managers like me a little bit more.

I made this yesterday afternoon to take for lunch.  I ate some for dinner, and man it was delicious AND easy to make.  I'm gonna make this again some other time.