If You Don't Have Time to Do It Right...

Sometimes I'm amazed at my own stupidity..

I don't want to go into a whole lot of detail here, but yesterday at work I needed to take data that was in one database in our school district and import it into another database. How exactly you do this differs from program to program, but the basic idea is pretty much the same as what you did in elementary school when your teacher gave you a list of definitions on one side of the page and a list of terms on the other and you drew lines from the correct word to the correct term. On the computer, though, there's no margin for error. The computer's going to do what you tell it to do, and so you need to make sure that you have the correct word matched up with the correct definition.

I didn't. And I didn't bother to check, either.

Well, and to be fair to myself, I didn't exactly miss matching the two items--I just matched them incorrectly. The terms I was matching were student birthdates, and I correctly matched the "Date of Birth" field in the first database with the "Birthdate" field in the second database. The problem was that I also had to select the FORMAT of the date. The date was in MM/DD/YYYY format (Today would be 09/30/2011), but in a rush to get this job done, I selected DD/MM/YYYY. I then hit the "Import" button and a message popped up something like this:

"You are about to make permanent changes to the database. Once these changes are applied they cannot be undone. ARE YOU SURE YOU WISH TO CONTINUE?"

What I SHOULD have done at that point was stop, leave the live database system, and go into our identical "sandbox" site and run the test there. Had I done that, I would have seen the error. But I didn't have time for that, so I just hit the "Yes" button and let the program go.

Once the import had finished, I hit the "Report" button and saw that--of the 2,300 or so records I was trying to import--about 1,200 of them failed. I knew something was wrong, and I very quickly figured out what it was. With the days and months reversed, many of the records errored out. A birth date of 07/24/2001, for example, SHOULD have been read by the computer as July 24th, 2001, but the program was doing what I told it to do (day first and then month) and was trying to make it the 7th day of the 24th month of 2001. There obviously is no such month, so nothing was written to that record. That happened to about 1,200 student records.

Worse than that, though, was that the program SUCCEEDED in importing the other 1,100 records. This was worse because the information that was now in the system was wrong! A student who should have had a birth date of February 9th, 1999 instead had a birthday of September 2, 1999. I poked around in the system, and there was no way for me to erase the birthdates on my own. I tried reimporting the information a second time with the information reversed, and this worked, but now those students had TWO birthdates. I called the vendor responsible for the second program and asked if they could fix the issue for me, and they said yes, but since the issue was my fault and I'd admitted it was my fault, it would cost $600 for them to fix it. Screw that, I thought to myself, so I started doing what I had to do: I spent five hours clicking on 1,100 student accounts and deleting the incorrect birthdates. Five hours of work that I could have avoided if I'd taken 20 minutes and tested the import first.

I remember when I got my first power tool. It was hardly even a power tool, to be frank: it was an inexpensive cordless drill. This was years ago, not too long after Lisa and I had married. I'd been hanging blinds in every window of our new house, and I'd been doing it manually with a handheld Phillips screwdriver. After nearly wearing a blister on my thumb I went out to Lowe's and bought the cordless drill, and after letting it charge for a while I eagerly got it out and took it to the window over our kitchen sink. I stood on a step ladder and put a screw against the drywall above the window, lined the bit of the cordless drill up with the screw, and hit the button on the cordless drill. Immediately the screw spun wildly out of position, I lost my balance and fell, dragging the spinning drill in a line across the drywall above the window, creating a scar all the way across, and my knee came up and hit the window, cracking the glass. I fell onto the kitchen counter, bending the sink faucet, which started leaking water.

I walked into the family room on the lower level and told my wife, "Power tools are great. They help you make bigger mistakes faster!"

I think that's what happened to me yesterday, too...

Maybe a Little TOO Frequently Asked?

A couple of years ago I made a post about a cool website called Wordle. Two years and three months later, I think 94% of all people in the world have used the site. So I'm not going to write about the site itself today.

Instead, I want to write about the FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page that appears on the site. I was reading it yesterday (Sometimes I just read these things. I can't explain it, either.), and I was amused by one of the replies to a question.

Most of the replies were pretty standard fare. For instance, the question of "I entered a word many times. Why does it only show up once?" is answered with the following: "Wordle uses the number of times a word appears in a text to determine its relative size. See the next question for details." Similarly, the question of "Why aren't numbers showing up?" gets a response of "By default, Wordle strips numbers from the text before drawing. See the 'Language' menu to change that setting." I'd describe the tone of all of the responses as "Professional-technical."

Except for one. The tone of the response to this question is so different from the others, in fact, that I'm assuming that it wasn't written at the same time. Instead, I think it was probably written in a fit of anger after getting the same question one time too many. The question is "Could you remove or change the name of the 'Sexsmith' font? I don't want my students to see it."

Here's the response:

Yes, with pleasure. First, please write to the musician Ron Sexsmith, after whom the font is named, and get him to change his name. You may also want to write to Sexsmith, Alberta, Canada, and see if you can get them to change their name before any of your students inadvertently consult a map. Christian rocker Paula Sexsmith ought to be in your sights as well; don't let her feel left out. Take a slapshot at goalie Tyson Sexsmith, while you're at it.

"Sexsmith" is a common surname and placename, especially in Canada. It's analogous to “Shoemaker”, “Fletcher”, or just plain “Smith”; it's a profession. A “seax smith” was someone who made seaxes.

The place-names Middlesex, Essex, Sussex, etc., all derive their names from the seax.

If the children of Boston and its suburbs can grow up in Middlesex county, perhaps giggling occasionally at the mention of the sheriff or courthouse thereof in local news broadcasts or 5th-grade geography lessons, then I believe that the children of the world can weather the mere sight of those letters, in that context. Good luck!



Click here to read the complete FAQ.




P.S. And by the way, just an aside, I made the Wordle above by copying and pasting all of my blog posts for August and September into Wordle. I learned that apparently I use the word "just" WAAAY too much!

Getting Used to Less Privacy

A lot of people are complaining about the new Facebook design. Let's be more frank: A lot of people are WHINING about the new Facebook design. But I'm much less worried about the latest Facebook version than I am worried about what's coming.

And no, this blog post isn't a chain letter about the fact that Facebook is going to start charging for membership...

...This is a REAL change coming to Facebook, and it's going to be called the Timeline. I've included a link to it at the bottom. The video is kind of intriguing, the idea that interested profile viewers can scan back through your online life to see what you've done in the past. It's almost like a virtual autobiography of you that is automatically put together by Facebook. Sounds kind of neat.

But as I glanced down the page, I saw the sample Profile page that Facebook is envisioning, and what scares me is that they're not just planning on pulling data from your Facebook activity, but from what Netflix movies you watch, the Places you've visited that you've shared with the world, the music you've listened to on Spotify, and the places you've been running from Nike, as well (no doubt) as from dozens of other "partners."

As I've read in several places, this compilation of data will be easing very close to the "creepy" edge. How much of our lives do we want visible on Facebook for so called "friends" to see?

But here's something even creepier: Even if you don't enable this Timeline feature of Facebook (my scant research suggests it will at least initially be voluntary), keep in mind that data is being mined about you that COULD allow a company like Facebook to create this data. Even if you don't have a Timeline page, and even if your "friends" (who may not really be your friends) can't see all of this information, there are plenty of corporations (who most definitely are NOT your friends) who'll have access to this wealth of information about you.

It's enough to make me consider deactivating my account.

Learn more about Facebook Timeline here.

P.S. Also, the Timeline page looks very similar to me to what MySapce looks like. This makes me wonder if Facebook has forgotten that it overtook MySpace--at least in part--because of the simplicity of its user interface. By making the user profile page more complex, it's taking a chance that it might make it too hard for grandma and grandpa to figure out, and if that's the case, Mom and Dad might move to a different site so that they can show the kids' photos to grandma and grandpa on a site they can understand.