Relational Integrity

I've been asked, recently, about when I might be posting a new blog. I used to write a lot, taking whatever nonsense was whirling about the old noggin and composing it in to some sort of postable blog-type-thing. Many of these blogs began as snippets of an email conversation, usually with my pal Rosenrosen, or germinated from seeds sown in the midst of some rant.

For several reasons, I am not very often in the sort of situation which used to lead to a blog. For starters, the powers that be at my job at Swirling Vortex, Inc. disbanded my department and moved us to another area. Many of my best blogs are descriptions of, or at least were inspired by, workaday conversations with those co-workers. After the move, those conversations became few and far between.

Emailing with Rosenrosen is also limited, since went back to school full-time and has limited time during the day. We used to get some really good material from student loan industry publications, as well as a financial aid listserv (such as the time we decided that the creator of the FinAid.org web site had killed and stuffed his mother, a la Norman Bates, as well as his first and only date, and had an army of "children" made up of Cabbage Patch and My Buddy dolls.)

The part-time job, while sucking up my free time and probably killing of little bits of what's left of my soul, has provided a bit of blog fodder, but really...how many times can I bitch about doughy fat girls making messes in the changing room? It might have been slightly funny the first time, and even that is debatable.

I recently got a new position at work. It's a lateral move so there is no raise involved, but the job allows me much more autonomy. The previous position involved much updating of tracking databases and third-party scheduling, which I hated. Now I'm back to a much preferable arrangement, which is being given a task and then allowed to go and do it with little interference.

One of these tasks is attempting to alter Access databases. I am not a programmer; I can write SAS queries and I can use AQT to find and update data, but that's about it.  Now I have to learn how to do shit in Access using Visual Basic. I think about it a lot; I sit around and think about why none of my queries seem to work and what I might be able to do to change that. There's no blog in any of that, the shit is boring. I myself alternate between falling asleep in my new fancy roomy cubicle and wanting to throw the laptop off the catwalk before skipping up to Human Resources to ask may I please have a job now for someone who's stupid, please? Hyuk.

That's it; that's why the blogging has dried up. That's all the time I have for this rubbish now; I'm going to sit around and think about the relational integrity between the tables in my database and how it relates to their key values.