My Musings

  • Dashboard Driving

    Dashboard driving: running your business solely on the numbers without considering your long-term prospects or intangibles. Do you drive your car solely by looking at the dashboard, measuring your speed and fuel usage? Or do you mostly drive by looking out the window to see where you are and where you are going and possibly…

  • Macro testing

    When you develop programs, you have to test, test, test. After this past month, I see at least 2 areas where you have to do some serious testing: 1) Test different sites/units/businesses that will be using your program. Each site or unit may have different ways of entering data or have different terminology. Even the…

  • You are not going crazy

    “One, two, three, four, five, …, eleven, twelve. Twelve characters.” “So why does Excel len() function gives me 13?” “Maybe there’s a blank character at the front. Let’s try =left(cell, 1)…Hmmm, R.” “Maybe it’s at the end. Try =right(cell, 1)…An e, nope.” Normally, if you are working with a download from SAP, you will be dealing…

  • Data Breaches – There’s an Awful Lot of ‘Em

    There’s a lot of bad actors in this world. They range from the infantile teenagers to the truly malicious. The latest set of news are about the massive breach at JPMorgan, which, being a financial firm, would have one of the strongest set of security plans in place and yet, they’ve been hacked. This means just about everybody is…

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    Programming Logic

    You know how programming logic can get gnarly? That happens when you need to make adjustments or additions to the program. Or you have a decision tree that is based upon time. I’ currently trying to write a program to save “beginning of the month” data to use for comparison purposes throughout the month without blowing…