WangNet

I kicked some major coding butt today. I was going to start marching around in a circle fist pumping.

Basically I took over, what sounded like, a horrible project hooking into an outlook mail box, parsing each email in MIME format, snagging the pdf attached, and saving it all to database (and then deleting it). The guy was all up in arms about illegal characters.. so far I found one and that condition took care of any future ones.

We'll see how it flies with the boss tomorrow.

It's like riding a bike with no handle bars... you damn well know you are doing it right when you are by yourself, but hell - when your boss says "that's perfect" it makes the world of difference. So far so good.. I dig what they are doing and I feel for the agents. It's all about hating the game not the player (stupid contract for hire).

I think shit is finally clicking with what I am supposed to be doing. I was informed the 'page 1000' was my stipulation (though I may have blacked out and suggested it and thought it was my boss), but alas I got past that hump. I was explained how the main booking systems work and that the 'newer' systems are more or less emulators that sit on top of these and feed them commands.. Well that's not true in a whole sense, but more or less right. These two apps have webservices one can hook into to read and execute commands.. It brings me back to the Fraud Detection days with the 3270 'GUI emulator' that sat on top of the screens... made by.. oh god how do I remember his name - Brian Rink (and his coding monkey) - and my near chance at supporting that vb6 app. Golly gee.

Man there is a ton of acronyms and what not to get a handle on.. but I figure 72 hours isn't bad to start getting a groove for this. Hopefully Bossman will understand me not running this app tonight (god I would hate to ruin actual data!) and will be running it tomorrow.

On the bad side I am not sure if I will be able to cover my two days of forced unpaid vacation. Grr.. stupid holidays.

Day 2 was okay.. I was wrong on the concept of 'pulling 1000 records from this table and process them' which I believe is 'pull all the records and start up a new connection for every 1000 to insert into a table'. Meh.. I'll see how that works out tomorrow.

This no home email is killing me. Really really it sucks.

On the plus side Falloutboy called me (*squee!*) and said there was talking of hiring people that now the existing systems and my name came up. He, rightfully, told them that would be willing to give the job a go as long as it doesn't require me to move to Denver. That would be nice.. working back at big Yella.

It does appear that the Fridays before Christmas and New Years is a 'day off' for T&T... and as such I will not be working which means no pay. I am unclear if that means I can work extra hours to make that up or not. I'll have to ask Dan the Man (a hold out from my old CB team).

Ugh. Sleet better not fuck up my bar night tomorrow. I am going on three days sans drinks... no Monday was a bust.. I was stressed and tired.

Trying to keep positive about this new gig... I really don't like the concept of 'contract to hire'.