Divided Minds

The Bible says that a double-minded man is unstable in all his ways. I'm tettering right now. There is a couple of major decisions that MUST be made in the next few weeks.

I should be graduating in May with my AS in Computer science. Now, I work as a programmer, and an AS degree would be useful. My wonderful and loving wife has put up with about four years now of me being a part-time husband, since school demands so much attention. I am also tired of homework, tired of working 40 hours a week, coming home and helping with housework, and then having to stay up all night studying.

On the other hand, a bachlor's degree would be more useful, and to be honest, more respected. If I say, "I have an associeates of science..." most "educated" people say, "oh, so what" It's like saying "I finished the 8th grade, and it only took five tries!"

A bachlors is the minimum for most State jobs. Should I continue in school, and put my family out, or continue on to help out my family's financial situation?

One is intensly personal, intensly private and the details of which I'm not going to share. I've been asked to do something that, while I understand and agree with the rational arguments for doing so, my heart says something else. Basically, it's a decision between what I want and what would be better for someone else.

These decisions must be made soon (within a month or so), and I must live with the consequences for the rest of my life.

Busy time, new baby

Well, it has been quite a while since I last wrote. To be honest, I had forgotten both my user name and password. An update would be warrented to the one or two people who may stumble across my rantings.

In Feb. 2007, we found out that we were going to be parents again. A little later, we found that we were having a son. On October 19th, Benjamin was born. Check out the link to the online birth announcement I posted. Ben is a healthy, happy, BIG Boy. His big sister thinks that he is simply the greatest

Work is still busy. I have been given (temporarily) the responsibility to make the Heirloom Birth Certificates until I finish the Heirloom order entry system. I'm doing it in VB 2005 (every time I mention the term "VB" my wife snickers as she says it sounds like I'm saying "VD")

Funny thing about programming is that you have to continually update your skill set, and the most effective way to do so is to write the software in a new language. This is both fun and frustrating. Fun because you learn new stuff, but frustrating because the thing that you can do in ten seconds in the old language takes you days to figure out how to do in the new. In VB NET, Microsoft decided that all database access should be done through a disconnected data set.

Yes, I know, the data reader object allows forward-only connections and SQL commands can be issued over the COMMAND objects. The problem is that they went from easy rs.fields("fieldname").value = myString to parsing a SQL command string. In DAO, I could connect to the database in four statements. In ADO, I could do so in three. In ADO.NET, I'm into five statements just to open a database for read only, and reading values is a pain in the butt.

Anyway, if you're programming over the net, this makes perfect sense, but did they forget that VB is primarily used to design database front ends for a client server architecture? I have two main gripes with Microsoft. First is that they work to make money first, even if it screws the end users, and second, they think were all stupid.

They don't care. Just like they broke compatibility with VB 6 when the dot net stuff came out. The dismissed the idea that many companies have invested tens of thousands of dollars in a custom code bases and are reluctant to throw away the investment.

Just like the stupid tool bar(aka ribbon bar) that the microsofties foisted upon Office 2007 users. There are several degrees of computer users. Some users adapt to changes easily, and love to learn new ways of doing things. Some view computers as the devil's work, and interact with them the same way you interact with a plague victim, as little as possible. Companies have invested lots of money in user training. From Office 97 until 2003, the user interface remained mostly stable, allowing folks to take what they've learned from older versions and apply it to newer versions with little headache. Now I understand the desire to improve user interfaces, and I don't fault Microsoft's attempt to make things easier, but come on folks! How hard is it to provide a menu system in addition to the bar? I am not a novice user by any means, and I struggle to find where they hid the option that I need, when I knew exactly where it was in the menu.