Author Archive
Thursday, March 11th, 2010
Book Review: Return Engagement (Settling Accounts, Book 1)
Harry Turtledove scrambles history for us, taking situations from the first half of the 20th century and mixing them up geographically.
Imagine a dis-United States split into independent North and South with a breakaway state in the west. Great Britain attacking America, swirled alliances in Europe and warfare breaking out all over the place. [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Books, Speculative Fiction by Jack
Wednesday, March 10th, 2010
Book Review: Sit and Go Strategy
Collin Moshman is a mathematician who turned away from post-graduate economics studies when he chose to pursue poker as a full-time professional. He has also written several books including this one.
This books looks at the easiest to join, most common online tournament: the Sit-N-Go (SNG). A Sit-N-Go tournament is a 9 or 10 [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Books, Guides by Jack
Tuesday, March 9th, 2010
Book Review: A Kiss of Shadows
Laurell K Hamilton writes in a genre that I generally avid: romance. That was almost enough to stop me from reading this book. Ultimately, I chose to read this book for a couple of reasons: I am challenging myself to stretch my boundaries and this book promised to have some elements of the [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Books, Romance by Jack
Monday, March 8th, 2010
Book Review: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is a novel by Phillip K. Dick. It also happens to be the story behind one of my favorite movies of all time: Bladerunner.
I actually saw the movie (several times) before reading the book, which is very unusual for me. At first, it was because I did [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Books, Movies, Science Fiction by Jack
Sunday, March 7th, 2010
Book Reviews
As indicated back in April 2009, I was contemplating making a change in the direction of this blog.
Like many – perhaps most – it was after writing for a little while that I began to question why I was trying to build a blog and what the goal for it is. All of the [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Books by Jack
Wednesday, April 29th, 2009
Renovations Underway
Sorry for the lack of new posts in some time. Learning how to develop a new custom theme and deciding just what I really want to use this blog for.
No Comments » - Posted in Off-topic by Jack
Thursday, March 19th, 2009
Transform Question in DataStage
Found this old question in the Data Direct Technologies Forum. I think it makes a good example exercise, since it can be solved multiple ways, but is short enough to address in a single (long) post.
I have a record in this format
H,0002
L,B254,4
L,B221,19
L,B064,4
H,0001
L,B208,1
L,B186,8
H,0004
L,B178,17
L,B132,19
L,B121,17
L,B025,12
H,xxxx (xxxx represents the customer unique no)
L, yyyy.z (yyyy is the product part no, [...]
No Comments » - Posted in DataStage by Jack
Thursday, February 26th, 2009
Learning DataStage
Being a DataStage ETL developer, I have spent plenty of time over the past few years working with a tool that has proven to be both powerful and, at times, frustrating. Powerful, in that it can handle a huge amount of data with a lot of flexibility, often with good performance, in a manner than [...]
No Comments » - Posted in DataStage, Software by Jack
Sunday, January 4th, 2009
Long Term Financial Goals as of January 2009
It is well documented that setting goals is made more effective when those goals are shared with other people.
Goal setting is a good thing. I’ve known it for most of my life, even when I have not been actively practicing it. As I have gained more experience, I have found that setting goals gets harder [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Planning by Jack
Friday, November 7th, 2008
A Rich Story
What is Rich?
A rich man decided to go on vacation to a faraway land, bringing his family with him to enjoy the experience. When he arrived, he saw some friends and invited them to join him for the weekend. The entire group went up into the mountains to the private retreat.
The first evening, everybody was [...]
