This week I’ve been working on a report. Originally, everything on the report was pulled from one table, but it needs to include data from the original table, plus some information from a second table that is associated with each record in the original table. The relationship is many to one, and in some cases, there may be no data in the second table, so I have to use an outer join, which returns a result set like this: ...
Jeanne at Body and Soul has an incredible post today about the challenge of confronting your own weakness.
Thomas Frank has written an article for the New York Review of Books that explains convincingly why Democrats are getting their heads handed to them by Republicans. It’s entitled, appropriately enough, What’s the Matter With Liberals? In it, he describes the phenomenon (also documented elsewhere) where many Americans see educated liberals as the “elite” that exercises undue influence over their lives, and ignore the economic elite. He rightly criticizes Democrats for allowing this to happen, because they have surrendered any moral authority they might have on economic issues to feed at the money trough with the Republicans. Anyway, read the whole article. ...
Rogers Cadenhead has a post up about his brief brush with fame. I watched the Today show clip and thought he came off very well. And the whole time I watched it, I was paralyzed by anxiety. The one thing I knew for sure was that I never want to be on TV like that. I think I can hold my own in conversation, and heck, I enjoy job interviews, but the idea of being interviewed by Katie Couric on national television is terrifying. Not that I believe I’ll ever have to worry about it. ...
Rael Dornfest has a bit up at the O’Reilly Radar about how he’s migrating his computer usage to Web applications, and has a good list of the ones he relies upon. I’ve been thinking of doing something similar lately. The big change for me came when I realized that I strongly prefer Gmail to Thunderbird. I’m not even sure exactly why. I also use del.icio.us, Flickr, Bloglines, and tons of other Web applications, but moving to the Web for your email seems like a particularly big step. Anyway, aside from coding, it seems like these days I use my Web browser for just about everything, and I like it. ...
Check out this post at Making Light for an explanation of why Thomas Friedman annoys the hell out of me.
Stewart Brand has written an essay predicting what the future of cities and humanity looks like. Definitely worth reading.
Jason Kottke pointed to an old article from Vogue food critic and frequent Iron Chef America judge Jeffrey Steingarten on learning to eat everything. I don’t eat everything (to my continued shame), but I eat many many different things. Until I was 25 or so, I was a very picky eater. I constantly lived in fear of going to decent restaurants, because I often found myself in a situation where there was literally nothing on the menu that I felt comfortable ordering. The idea of any food with sauce was intensely traumatic. As I’ve mentioned before, I grew up in a small town, and when I went to college, I had never eaten Greek, Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Italian (aside from spaghetti or pasta), or plenty of other varieties of food. I expanded my horizons a bit in college (incorporating some Chinese and Vietnamese food), but I was still awfully picky. Then, after I’d moved away for my first real job, I started hanging out with a girl who I really wanted to date. One thing I knew about her is that she was definitely not a picky eater. She ate at all the restaurants in town with no fear at all. And I knew that she would not respect me if I went to a restaurant that she loved and found nothing I was willing to eat on the menu. It was at that point that I decided that I was no longer a picky eater. I’d eat whatever was put in front of me with a smile. I told myself a lie, that if other people eat something, it can’t be that different from what I already eat. It paid off. Not only do I enjoy all sorts of food today that I couldn’t even imagine eating back then, but I my strategy worked. She wound up marrying me. And to this day she tells people that she can’t believe that I was ever a picky eater. ...
Rogers Cadenhead posted the other day about how he had speculated on the name the next pope would choose by registering some domain names. One of the names he chose was benedictxvi.com, and lo and behold, he nailed it. This has yielded him plenty of attention, not only among bloggers, but in the mainstream media as well. I’d love to pull off such shenanigans, but my brain just isn’t wired that way.
The New York Times is planning a site-wide redesign. Want to be in charge of it? In a just world, Adrian Holovaty (or perhaps his boss) would get this job.