1999-11-15

Monday

It's cold (-2C) and everything is frozen. There is no rain and no clouds and it stayed that way all day.

The roads were frozen as well, I counted seven cars that had slipped off. And I almost added myself to the count. Just a tricky patch of under cooled rain and at 120Km/h my car began to spin. The patch was not long enough however and I was over it before I had totally lost control. I continued, a bit slower.
On a a viaduct on the highway a truck had lost its cargo, huge rolls of sheet steel, due to a broken axle. Just after I joined the pile up the highway was closed off at the last off ramp, which I had just passed, for two hours.

Nice, I started off at 6h45 at home and arrived at work at 10h10.

Work is slow but steady.

Ronny solved the problem we found last Friday, so I removed the special testing code from the AS/400 programs and let Wilbert transfer the whole lot to production. I checked out where the invoice number are generated. We have temporal invoice numbers, set by the calculation routine. Later the invoicing program replaced these with the definitive invoice number. These invoice numbers must be selected from a different range. In Norway there is some overlap resulting in corrupted invoices. Well that is the suspicion of Jan. I am confident that even overlapping ranges don't cause problems. But, if you use a query tool in stead of the regular programs to check out the files you may find interesting stuff.

And I started the investigation on another problem.

I got an appointment with the dentist for Thursday. I could have pressed for an earlier date but the tooth ache has abated seriously, it is just lightly irritating. I think that the filling in the second molar, bottom right, shifted a little and pressed on the nerve. This made it extremely painful on Sunday. But now the nerve probably has shifted a bit, out of the pressure zone. It is still painful but not as incapacitating as yesterday.

My mailbox at home stayed empty all weekend and now, at work if overflows. Apart from two subscriptions and one joke from John, all was from the Daynotes Gang. And highly entertaining at that. Maybe this group will turn into a Mailnotes Gang.

I chided Brian for trying to deceive me about sleep patterns in America. Maybe he doesn't sleep but of course he is not entirely representative of your average American.

1999-11-16

Tuesday

It may not be the onslaught of winter but -7C is actually cold. It had not rained during the night so the roads were as clear as the sky.
It was again a sunny day until about 16h00. Then clouds began to close in and the wind picked up. And by 18h00, while driving home, snow started to fall, drifting furiously in the wind. It melted immediately and it stopped rather soon.
But if it snows again this night we have a problem in the morning.

The new problem I started on yesterday is not going easy. Some conditions apply to the original value of a line while others apply to the resulting value of a line, after the other conditions have been applied. Somewhere that second type doesn't work as it should. And I must find out why. And where and when and ...

Oh, well, I just have to find my magic hat again. (No Brian, that is a Black one)

Five days of tooth ache are starting to take their toll. The pain in the tooth itself gets dull but my whole jaw is aching now and I start to get a headache as well. I haven't closed my jaws for some days now and the desire to bite strongly into something, an apple or ..., becomes greater. But I am not sure I'd survive it :-)

1999-11-17

Wednesday

A bunch of leaking clouds has kept the night temperature from falling below 4C so there is no frost. In the afternoon there is even some weak sunshine.

By evening my tooth ache has all but gone. Great, by the time I reach the dentist tomorrow all the pain and trouble will be gone.

1999-11-18

Thursday

There is an open sky and 1C on the thermometer, with just the lightest of frost on my car windows. At about nine a clock it begins to snow, nice thick, sticking flakes but they melt on the ground. An hour later the snowing stops but the clouds remain.
I have a day off so the snow doesn't bother me but apparently it is causing some real chaos on the roads. He he.

I got back from the dentist, he found an inflamed dental nerve. He used a hydraulic jackhammer to remove the old filling and then applied a stiff brush to scrub down on that nerve. Well, that is what I felt anyway.
Next week I go back for a final check and a new filling. I am really looking forward to it :-(
This morning I hardly felt the tooth but now, after the treatment it smarts.

I didn't post anything yesterday, I just put up a kind of place holder. Not that I have to say much today. Apart from the dentists I had my car serviced and I read up on some magazines.
One had a short article about a new machine that Psion has ready. I have an old series 3a model which is plenty good enough while my brother has a newer series-5 model which is about the best hand held computer around. The new series-7 is just a size bigger, too big for a regular pocket. I think I must check out their site tomorrow.

1999-11-19

Friday

No snow today, just a completely overcast day with one short rain shower. The temperature of 4C remained unchanged throughout the day.

There was a problem in Belgium. It is possible to collect a series of orders on a single invoice. This is called collective invoicing. It is mostly used for organisations that have one invoice address but various delivery addresses, such like a supermarket chain or the national railroads. This function works in other opcos and even in Belgium but for one client (NMBS). They have had a lot of invoice printing problems so naturally I started checking their database but nothing was wrong there, in fact the invoice was correct but it didn't print right. After searching for hours I found that the invoice job had crashed but nobody had reacted. This is not the first time they ignore crashes. The crash was caused by collecting more than 99 orders on the invoice, causing an internal table to overflow. Table in RPG are set at compile time so you try to keep them as small as possible. It's easily solved by expanding the table (to 999 elements).
As usual the solving took no time at all while the searching ate the day. If they had mentioned the crash I could have found the error in a few minutes thanks to our error logging system.

I had forgotten to change my mail forwarding. On Wednesday I had switched it off to be able to get at my mail from home. The result was that I didn't get any external mail at work.

The temporally repaired tooth was rather sensitive but not painful. Far less disturbing.

1999-11-20

Saturday

Overcast and cool (4C) turning unsettled with some short breaks of sun and some equally short spell of rain. At about 16h00 we had a bout of driving snow.

While shopping I passed trough a part of town I don't usually pass and I noticed that a lot of shops were closed, with 'For Hire' signs on them. A few parts of town have always been doing very well while the other parts are in up and down cycles.

It was rather late yesterday and after typing in my daynote I didn't feel like going up to the attic for posting it. And while I was home the whole day I hardly did anything productive. Resting, which I did plenty, is of course not really productive.

And I got this Virus warning :

Monica Lewinsky Virus : Sucks all the memory out of your computer.
Titanic Virus : makes your whole computer go down
Bill Gates virus : takes 100$ from your pocket and then makes your computer go down
Mike Tyson virus : quits after one byte
Woody Allen virus : by-passes the mother board and turns on the daughter card
Spice Girl virus : has no real function but makes for a pretty desktop
Ronald Reagan virus : saves all your data but then forget where it is stored
BT virus : every 3 minutes it tells you what great service you are getting
C&W virus : every 3 minutes it reminds you that you are paying too much for the BT virus
Arnold Schwartzenegger virus : terminates and stay resident, it will be back
Viagra virus : expands you hard drive by putting too much pressure on it
Clinton virus : has a six inch hard drive and no memory

1999-11-21

Sunday

The clouds are gone and the temperature has fallen to -4C. Halfway trough the morning the clouds returned but it remains dry.

Minus four is very nice for running, I did swap to a sweatshirt for a T-shirt is a bit on the thin side :-)

I cleared out some stacks of paper from my room. The problem is that I have been so very careful building these stacks ... that I have no idea what is where. And I cannot simply dump them because there are things like invoices and bank reports mixed in between old articles and program listings. Yes, office organization is one of my specialties. The result is that I have to check every page. Snork

My tooth isn't sensitive anymore, the only annoyance left is that the temporal filling is just a sliver too thick.

My father is going to hospital on Monday for a new lens. The lens in his right eye has been turning dark and while it doesn't turn dark instantly but typically take years, this process has speeded up considerably these last months. So much so that can hardly read anymore. The new lens is some sort of plastic. The operation should be simple and fast and he could get home in the evening. Because he has to be back the morning after for his kidney dialysis he will probably stay overnight.

So there will not be an update tomorrow.