A Beautiful Message About Growing Old

SHIT!

I forgot what it was!

Hamilton, Ohio – Local EMS Chief and Photographer Steve Weigold started acting strangely today.  Weigold, not normally known for vehicular vanity pulled out all the stops as he got out soap, water, buckets, scrub brushes and other supplies and started washing his car.

Neighbors noticed the commotion and the erratic behavior and immediately called authorities.  A local emergency official who asked not to be named was quoted as saying “Weigold’s sanity has been questioned for years for his involvement in EMS in general and for accepting a position as Chief specifically, but this takes the cake.”

Authorities have not tried to move in on the residence yet, fearing Weigold may turn the hose on them or himself.  They indicate they are awaiting the arrival of a psychiatric specialist.  This unnamed specialist is apparently coming from a highly placed university in Tennessee and is uniquely skilled in dealing with the kind of psychosis the Chief is displaying. Authorities will not however, release this specialists name.   In the mean time, authorities are standing by to prevent the Chief from harming himself or the surrounding community.

When interviewed, neighbors and co-workers alike agreed that the fact that Weigold was washing his car was definitely unusual and that he must need help for his unusual behavior.  One especially rural neighbor was quoted as saying “Yea, thar was this loud roar noise, like those trains yonder… then my trailer started…  wait.. wat was the kestion again?”

Reporters tried to interview Weigold himself, but he refused to turn off the buffer long enough to do so.  Those nearby report that he mumbled something about not wanting his car to look as old as he is.

And, in related news, local trailer park resident Ineeda Tension, who was on the scene watching the commotion, fainted when Chief Weigold got out the Q-tips to clean the vents.

Keep your browser pointed here for more as this story develops!

Grrrr… nothing like a MySql bug to really make your day.

I had need to generate a sum for a column of duration values with the type of TIME.  Orginally I used this as part of my query:

sum(call_duration) as totalhours

Turns out this does not work properly and has apparently been a problem since 2005!

http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=12108

From reading the comments, there appears to be some argument as to the validity of the bug.  For what it’s worth, I found that the problem is more pronounced with more results.  I found that it was non-existant (that is that the sum returned the correct value) with result sets with only a few rows.   The problem seemed to get more severe based on more rows in the results.  In my case, a result set with about 2000 rows in it had an error of on the order of three hours.

The work around is to modify the query slightly:

sum(TIME_TO_SEC(crf_call_duration)) as totalhours

This converts the time to essentially an integer which is then properly handled by the sum.  You can then either work with the result as a count of seconds, or use the function SEC_TO_TIME to convert it back to a TIME value.

I hope this helps someone else.  It cost me a number of hours…

Making a baby!

The Smiths were unable to conceive children and decided to use a surrogate father to start their family. On the day the proxy father was to arrive, Mr. Smith kissed his wife goodbye and said, ‘Well, I’m off now. The man should be here soon.’

Half an hour later, just by chance, a door-to-door baby photographer happened to ring the doorbell, hoping to make a sale. ‘Good morning, Ma’am’, he said, ‘I’ve come to…’

‘Oh, no need to explain,’ Mrs. Smith cut in, embarrassed, ‘I’ve been expecting you.’

‘Have you really?’ said the photographer. ‘Well, that’s good. Did you know babies are my specialty?’

‘Well that’s what my husband and I had hoped. Please come in and have a seat’.

After a moment she asked, blushing, ‘Well, where do we start?’

‘Leave everything to me. I usually try two in the bathtub, one on the couch, and perhaps a couple on the bed. And sometimes the living room floor is fun. You can really spread out there.’

‘Bathtub, living room floor? No wonder it didn’t work out for Harry and me!’

‘Well, Ma’am, none of us can guarantee a good one every time. But if we try several different positions and I shoot from six or seven angles, I’m sure you’ll be pleased with the results.’

‘My, that’s a lot!’, gasped Mrs. Smith.

‘Ma’am, in my line of work a man has to take his time. I’d love to be In and out in five minutes, but I’m sure you’d be disappointed with that.’

‘Don’t I know it,’ said Mrs. Smith quietly.

The photographer opened his briefcase and pulled out a portfolio of his baby pictures. ‘This was done on the top of a bus,’ he said.

‘Oh, my God!’ Mrs. Smith exclaimed, grasping at her throat.

‘And these twins turned out exceptionally well – when you consider their mother was so difficult to work with.’

‘She was difficult?’ asked Mrs. Smith.

‘Yes, I’m afraid so. I finally had to take her to the park to get the job done right. People were crowding around four and five deep to get a good look’

‘Four and five deep?’ said Mrs. Smith, her eyes wide with amazement.

‘Yes’, the photographer replied. ‘And for more than three hours, too. The mother was constantly squealing and yelling – I could hardly concentrate, and when darkness approached I had to rush my shots.
Finally, when the squirrels began nibbling on my equipment, I just had to pack it all in.’

Mrs. Smith leaned forward. ‘Do you mean they actually chewed on your, uh…equipment?’

‘It’s true, Ma’am, yes.. Well, if you’re ready, I’ll set-up my tripod and we can get to work right away.’

‘Tripod?’

‘Oh yes, Ma’am. I need to use a tripod to rest my Canon on. It’s much too big to be held in the hand very long.’

Mrs. Smith fainted

- from a Facebook status message.  Thanks James!

Stay Optimistic!

(Tagline from a forum post)
Yeah… thats what kind of day I’m having too.