Off track

Well, it took a few weeks, but I'm off track again. The apartment is a mess — kitchen, too &mdash and I'm behind on tracking my finances. I managed to keep track through the month of May, only losing $2 all month, but June is not going to be as accurate.

C2 class was a review last night, which was a relief. All these calls are starting to pile up in my head, especially these cross and wheel things. There's too many of them and they all sound the same. There's another review on Saturday, but I had already planned to go to Virginia for a birthday party that day. Now I'm reconsidering. Staying in town will save me the train fare and I need the C2 review. Besides, if I go to VA, I'll miss the Baltimore Pride Block Party and I'll would probably have to catch a 3 am train home, which will me me likely to sleep through the Pride Festival as well.

Russell called me this morning &mdash an hour before I was intending to wake up &mdash to ask me to meet him so he could give me a prescription to take to the pharmacy for him. As if there aren't pharmacies in DC. Anyway, I saw a bumper sticker, "A Hamburger Stops A Beating Heart." I'm not a vegetarian or vegan, but if I had a car, I'd slap that on it just to be snide. :-)

I need to knuckle down tonight and get this place cleaned up.

I hate being stupid

I was goofing around with the MySQL command-line client, experimenting with different features (all very cool) when I inadvertently discovered that every order that our client site has been processing this week is broken due to a change in the database structure that the application didn't know how to handle.

So, after notifying the client and the boss of the error, I sat down to reconstruct the missing data. Thank goodness for email receipts! I get of copy of every email receipt that goes out to the customers, so I have a backup record of what they ordered and I was able to use that to enter the data into the database manually. Tedious, but better than telling the client that he can't fill his orders because we screwed up.

It's stupid errors like this that underscores the fact that I've only been using these tools for about a year. I haven't learned all there is about what not to do.

One of the features of the command-line client that I discovered is the ability to run it in safe-updates mode, which will prevent me from deleting or changing large groups of records accidentally. I've modified my configuration so that I run in this mode by default. I made that error once before. It took me half a day to fix it.

Another feature lets me set the prompt to indicate which database I'm connected to. I have a development database and a live database. Sometimes I've found myself confused as to which I was connected to. Now I'll always know.

Finally, I've started assembling a collection of SQL snippets that I can call from the command-line client — somewhat like macros. I can use them to make complicated queries more convenient. Experimenting with these is how I found the fact of the missing data.

The boss was pleased, oddly enough. He was pleased that I'm on top of the database and found the errors, notified the client and then found a way to fix the problem. He did say my email to the client was a little bit alarmist, but I was still in the "oh, shit!" moment. :-)

This client has the tendency to send emails IN CAPITAL LETTERS WHEN HE IS UPSET. I'm thankful that his reply to me was in proper case.

Okay. LJ breaktime is over. Time to compare the database against the email receipts to make sure I didn't make any errors.