Social Networking technology and why it is cool/totally sucks
So you want to share some pics with friends on Facebook(FB) of your wild weekend in Vegas. Except after you put them on Facebook, you realize some of the people in your Facebook Friend list are the parents of the kids you teach every day. You want to make a comment on your blog about how much something sucks about this person, or your job, or your family or the state of affairs on your school board. But you realize that they'll see your tweet, or check out your blog, or see just how much time you're spending on Facebook or MySpace.
So why bother? Sometimes I don't really know. I have friends on Facebook that I work with. My parents are on Facebook. Hell, my boss reads this blog every once in a while. I was reading a post put out there by Mike at Unraveling Mysteries on Why We Blog, and he brings up some good points
One of the main reasons I blog is because when I have a head full, I tend to sort it all out better when I write, rather than just sitting there, talking about it. I sometimes tend to beat a dead horse because I don't feel like I've gotten my point across and keep taking and talking. For me, blogging is therapy of a sort, and I liked being able to write anything I wanted about just about everything.
Now, both my parents are on Facebook (which is updated by a plug-in from WordPress telling Twitter I made a new post), and my boss reads my blog. And I actually have people who read this blog, goodness knows why.:)
That initial freedom that I felt is kind of gone, and no Matt, I don't want you to stop reading. I'm just bringing up a point I've been kicking around in my head. We join Facebook and blog, and tweet, and other things - never got into myspace, too freakin busy lookin - to hook up with people that we don't see all the time and reconnect with people we knew long ago. It helps us reconnect with old friends, helps us stay more easily in touch with friends and relatives, and generally makes communication easier for us.
My favorite thing of all is Twitter. The funny thing is, it started as a social thing where I would update with everything from 'I'm eating a cookie' to 'I am going to the hospital because I just sliced open my damn finger and I'm taking the time to tweet about it on my blackberry one handed'. That sense of fun tweeting occassionally turned into a VERY good tool for me to use in my development work and the tech administration that I do every day at my job. I get crap from FB people all the time because my Twitter account updates my FB status automatically. And I have gotten into the habit of Tweeting tech related questions that to the normal joe, looks like a cross between hieroglyphs and stick figures. The wonderful thing about Twitter is I can usually get a solution or advice in 5-50 minutes with several different and viable suggestions. The offshoot of that is people on FB giving me crap about speaking in Klingon 
The interesting offshoot of that teasing on FB is I've gotten several websites of work from people who tell me "Well, I don't know what 1/4 of your FB status updates mean, but you seem UberTechie - can you design a website for me?" AWESOME! I'll take that any day of the week. Tease away, I'm getting business.
So, why is it cool? It allows you to reconnect with people from your past, keep tighter with people you know, and allows a constant stream of communication back and forth.
Why does it suck? Lets face it, how much time did you spend on Facebook playing all of those games and doing all of those "If you were a dictator, which one would you be" quizzes? I'll raise my hand and say, A LOT! It was cool and fun to catch up with people, and it still is for the most part, but I don't spend all that much time on Facebook now a days. I do get quite a lot of comments about my FB Updates, which I should really see if I want to disconnect the Twitter account updating FB Status.
So, in conclusion, I think I'll stick with what is out there, talk about things on my blog that won't jeopardize my relationships or my job, Tweet till I turn into a freakin birdie, and use them for what they are there for - to communicate. Putting yourself on the internet- and yes Mom and Dad you are now part of the internet- allows people to get in touch with you easier, but it does put quite a bit of you out there. So before you start a blog, or Tweet, or join Facebook, take a serious look at how 'out there' you want to be. And if you do decide that you do want to get involved in it all, be careful what you say and to whom you say it. Dooce.com is a site of a woman from LA who lost her job because of stuff she was blogging about. Granted, she was blogging about what an a-hole the DBA in her company was, but still 
You can now find 'Dooced' in the urban dictionary online somewhere which means 'to be fired for content on your blog'.
I know plenty of people out there who blog and tweet and do other social networking, totally anonymously. Take a hard moment and see if that might be a better road for you. I've thought many times of starting another blog so that I didn't have to worry about people finding my blog and getting upset with what I am writing. It'd be nice to be able to say anything that I want, but to tell the truth, I'm not a fan of Anonymous online rantings, because truthfully, people hide behind these personas and make other people's lives miserable. And more importantly there are some things that shouldn't be out there because all it takes is one person, knowing that Anon9901 is Matt Cushing and he said.....
Who’s the man?!?
Have you ever had a problem/issue/project that just wouldn't f'in go away? It's like trying to get your hand around something slippery - the harder you squeeze, the faster it slips away?
Yeah, that's about what my year has been like so far. So to be able to have a "YES" moment when things finally fell into place was a welcome change from the constant battering I've been doing against all of the brick walls that keep springing up. FTNITK, I'm a web applications developer for a company in White Plains NY (it's just north of NYC). I live in NJ, so my commute is considerable, but I don't really mind it because I love my job. We run nursing homes in the south, and one of the biggest obstacles we have is centralization of data - getting all of the good stuff, in one place, so everyone can use it to move forward.
We have this chunk of data that I need in 47 different places, and I need to collect it all and put it in a readable format. I can set up a job to go out to each database individually, grab some data, and pull it back here. The problem is, the db's are really old and don't talk directly to my new shiny ones, and I don't want to write 47 copies of the same job because if I have to make a change, it'll have to be to all of them.
So I've been trying to figure out a way to write one job, and just change where I point it. FINALLY got it today and I'm going to do more work on it tomorrow because now I'm going home. I've done enough for today.
if you've gotten this far and you're interested - it's an SSIS job mining data from Keane RAM applications Progress database and pushing it to a data warehouse that I'm building. Lots of moving pieces. Ugh.
Twitter is truly amazing
Yeah I know. "Another post about social networking". Keep your pants on, it's not going to be how I kept in touch with my ex girlfriends brothers dogs hamster.
I've been playing around with blogging for a long time now, this one going back as far as my latest Oops where I didn't back up my stuff before I moved and then realized that they had already cleared my old account. I recently got into Twitter, mostly because it was fun and I KNEW that everyone out there would want to know just how I was doing, what I was up to, and what I was thinking at every freakin second - important stuff.
Recently, in the last several days, I've realized that Twitter has become one of my development tools. Granted, I have 140 characters to describe my issue, but can I just say how much time I save by posting a twit like "Anyone ever do x,y,z" wait 10 minutes and get 5-10 responses ranging from "Dude DON'T" to "yeah, but you need to do a,b,c first - shoot me an email and I'll show you what I mean".
I've even had people send me scraps of code, websites with tutorials, and advice to the extent of detailed explanation of why, where, and how much on stuff I've been wondering about for a while.
I can't be the first person who's realized this. I tweeted something summing this all up and got a response from one guy in St. Louis about how he felt like we all worked together. You know what? He's RIGHT! We've been using DNN (dotnetnuke) for the last 3 years for our internal portal and I've always had questions about certain things, but never could get a good answer.
Dude, I've fixed more in the last week.5 than in the last 3 years thanks to several guys I am following and thanks to apps like TweetDeck you can set up filters to look for words and phrases so you can respond to things. I just started using it and got abotu 10 tweets today from people I'm not currently following, but who answered a question I posted.
So I guess in summation what I should say is THANK YOU TWITTER!!! It brings resources and people within reach so much easier and FASTER! I agree with SLH, I do feel like I am working with a lot more people than just the people who are physically in my office. So to all of you who have responded to my tweets, thanks!
Tech: Planning for the future
So we are mostly a .NET shop, all of our servers are Windows 2003 using IIS and all of my code is in C#.
What I am wanting to do, is to look out there and find out what is the best way of deciding how we should move forward with operations. I can continue to build apps in C#, mostly because all of our stuff is written in it already. The presentation is kind of clunky, but we're in healthcare, we're supposed to be behind everyone else.
What I am really looking for is advice on how to move forward with current technology without breaking the bank, having to relearn everything from scratch, and leverage what we already have and can make/change with little upset and not too much adjustment.
I am the developer, the dba, the report writer. I am for the most part the business analyst in that I go to a lot of folx and try to discover what they NEED, rather than what they want. We have a Project Manager/Analyst who is brilliant as well, but she's working with other departments on different projects.
My main goal going forward is to move to a more BI(Business Intelligence) mode, try to leverage the huge amounts of data we are currently gathering and not utilizing to the fullest, use our third party data more effectively for analysis and checks and balances, and allow the company to move forward while at the same time, having a plan in place and moving effectively instead of just because.
If anyone has any suggestions, I'd love to hear them. I'm the type of person who knows a little about a lot, and it's making me a little crazy because I don't have the resources to make the informed decisions I need to make. What I can picture is something along these lines:
I'd like to leverage the data I have in my current db's as well as third party data into a data warehouse so I can utilize cubes, Sql Server Analysis Services(SSAS), and pivot tables for projections and analysis.
I'd like to leverage the current apps to continue business, but at the same time find a way to create middle tier apps to serve up data so that I can...
Start moving into a Design based area and separate Design from Code/Business Logic.
I want to separate the design from the business logic, simply because I believe a robust middle tier will allow me to design multiple fronts. We have quite a lot of regional people, and yet there are plenty of people in the facilities. I'd like to be able to create an environment that would allow a user on a PC in a facility to be able to access the information they need using a webpage, and yet at the same time create a webservices that would allow people in the field to accomplish things on their blackberrys.
Perfect example - a user in the facility wants to see what requests have been approved. They see one is still waiting, they call Mgr X in the field, "Oh wow, sorry, let me do it now", Mgr X opens a page on her blackberry and clicks a few buttons and voila, the request is approved, the order is made, and the piece is on it's way.
From what my limited understanding told me, I could do that by having some webservice that accomplished my business logic sitting in the middle with a Webpage for a PC user and some kind of microwebpage for a Blackberry user.
I have seen Adobe Flex utilized in several different cool applications and I've always been a fan of RIA's seeing them as a way to encapsulate business applications and allow for different forms - Flex allows you to develop one program and compile it as a SWF for a website, or as an AIR application for the desktop. I'm not sure if this is the way to go, but I would really like to find out because I like the technology.
I just don't want to reinvent the wheel.
Any advice would be appreciated.
TECH: Hitting enter?
Okay, so how many of you hit Enter to move between fields in a form online? I didn't realize that hitting enter will submit a form because I've never done that. I either click in the boxes, or use tab.
Anyway, I built a form and the requestor wanted to disable enter on the whole thing. Why? I don't know, but I wanted her to stop bugging me
I found a way to do it, but it's kind of a pain. The first part is the javascript function, make sure it's between the head tags.
<script language="JavaScript">
function disableEnterKey(e)
{
var key;
if(window.event)
key = window.event.keyCode; //IE
else
key = e.which; //firefox
if(key == 13)
return false;
else
return true;
}
</script>
The last part is something you have to put in every single text box (and I had about 100 - thank goodness for find and replace)
<input type=”text” name=”mytext” onKeyPress=”return disableEnterKey(event)”>
The important part is the part in red. Just slap that in each input tag, and you're ready to go.
Anyone have an easier way of doing it?
Why are you here?
So I'm sitting in a training class at NetCom, which I would recommend btw, and there is a woman sitting in front of me. As the lesson is going along, I notice her screen flashing quite a bit.
She's posting on Facebook and Myspace while she's here.
Dude! This class isn't cheap! WTF Are you doing?
Anyway, I'm in the Empire State Building, prolly going to go to the observation deck before I leave today.