[Geek victory dance /]

WARNING: Pointless, mundane, and feebly self-congratulatory.

So it’s a quarter to eight, and I’m steeling myself for the homeward commute (a Seattle rainstorm is not necessarily motorcycle weather, Roachman!) but I’m feeling good.

I’m feeling unusually good, in fact, 'cept for the sore elbows from patting myself on the back.

I work in technical sales (not support, a topic I could hold forth on forever) for a big maker of specialized electronics. One of our dealers came to me yesterday with a customer whose brand-new system wouldn’t work as advertised (a serial port configuration got corrupted when he cycled power).

So, yesterday we submitted the problem to the real technical support at the factory. This morning, “Sorry, we know about that, but it won’t be fixed until the next release in three months”.

Mind you, we just added this extra serial port to the product last release. The customer needs this machine to be at a trade show next week.

I’m just stinky proud of myself, because now after eleven hours of scratching my head and stealing technical notes from unsecured servers at the factory, I got a workaround that just takes 2600 bytes and only adds a third of a second to boot time. Yay me !

Which brings me to the reason that I posted this to a MPSIMS: Do you have “Yessssss!” moments at your job? Dilbert-esque “still pumped from using the mouse” moments of application-specific pride that nobody else in the office understands even if you explain it on the whiteboard using perfectly clear hex codes?

Or have they all been beaten out of you by “great, that’s nice, you’re competent so take the work of all the rest of the incompetents” like my last job ?

in high school, i was worked part time as a cable tech (meaning i was a cable puller… i installed cat5 network and voice cable in a local office building). we had to pull some fiber from the top floor up to the roof, then out about 75 ft. we had no fiber, and we didn’t have time to order more, so we pulled some unused fiber out of the wall, rolled it onto a spool, and crossed our fingers that it would be long enough (bear in mind that fiber optic cable is pretty easy to break, at least when you’re ripping it out of the wall). so we carefully pulled it out, carefully put it on a spool, then carefully pulled it from the top floor to the roof, and across a bunch of jagged gravel that was on top of the roof. it took forever (in fact, i think we had to work a few hours overtime to do it by the deadline) and we were very worried we’d broken the fiber at some point.

the boss came in the next day, tested it, and said it worked perfectly!! plus, we’d used the whole spool and didn’t know if it was long enough, but we came in at 2 ft over what was necessary!

a perfect pull, in every sense of the word!

As a housewife and stay-at-home Mom, my “yess!” moments probably aren’t as cosmically important as anything to do with serial port configurations, but they do get me pumped.

My main “yess!” moments are when somebody can’t find something important (physics textbook, glasses, etc.) and I know where it is. “I found your glasses on the floor under the couch and I put them on the sewing dresser.” Crisis averted! Yess!

Well, you had to be there…

well i know what you mean, DDG (or at least i think i do). my room mate loses everything that she touches. nothing makes me feel better than when i watch her search for her keys, then i stand up, walk to her coffee table and say, “here they are!”
then, of course, i have to rub it in by saying, “you don’t know how to look for anything, do you?”

she always replys with “shut up,” but i know she appreciates it. really, deep down she does.

Kinda boring but: My manager & the head install guy were trying to bring up a new piece of telecom equipment (SONET) into our main system. They’d been working at it for a few hours. It was near the end of the day and I was bored, so I started helping them out (sticking my nose in).

I’m the one who figured out the fibers were reversed at the other end. Made me feel good since they both had more technical knowledge than I did.

I program a pseudo-realtime system and any time I can squeeze a few bytes out of a program to make it faster it’s a personal “yes!” moment for me. With hardware becoming faster and cheaper it’s not as important as it once was, but it’s still a personal victory. I hate bloated code.

I’ve had a couple of occassions where other programmers doing additions to programs I’ve written in the past have come by and mentioned how well commented (and therefore more readable and understandable) my programs were. Now if they’d just nominate me for a bonus!

Weeell, a few months ago, we were having a problem with some users working in an account in the database on our mainframe getting logged off. This was a problem, because it was corrupting data when they would get logged off. We tried everything we could to prove whether it was a problem with the database, someone logging them off, etc. I’m the one who noticed that every time they had called recently, our snmpd map was showing degradation on the hubs in their building. They were losing their network connection, unix knew it, but the database was too dumb to know and was just showing them logged off. We replaced the hubs, problem ceased. Yessss!!!

Nothing to add… I’m a programmer… we never have “Yess! Moments”.

Unless a new game comes out.

Anyway, I just wanted to point out that I thought this thread was about a greek victory dance.

Now, that I’d like to see.

I’m a programmer and we have lots of ‘yes’ moments. When your working on the same problem for 8 straight days, then you get the brilliant flash that will let you fix it. Or you finally finish the 6 month project and get the first clean run. Those are better yes moments than anybody else gets.

In fact at one of my old jobs me and some coworkers got into this little game where when one of us would finish something big we would shout “I AM A GOD!!!”. Unfortunately I went to a new job but was still in the habit, Got me some strange looks.

My days are full of “YES!!” moments, and few are the people who give a specific shit or would understand it if they did, so I know what you mean. I’m a FileMaker database geek.

FileMaker does nice easy reports on any data structure: you sort it by the categories, then within each category, the subcategory, and so on and it automatically displays each category name that occurs in the data, along with totals for that category, and so on through all the subcategories, arrayed in the order you want them in. The one thing it doesn’t do is display categories for which no data exists. Or, actually, it doesn’t do that and it doesn’t display your Uncle Fred’s Date of Most Recent Tattoo Acquisition either, for the same reason: it has no bloody way of knowing anything about either one since it has no data pertaining to either one.

So the upstairs client has a data set in which each record is in one of a fairly large but finite and predetermined set of categories, and is for one of the possible 12 months. And the upstairs client wants the report to include all categories for all months of the current year, putting 0 for the total expenditure if nothing was spent for that category*month. So much for the convenient built-in FileMaker way of doing the report!

OK, there exist lots of ways of scripting the process of running through a selected data set and tallying up the amounts in each category and blopping the results into a field or fields, but many of them would involve a huge and ugly morass of value-specific “If” statements, because FileMaker is still kind of undernourished when it comes to indirect referencing. It does, however, allow for a very flexible construction of data relationships, including calc fields and globals…heh heh heh…

So I define a calc field to equal, in a consecutive order I set up {the Choose function}, all the values of the main category variable depending on the value of a global number field, then define another calc field as the concatenation of the Choose field and the MonthNumber field, and a third calc field as the record’s category value concatenated with the month of the record’s date field, and, finally, relate the table to itself in a self-join relationship of the first concatenated field to the second. Set up a script that runs a loop within a loop, the first loop of which increments the digit of the global number field that the Choose field depends on and sets down the sum of all quantity spent as summarized through the self-join relationship (which starts off pointing to the first category, the first month, the selected year), then goes to the next field, until that number equals the number corresponding to the last category; the second loop increments the month digit and then performs the first loop and exits when the month digit exceeds 12.

The layout is a special layout that has only the target fields, arrayed with a tab order corresponding to the order in which the dual-loop routine will place the data, so “Go to Next Field” always causes the blind unspecified “Set Field” statement to place the data in the correct target.

So instead of a horrid morass of “If” statements and separate “Set Field” steps for each category of each month, a script of just a few lines!
::does happy dance::