HikingDave.com

I thought it was a good idea at the time…

We have an Infopath form that contains requests for IT services. But it moves into SharePoint for management through development, test, deployment, etc. I figured… why force Devs to go into InfoPath just to add in a priority? So I added a field into the list, not the form.

Well, the form would no longer publish to the list. Apparently, all columns in the list MUST be in the InfoPath data, or else you get an error of “Cannot update content type” when trying to publish.

It was an easy fix – I just added the field to the InfoPath data source.

And now I know not to ever do that again.

Many people have heard of the 100 pushup plan, the 200 situp plan, or the Couch to 5K plan.

I put them all together:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=0Av7yqRncL9zhdDhrYTVrR3dRRm5meUhJSGtJa3Vycmc&hl=en&output=html

Enjoy.

I was thinking the other night… thinking of an unoriginal question. What would I do differently if I had a second chance at college? But I tried to avoid the easy answers… I tried to avoid thinking of specific poor decisions and how different choices could have had better results. Instead I was contemplating how I could have been a better overall person?

And I think these are the changes I would make:

1) Buy a tent, a sleeping bag, and a backpack. Spend some weekends camping. Just throw the backpack on — there were two state parks within backpacking distance. Walk through the corn fields, pitch the tent, bring some books, and just spend more time outdoors and away from everyone.
2) Ignore the culture. It is really easy to walk into a school and get so interested in the first groups of people you meet that you copy some of their culture instead of finding your own. So ignore them. Politely. Find your own path. Everyone eventually does this… but do it from the very first day.
3) Be healthier. Eat better, go exercise when I get up. This is a wonderful habit to have as an adult, and there is no reason not to start when you are young.
4) Skip the late night talks. I loved walking through town with a friend, staying up late, just talking. I have wonderful memories of these events. But those friends will still be there in the morning. Go to sleep already.
5) Skip dating, too. There were some people who met their spouses at college. But most didn’t. Dating takes a lot of energy and adds a lot of drama. If two people are really going to care that much for each other, they can wait. Your energy has better places to go. Really. Don’t let your biology fool you on this one.
6) Double (or triple) major. I got a degree in Art. I would not change this. But I would add majors in Physics and Computer Science. This is the only time in your life when you have no obligations other than to learn. Maximize it. Take as many classes and do as many activities as your sanity can bear. You’ll never have this much time to do so again.
7) Be Introverted. In your old age, you aren’t going to be wishing you had spent more time being social. You are going to wish you had spent more time learning and working on projects that inspired you.

Just a quick note of something I discovered.

There is probably a better answer to this, but…

I have a dataview sorted by a non-required numeric field. By default, SharePoint puts null values before the populated values. This is not what I want. I do want to see the items that are null, but this is a field used for priority, so I want the null/unprioritized values as the bottom of the list.

The first answer I came up with was to try to translate the nulls into 9s. That did not work. But then I figured out than if I try to perform a numeric operation on the null, I could get it to turn itself into ‘NaN’. Cool. A String. At that point, I can manipulate the string to get it into a ‘9’.

So my final sort expression is now:
translate(translate(string(ceiling(@FieldName)),‘N’,’‘),‘a’,‘9’)

So, when looking for our new home, we were considering moving into the heart of Denver. One of the concerns was the crime rate. We were OK with living in a higher crime area… but ended up moving to the suburbs anyway — Highlands Ranch, CO, the epitome of HOA-controlled suburbia.

So what happens when we get here?

Well, we meet our neighbors, they all seem great. A week later, cops knock on our door, grilling us about what we knew of our neighbor, when he is home, when he leaves, etc.
They don’t tell us why they are asking, but a quick internet search shows that an assault was reported at his home just a few hours before the police started asking about him.

The next day, his front door is wide open and stays that way for over 24 hours. Clearly, the dude is not home. Which is odd, as he said he works from home.

He is a minor internet celebrity, but he hasn’t been online in 2 weeks now. People are starting to ask around and be very concerned about the dude.

So this is the suburbs – neighbors who have crimes occur at their homes, then disappear. I really don’t know details of what is going on, so I am not even going to presume what the actual story is.

But between this, and the used condoms I see laying around the streets… is Highlands Ranch really all that much better than the inner city??