The Blog

After finishing up a custom timer job project, I relied on several resources to get the job done. here are some links I found very helpful:

We needed to add a couple existing phones to my account and bundle them as a family plan, and it should have been a very easy thing to do but took quite a while.

Apparently when my account was setup, it was on a particular “network” in the AT&T accounting system, and the other phones were in a newer different “network”. In this case, network has nothing to do with the physical wireless network, it is like a sales/marketing territory or something. They are trying to convert everyone to the newer network, and so they couldn’t move my older account into the newer network without giving me a new account number.

The devil is in the details though, so I asked about the corporate discount I get through my work, and if that would still apply to my new account. It wouldn’t, and it would take up to three months for it to apply again. I also asked about my automatic scheduled payments, and if I would need to set those up again from scratch. Of course I would.

Anyways, I fought and should receive a credit so that my corporate discount doesn’t have any lapse. The phone assistant was nice enough an helped us through fixing that once we complained about it.

What a pain to have to go through, just so AT&T can clean up its internal accounting workings.

Permalink

We just had a gas fireplace insert installed, and used Bassett Home Heating to install it. John, the owner, is a no-nonsense, very helpful and reasonable guy, and runs a nice family business (his son comes along and helps him out). We used them when we installed our gas hot water heater, and he did an OK job.

I was missing a part before the installation, and he was nice enough to stop by the stove place in Lynwood and get the part.

Both times I had to ask and make sure that they caulked where the gas pipe enters the house. But they were much more reasonable than the installers that Rich’s Stove and Spa recommended.

I’d certainly recommend if you need that kind of service in the Seattle area.

[rating:3.5]

Permalink

Isaiah has started to say “like” quite a bit in his every day speech now. A lot of it comes from us, as we unknowingly add these common filler words. You start to pay attention though when your three year old begins doing it a lot. He’s a clean slate as far as grammar goes, and there is no reason for him to start adopting these bad speech patterns now, so Shanna and I have been making an effort to watch ourselves and avoid it.

It’s hard though. And once you start paying attention to it, you notice that almost everyone does it, like, all the time. Oops:)

Identifying the context that you use those words in is a good first step. I tend to use “like” when I am estimating something, for example “It’s like, four or five blocks away.”, and I could have used any number of other words to convey that.

I designed a form for a client that had several different views, and I needed a way to display a specific view when the form was opened. This was easy, but took me a bit to figure out.

  1. Go to Tools > Form Options.
  2. Click the Open and Save option.
  3. Click the Rules button, and add rules and actions to switch views.

With this method, I was able to set a field on form submittal to indicate which view was last active. When the submitted form was re-opened, I was able to use a conditional rule to switch to that last active view.