Nice Days, White Weddings

Spring somehow manages to pull that trick of being somehow both gradual and sudden. One minute I'm celebrating the fact that a couple of daffodils have survived the morning frost and the snow has stopped, next thing it's everywhere, trees are blooming, grass is growing and there's been more than two dry days together. No wonder religions and spring got so intertwined. It's as if winter devastates everything in it's path and disappears leaving a Barron landscape and then spring just comes along behind it and starts colouring everything in again and makes it all look like it should. Yep Spring has definitely sprung. Here in Scotland it's been particularly nice for the last two weeks. (Spring can be a pretty wet affair in Scotland but not this year so far)

The downside to all this lovely springy stuff (you must have known there was a catch) is that things start to need looking after again. Grass and weeds spring up and hedges bush out where they shouldn't. Paths need that winter filth sprayed off them and it's then that you notice where repairs are needed. All those little outside jobs that you've avoided thus far due to the ridiculously cold weather can't be avoided any longer (Lucky I didn't put Christmas lights outside this year because, if I had listened to the wife and done it, it would have been about two weeks ago before I got them down).

Proof, if proof were required, that god exists comes at this time of year. Not from the beautiful rebirth of the world but more from the fact that, thanks to his rising again, we get a public holiday with which to catch up on all of these tasks. Ask any DIY retailer and they'll tell you that the big event in their calendar is Easter. Even your local supermarket will have cashed in with a selection of sun loungers, barbecues, hoses and lawn mowers.

Here in the UK this Easter has been a wee bit bigger than most. Why? Well because in the UK we have both God and a Queen which means that, when the queens grandchildren decide to get married, we get more holidays. Yep Prince William and Kate Middleton (commoner and daughter of multi millionaires as the press keep telling us) tied the knot yesterday and the whole of the UK workforce gained an extra public holiday to organise street parties, wave union jacks and basically celebrate along with our young royals. Cynics will point out that if you want us Brits to forget the recession, stop moaning about politics and generate a whole feel good factor then all you need is usually a royal wedding or a good war. The problem with the 'good war' plan is that it needs to be something properly nationalistic like the Falklands. I'm afraid that, whilst we have immense respect for our troops serving all over the world, the whole Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya type stuff just isn't nationalistic enough to create that uniquely British feel good factor that's required just now. Our sportsmen and Women aren't active enough just now either because they can sometimes create a mini feelgood factor. Nope the only way to get us to kick back and forget our woes this year was going to be a royal wedding and boy did we get one.

Now to be honest (Don't tell everyone) the United Kingdom over which our monarch presides isn't maybe as united as you might have been led to believe (unless of course you're battling the Falkland aisles). In fact there have been points in history where it's been downright un-United. Even now politically there are parties dedicated to nationalistic splits and every part of the country actually has it's own parliament as well as central government. It should come as no surprise then that some of it's royal subjects might have taken the day off, may even have raised a glass, but actually chose to use this free day for something other than a wedding street party. I have nothing against our young royals however I was asleep when they said 'I do' and when the crowds gathered at the railings of Buckingham palace I gathered at my own railings with a ladder and a paint pot ready to get one of those exterior jobs out of the way. Religion, Royalty and Politics are three things garanteed to cause controversy in any conversation however thanks to all three we had Easter Monday, The royal wedding on the Friday, and then International Workers day (May Day) the following Monday.

As the English and some of the Northern Irish sweep away the bunting, the Union Jack paper plates and napkins and reopen their town centres the gardens of Wales and Scotland will never have looked so well kept. Here's to William and Kate may their marriage be fantastic and long and may the press and tourism focus on bringing the benefits of this across the whole UK. Across all of the UK I think I can speak for everyone in saying thanks for the holiday.

So last weekend (Easter) we got a nice long weekend down at the caravan and this weekend (both the wedding and May day) we've had the chance to start the never ending task of making the outside of the house look beautiful. Caravans and gardens!! God I sound old. But it's all good really. Few things make a cold tin of beer more enjoyable than a weekend at the sea side or the end of a hard day grafting in the garden in the sun. If that makes me old then bring it on.

Access all areas

Yep the database that I was cursing last month is now a reality in my workplace. God was it a bad idea to start that project. From the minute I realised that it wouldn't work properly across a network I should have abandoned it but, did I? Did I hell. I now have a database with four full months worth of info based on a platform that is almost guaranteed to collapse. The thing is, people are loving it and even asking that I develop more. No-one seems to want to listen when I point out that it's hurtling towards an inevitable crash landing. I think the problem is that I've come up with a solution that seems to work. It's quick, functional and seems to have very few glitches that couldn't be worked around within the first week of use. Even I forget how precarious it all is. To be fair I've got it backed up all over the place so, when it comes crashing down, we shouldn't actually lose anything but the information that was being keyed at the time of the crash. Or maybe my band aid type fix of having users in the North work with a front end whilst users in the south access the back end directly isn't as precarious as it seems. If you google this method of a semi split database you'll find nothing comes up. No one either recommends or condemns it. Is that because it's such a stupid idea or is it because no-one has ever thought about it? Not so sure myself.

Anyhow if it continues to work as it does at the moment and I can tweak a few things it might just be the appraisal winner that I need for this year. I've been all but obsessed by it for over a month and now that I've finished delivering the course that I was delivering I should be able to get another month devoted to it before I move on. It's not every job that affords you two months to work on a geeky project that you actually enjoy doing. For all the frustration it still beats going to the shops and buying a brain training game. Trust me, with access, every small triumph brings with it many many pitfalls that need fixing. Every simple suggestion that anyone makes to improve it results in endless hours puzzling over why even the most straightforward of ideas can't be accomplished in the way that you thought. If I were my employer I wouldn't have let me near this project as, if I ever left the job, there's almost no-one about that would have any idea how to develop the damn thing. That said a lot of the reason it's taken so long to design is that I've avoided taking any shortcuts. Every report and form has been designed in such a way that, whilst it's taken a while to create, it should not need any maintenance to continue to work. Maybe future proof is too strong an expression but definitely future resistant. Well at least provided it doesn't corrupt. Fingers crossed.

In learning and designing the database I've also relied heavily on the Internet and a few of the forums that are out there devoted to Access. The problem with the forums, and databases in general, is that there is a sort of science behind databases that needs to be adhered to. That's probably why they are so much less popular than huge excel spreadsheets. Databases need thought about in advance. You almost need to know everything you will ever want out of it in advance or you'll pay dearly further down the line. If your design didn't anticipate that you would want that 'percentage' report or 'comparison' report then you may have to do a lot of back peddling and redesigning to get your tables into a state that will allow it. In doing so you'll also probably break all the other reports that you were successful in creating first time round. Users on the forums seem to almost take pride in how un-user friendly it actually is. They love to talk about data redundancy and the 'normalization' of data. Yep they'll devote days, even weeks to getting a table structure that avoids any duplicate references yet they think nothing of having to create three or four queries just to end up with a calculation that could have been written into a cell in excel in about a minute by a complete novice. The difference I suppose is that the access database will take up a tiny bit of the disc space taken by it's excel counterpart. The database will also be easier to use and more robust for the end user. If I'm honest I'm delighted with myself for getting this one moving but, had I known at the start what I know now I would probably have spent the time designing a huge excel spreadsheet. At least then, had it all gone wrong, I would have had plenty of people willing to help.

So there you have it, the clocks have changed, the weather has changed and now we're heading toward my favorite part of the year, Summer. Don't think I've forgotten about the money saving stuff. We're still car sharing, the electricity and gas are with cheaper supplier's and the next focus will probably involve seeing how much I can save on this years car insurance. Previous blogs will also point those who need it in the direction of cheaper tyres and a fantastically priced vehicle recovery service. Yep money saving will continue to be a big part of life so keep watching this space.

Till next time

T