Author: Ross Goodman

Categories
Fun Ross

Calf Strain

After completing the 10K for MND I foolishly stopped my training.

I decided to restart it during the week, I stretched just as much as I normally did. I walked 5 times further for my warm up. I went for 1 mile: jog 4 walk 2. I had a long walk to warm down.

I still managed to pull my right calf !

This was something I had when i was training regularly, the only thing that helped was going for a weekly massage.

I have changed the way that I walk so that I am stretching my calfs more and I feel a twinge with every step, this is helping me slightly but not “fast” enough. I want to get back out and do more.

Any suggestions for “better” or “more appropriate” stretches that I should do?

Categories
Photography

My Camera Has Developed A Fault

DSC_7246

See the two red dots and the red line?

I’m currently investigating camera repair shops 🙁

My camera is out of warranty.

Categories
Emma Family Sarah Uncategorized

School Prize Giving

DSC_7224

Both Emma and Sarah were recently recognised for their hard work at school.

They make me so proud!

Categories
Ross

Exhaustion Is

  • Falling asleep and no one can wake you.
  • Sitting on the edge of your daughters bed and falling asleep sitting up.
  • Keeling over onto the floor and falling asleep.
  • Waking up, not knowing what day it is; and not caring.
  • Trying to do 100 pushups; getting into position and falling asleep.
  • Making a cup of tea for the caffeine hit and falling asleep before the kettle is boiled.
  • Stopping at the motorway services for a snooze on the way home from work.
Categories
Work

Quote Of The Week

Thanks, thats “exactly” what we asked for, but “this” is what we want !

Categories
Microsoft Office Work

Microsoft Word 2007 Keyboard Shortcuts

I use Microsoft Office 2008 on my work laptop. Whilst I am no touch typist; I wish I could take the productivity hit whilst I learn, I do prefer to use the keyboard for most functions, growling when I have to resort to using the mouse.

I was torn by the ribbon interface; for 80% of the things that i want to do i can find it very quickly, the remaining 20% often required a trip to help to find it. Another thing that I hated was that I “had” to use the mouse to access the ribbon features.

Then I pressed the “Alt” key !!!!!!!

This pops up an overlay on top of the ribbon interface that shows you which key to press to access http://pharmacy-no-rx.net each feature. Or should I say, EVERY feature. If you can see it on the ribbon, you can access it via a keystroke. I’m beginning to like this user interface.

The remaining bugbear is that I always use styles, nost commonly the heading styles and normal. In the previous version of Word I always assigned my own keystroke shortcuts to access them, but I was always over riding exisiing keystrokes and features.

In Word 2007 I have found that there are system assigned keystrokes:

Ctrl + Alt + 1 = Heading 1

Ctrl + Alt + 2 = Heading 2

etc

Strl + Shift + N = Normal

Productive typing here I come !

Categories
Ross

Getting Things Done

A happy coincidence, at the beginning of the year, I read an article, I think it may have been on LifeHacker about the concept of a “zero state” inbox. Basically, keep your inbox empty, file all e-mails as soon as they appear and create tasks for anything you can’t do there and the.

Now I realise that this is the basic premis of Getting Things Done (GTD) by David Allen.

Continue reading “Getting Things Done”
Categories
Ross

100 Pushups

One Hundred Pushups

I first read about this on JD’s Get Fit Slowly blog, I’m up for it !

The target is, after 6 weeks I should be able to do 100 push-ups.

First day is today!

Categories
Maxima Information Group Microsoft SQLServer Work

Concatenate Two Fields And Get A Smaller Answer !?!?

Had a “strange” problem last week that really stumped me for longer than it should have.

My colleague had run a query to list some data and was getting approximately 200,000 rows back. We were investigating why a unique constraint was being violated so I took his query and did a count distinct to try and find the duplicates. I got 30,000 distinct values.

This really confused me, I was expecting only a handfull of duplicates, if any. Then I noticed that the first query already WAS a distinct list !

select distinct col1_id, col2_id from tablea

select count(distinct col1_id + ‘-‘ + col2_id) from tablea

I concatenated the fields together so I am counting a single field, I included the separator so that I could differentiate 1-11 from 11-1.

See if you can spot what the problem is before you read on.

Continue reading “Concatenate Two Fields And Get A Smaller Answer !?!?”
Categories
Business Objects Maxima Information Group Work XI 3.0

Business Objects XI 3.0 New Features – Change Data Tracking

Business Objects

I know that I covered this in my video post, but I hated the quality of the video, so here is a similar post with pictures (click on hem to see larger versions).

You no longer need to splash out on fancy dashboarding software (although Xcelsius is good !) to quickly highlight when your data is changing. A new feature in Business Objects Web Intelligence (WebI) 3.0 allows you to add this feature to any document.

Continue reading “Business Objects XI 3.0 New Features – Change Data Tracking”