Happiness of Joy

I read through a friend's blog post recently that contrasts the differences of happiness and joy. Travis writes: "A good life can't rely on places, jobs, or people for hope and confidence... that would be like relying on scratch lotto tickets for a stable financial future".

Happiness is circumstantial. Circumstances that are unpleasant are most often out of our control. Joy is more of a foundation. A foundation that gauges our reactions and satisfactions. A foundation based of our faith and beliefs. Joy is the hope of knowing an outcome to an unpleasant circumstance.

Joy based on the wrong beliefs is not joyful, even under happy circumstances. Read Ecclesiastes 2:1-17. Uncountable happy circumstances only resulted in an astounding grievous response.

Now read Nehemiah 8:10. Mainly the part about "do not be grieved, for the joy of the LORD is your strength". This is a command, do not! Do not grieve, why not? Because the LORD is the foundation of our joy, and the foundation is secure. This is written in Nehemiah in a time that the Israelites had been in captivity. Read that as an unpleasant circumstance. Even in times of distress one can have joy if their foundation is secure.


In conclusion I am extremely excited for California. Let's hope for some warm weather!
And because I did not post this before (December 30, 2010, a few minutes before 7am local): Earthquakes make a good alarm clock.

Phrases In Consulting

"Good, fast, cheap; pick two."
"You can't make the neighborhood safe if your house is on fire."
"It's the version of the truth that's corporately accepted."
"It's bleeding; here's a cast."

(happy binary time)

Zune Error - C00D124D

So I was having problems getting my zune to sync with my computer. I kept getting an error: Zune Player Isn't Responding, C00D124D.

Problem

After a few minutes of deliberation I finally figured out the cause and solution. The Zune software was trying to sync a song from the Zune HD to the computer. The song was corrupted though (played the first few seconds then stopped).

Solution

• Disconnect the Zune HD.
• Find the most recent song the Zune Software was attempting to sync and check that song (on the Zune HD) if it is corrupted.
• If that song is corrupted (or has problems playing) long press and select delete. Otherwise you'll have to go through your library and find what song file is causing the problem manually.
• Plug the Zune HD back into the computer with the cable and everything should be back to normal.

Best of luck and feel free to leave a comment if you have any questions.

Start of a new project

Xilinx 12.3 installed. Check.
ModelSim PE installed. Check.
Good Memories coming back. Check.

Why does VHDL have to be so intriguing? All I need to recall how to do are do files.

Dare I say Zeeland is as amazing the second time as it was the first? I think so!

Fail

What would you do if you knew that you would not fail?
Same thing that I would do if I knew that I would fail.

SQL to remember

SELECT * FROM syscomments s

LEFT OUTER JOIN sysobjects o ON s.id = o.id

WHERE text like '%Search Term%'

That is how you search through (in my case) stored procedures in a database. Works in SQL 2000. No that's not a typo.

SQL 2008 Writeback

When attempting to do a writeback in Excel 2010 the following error is returned:

"Data could not be retrieved from the external data source.
Error message returned by the external data source:

Server: The operation has been cancelled due to memory pressure."


I repeated the same action while looking at the resource monitor on the server that the cube was located. The memory linearly increased from 17% to 99% then started hitting huge seg. faults with varying memory consumption until the error was displayed in Excel.

So it's a memory problem.

And the interesting thing about this, SQL 2008 analysis services doesn't flush the memory until someone connects to it. (i.e. the memory on the server didn't drop back to 17% until I did a reconnect in SQL Server Management studio to the cube)

Apparently this cube needs to be designed better or the server needs more than 4GB of RAM.



Not that you wanted to know this...whoever decided to read it.