Merry Christmas - 2008

By James at December 23, 2008 06:31
Filed Under: Life in General

 

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all our friends. Can you solve the puzzle?

James

Offshore Contractor Speak

By James at December 17, 2008 11:03
Filed Under: Miscellaneous, Life in General, Web Development

We work with an offshore country based at GMT + 5:30 to develop an application for us. Communicating with the contractors has been trying to say the least. Emails just don’t seem to get the point across about what needs to be done, or how I should set things up on my side. And, it seems they want me to be awake at 2:30 AM my time to answer the phone. After two weeks of trying to move the application from staging to production, with multiple points of failure, it was time for a phone call.

Ring, ring.

Me: “Hello”

Them: “Hi James”

blah, blah, blah, and niceties exchanged.

Me: “Ok, so let me get this straight. On the production machine, you want me to set the connection string to the XYZ report to the staging database? Doesn’t this defeat the purpose?”

Them: “Yes, set the connection string to the staging database.”

Me: “Are you sure? You’re positive right? This is the production server.”

Them: “Yes, please set the connection string to the staging database on report XYZ.”

Me: “On the production server?”

Them: “Yes on the production server, set the connection string to the staging database.”

(this isn’t going well)

Me: “Ok. Then anything else?”

Them: “Yes, when we move to the production server, make sure to change the connection string to the production database.”

Me: “Sigh….”

About the author

James James is a five time and current Microsoft MVP in Client App Development, a Telerik Insider, a past Director on the INETA North America Board, a husband and dad, and has been developing software since the early days of Laser Discs and HyperCard stacks. As the Founder and President of the Inland Empire .NET User's Group, he has fondly watched it grow from a twice-a-month, early Saturday morning group of five in 2003, to a robust and rambunctious gathering of all types and sizes of .NET developers.

James loves to dig deep into the latest cutting edge technologies - sometimes with spectacular disasters - and spread the word about the latest and greatest bits, getting people excited about developing web sites and applications on the .NET platform, and using the best tools for the job. He tries to blog as often as he can, but usually gets distracted by EF, LINQ, MVC, ASP, SQL, XML, and most other types of acronyms. To keep calm James plays a mean Djembe and tries to practice his violin. You can follow him on twitter at @latringo.

And as usual, the comments, suggestions, writings and rants are my own, and really shouldn't reflect the opinions of my employer. That is, unless it really does.

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