Ross Goodman

Last week I gave a colleague a demonstration on why, if you have numbers stored in a character string you should convert them explicitly to numbers:

select ‘Yes’
from dual
where ‘1000′ between ‘000′ and ‘999′;

‘YES’
—–
Yes

Whilst nowhere near as ambitious as J.D. and Kris’ project here I have decided to do some work in the garden this year. I’m a few weeks behind writing up my progress so I’ll try and summarise after the break.

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photo credit: eshm
I was having a flick through my employment contract and I found the following clause:

13.2
You agree that during the course of this contract and after the termination of the contract for whatever reason without limit in point in time you will keep in confidence and shall not disclose to any person unless authorised to do so with the prior written consent of the Company the following:-
13.2.1 Any consultancy know-how, methods, tools, techniques or intellectual capital.

I realised that some of my blog entries or tweets could fall foul of this clause so I asked for written permission to continue blogging generic “work related” content such as Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing, Data Modelling and Business Objects.
Rather than granting this and leveraging the fairly good google rankings that my posts seem to get I was asked to remove all work related posts.
Business Objects Best Practice (higher ranking than BusinessObjects.com)
Business Objects New Features (Page One)
Dimensional Modelling (Ralph Kimball ?)
As such I have password protected all of my work related posts.
If you are struggling to find content there are a variety of searches that could turn up interesting content.
Alternatively you can go to my company site, contact details can be found here or here.

I have just seen this link on the MND Scotland web site.
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What song do you think best sums up Business Intelligence?

photo credit: mistress_f
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My sister in law Lynne just sent me this:

Spotted this cheeky little gift set in Haddows, Copland Road, Govan last night - the guy at the counter says they sell like hot cakes!
A bottle of Buckfast, 20 Mayfair and a packet of skins - you couldn’t make it up! BUCKY GIFT PACK ONLY £9.08

I’m a big fan of Remember The Milk (RTM) and David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD).
The one concept that I have been missing in the whole process is how to set reminders for following up emails.
I regularly use a waitingfor tag and a tag for each persons name but my habit of actually creating the task is not quite there yet.
The habit is no longer needed now.
I have “discovered” that from RTM | Settings | Info there is an “Inbox EMail Address”. For any e-mail I want to chase I simply BCC the message to this address and it creates a task in my inbox. The body of the message goes into a note attached to the task.
All I have to do then is move it to the appropriate list and set any tags or due date.
I would recommend using BCC, if anyone discovers your inbox e-mail address then they will be able to create tasks in your inbox too!