Wednesday. Oi.

[azurelunatic]

11:58 AM 5/16/2007
I have the ability to explain complicated technical concepts to people who do not consider themselves complicated technical people.


12:40 PM 5/16/2007
My morning prayer today, cross-posted to an alchemy-oriented e-mail group:
Lead of misunderstanding to gold of knowledge.

As I seek to correct the misunderstandings of others, so let me let go of my own mistaken impressions and learn the truth, or something closer to the truth.

Let me teach with compassion, without attacking others for the misunderstandings they hold, and let me learn with joy.

My misunderstandings are not me. I can re-learn things I learned incorrectly without compromising myself. If new information makes me have to sit down and re-think my position in the world, better to know the gold of truth than to muddle along in the lead of ignorance or misunderstanding.


2:01 PM 5/16/2007
Defended my title as local database guru. Turns out that sometimes Access ignores leading zeroes when importing things like zip codes from Excel. Whee. Turns out also that putting a record with a leading zero at the top of the Excel sheet forces Access to think about what it's importing, and import it as the text it was supposed to be rather than the number it was going to pretend it was. Wrote a note to Darkside to this effect, because I was having woes with this and he was asking me about stuff related to it, and, well, I should make an effort to keep him updated.


3:38 PM 5/16/2007
Windbag Interviewer is a tea drinker. Useful bit of trivia to know. He's looking a bit deflated these days. He's supposed to be a round fellow a bit red in the face. It's very concerning to see him looking pale and shrunken. I have no real personal liking for him (in fact, I have some personal disliking for him, related to his being a passive-aggressive twit), but I wouldn't wish ill-health upon him. It's not a good kind of pale and shrunken.


5:11 PM 5/16/2007
Raaah bad things happen with table. *smash*

Comments

[beckyzoole.livejournal.com]

In the past I've done a lot of importing to Access from spreadsheets. The leading zero thing was a BIG problem once. Finally I wrote a Lotus macro to export the data to a comma delimited flat ASCII text file, with zeros as needed, and then imported that file to Access. It kept the leading zeros then. It was a pain in the neck, too.

[azurelunatic]

Hmm, I should experiment with flat files. That's a thought.

[beckyzoole.livejournal.com]

They're especially good for situations when the spreadsheet's been formatted and prettied up, so it doesn't import easily all by itself, or when you want to import different columns and/or worksheets to different tables.