The thing about women’s clothes

Posted on 14/11/2012 by maxxxie

After losing a stack of weight years ago (about 28kg/62lb, for anyone who cares), I had to do the one thing I dreaded more than the effort required to lose the weight in the first place: buy a new wardrobe.

I am not a fashion queen. I am not glamorous. Until that point in my life, my clothes shopping was conducted in the “you’re-obese-but-we-love-you-anyway” section, or in the men’s department. So my wardrobe consisted mostly of things that didn’t fit me properly (eg a super-long leg because the waist needed to be so huge) and were ugly.

So when it came time to actually go clothes shopping, I had pretty low expectations. But I was surprised. First of all, things actually fit and looked good. But the thing that really got me was…

….apparently women don’t need pockets. Being that I wore men’s clothes for so very long, it never occurred to me that clothing for women would be so fucking useless. Listen up, folks, I’m a dyke. Not a lipstick lesbian, not a glamour queen, not a fucking catwalk model. I want clothes that can hold my car keys. My wallet. My mobile phone. I don’t want no stinking purse!!!!

And apparently women don’t wear long sleeves, or require clothing that keeps them warm. No, that is exclusively a male requirement.

I’ve wanted to write about this so many times, but every time I’ve refrained. But it turns out someone’s beaten me to the punch. Have a read of this great article: http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-7-most-baffling-things-about-womens-clothes/

Every single word is golden truth.

And while you're there, visit this one: http://www.cracked.com/article_18622_plus-sized-clothes-translating-baffling-euphemisms.html. Also golden truth.

Benson’s wristwatch

Posted on 11/11/2012 by maxxxie

Just for fun, I thought I'd check out what sort of watch Benson wears on SVU. I've always known deep down inside that all the stuff these characters wear is way out of the range of "normal", "affordable" or "realistic" – either for the characters or for the people watching the show.

So it wasn't a great surprise when I found that the Benson character wears a Breitling Chronomat. For those of you who are curious what this looks like, and more importantly, how much such a thing costs, check this out:

http://www.chrono24.com/en/breitling/chronomat–mod13.htm. The cheapest one is a touch over a thousand dollars!!!!! And hey, if you feel like going up-market, there's the $33,500 version. If that's a little cheap for your tastes, try on the $75,300 version. What's that, you still feel like it's not quite expensive enough? No problem. There's a few that fit into the "if you have to ask, you can't afford it" category.

Fucking oath, what drugs are these people on? Is it any wonder that regular Joe Schmoes like us will never, ever, ever look like the people we idolise?

Gillard goes ballistic

Posted on 18/10/2012 by maxxxie

I know this made the news ages ago, but I really had to put this up. I've never been impressed by Gillard (to whom I generally refer as "Dullard"). But this speech had me absolutely enthralled. Tony Abbot just had his arse handed to him.

SQL REPLACE – a quick aide memoire

Posted on 16/10/2012 by maxxxie

Really, just visit this link: http://www.sqlteam.com/article/using-replace-in-an-update-statement

Musicals

Posted on 13/10/2012 by maxxxie

As a child, I hated musicals. School holiday viewing was full of them. Inevitably there’d be the Wizard of Oz, or.. shudder.. The Sound of Music, or worse, The Pirates of Penzance. It seemed to me that musicals were nothing but crap.

They made a movie of Annie sometime in the early eighties. I saw it with a bunch of friends. I can’t remember much of the story, just some of the songs. Tomorrow, of course, and I could probably hum along to a few others.

But overall, musicals just didn’t do it for me, and I regarded them as a bit of a cultural lost cause. So when I saw that Rent (a recording of the Broadway show, not the cinematic version) was showing on cable, I wasn’t all that interested. But they kept putting it on, so I recorded it and forgot about it until I was bored one day and figured I’d give it a try.

Boy, what an eye-opener. Rent changed everything I’d ever thought about musicals. No overacting, no overly flowery language, no pretensions. Just a moving story, with contemporary themes, set to some incredible music. Throughout the course of the show, I laughed, I cried, I cheered for the characters. I identified with them and their stories. And I loved the music itself. It challenged everything I’d thought musicals to be.

I felt a genuine sense of sadness and loss when I learned that Jonathan Larson had died the night before opening night. Up until that point in my life, I’d never understood why complete strangers cried when some famous artist or producer or actor or whatever died. But now I do. What a tremendous talent.

Also hot.

Posted on 08/10/2012 by maxxxie

Hot

Posted on 06/10/2012 by maxxxie

CQ 2012 photos

Posted on 19/09/2012 by maxxxie

I'm back from our annual Cycle Queensland bike ride. I've uploaded the photos to another site, so I won't waste time uploading them here too. Find them here!

Search string LOLZ

Posted on 19/09/2012 by maxxxie

This month's funniest search engine hits:

"how the fucking christ do you import a table into sql 2008" (been there, buddy, I feel your pain)

and

"ww2 tank traps at paddy's flat" (this is probably only funny to me; somehow Google got to a test site that contained these words as part of a description of a four-day bike ride)

Searching all tables in a database

Posted on 16/08/2012 by maxxxie

In my recent travels, I've had to do a bit of discovery work. Specifically, if we move a DB from one server to another, what will break, and how?

SQL Profiler is great at telling me who's doing what with a particular DB. With it, I can figure out which SQL clients need their connection strings modified. Great news! But here's an interesting twist. In all the Profiles I captured, I noticed that some of the UPDATE and INSERT statements contained references to UNC paths. Wouldn't you know it, the paths refer to the DB server that's being decommissioned.

So even if we successfully moved the DB and reconfigured its clients, the application would still break because it would query the DB and get a path that didn't exist anymore. Well, that's nice to know. But I wanted to know if there was anything else, anywhere, within the DB that made reference to that server.

I found a most excellent procedure here: http://blogs.lessthandot.com/index.php/DataMgmt/DataDesign/the-ten-most-asked-sql-server-questions–1#2 The code trawls through and returns the table and column names that contain the string you're looking for. It's enough to point you in the right direction.

If you don't feel like trawling through the entire post, here's the relevant TSQL Call it by running a command like:

exec FindMyData_string 'google', 0

1	exec FindMyData_string 'google', 0

CREATE PROCEDURE FindMyData_String
    @DataToFind NVARCHAR(4000),
    @ExactMatch BIT = 0
AS
SET NOCOUNT ON
 
DECLARE @Temp TABLE(RowId INT IDENTITY(1,1), SchemaName sysname, TableName sysname, ColumnName SysName, DataType VARCHAR(100), DataFound BIT)
 
    INSERT  INTO @Temp(TableName,SchemaName, ColumnName, DataType)
    SELECT  C.Table_Name,C.TABLE_SCHEMA, C.Column_Name, C.Data_Type
    FROM    Information_Schema.Columns AS C
            INNER Join Information_Schema.Tables AS T
                ON C.Table_Name = T.Table_Name
        AND C.TABLE_SCHEMA = T.TABLE_SCHEMA
    WHERE   Table_Type = 'Base Table'
            And Data_Type In ('ntext','text','nvarchar','nchar','varchar','char')
 
 
DECLARE @i INT
DECLARE @MAX INT
DECLARE @TableName sysname
DECLARE @ColumnName sysname
DECLARE @SchemaName sysname
DECLARE @SQL NVARCHAR(4000)
DECLARE @PARAMETERS NVARCHAR(4000)
DECLARE @DataExists BIT
DECLARE @SQLTemplate NVARCHAR(4000)
 
SELECT  @SQLTemplate = CASE WHEN @ExactMatch = 1
                            THEN 'If Exists(Select *
                                          From   ReplaceTableName
                                          Where  Convert(nVarChar(4000), [ReplaceColumnName])
                                                       = ''' + @DataToFind + '''
                                          )
                                     Set @DataExists = 1
                                 Else
                                     Set @DataExists = 0'
                            ELSE 'If Exists(Select *
                                          From   ReplaceTableName
                                          Where  Convert(nVarChar(4000), [ReplaceColumnName])
                                                       Like ''%' + @DataToFind + '%''
                                          )
                                     Set @DataExists = 1
                                 Else
                                     Set @DataExists = 0'
                            END,
        @PARAMETERS = '@DataExists Bit OUTPUT',
        @i = 1
 
SELECT @i = 1, @MAX = MAX(RowId)
FROM   @Temp
 
WHILE @i <= @MAX
    BEGIN
        SELECT  @SQL = REPLACE(REPLACE(@SQLTemplate, 'ReplaceTableName', QUOTENAME(SchemaName) + '.' + QUOTENAME(TableName)), 'ReplaceColumnName', ColumnName)
        FROM    @Temp
        WHERE   RowId = @i
 
 
        PRINT @SQL
        EXEC SP_EXECUTESQL @SQL, @PARAMETERS, @DataExists = @DataExists OUTPUT
 
        IF @DataExists =1
            UPDATE @Temp SET DataFound = 1 WHERE RowId = @i
 
        SET @i = @i + 1
    END
 
SELECT  SchemaName,TableName, ColumnName
FROM    @Temp
WHERE   DataFound = 1
GO

CREATE PROCEDURE FindMyData_String

@DataToFind NVARCHAR(4000),

@ExactMatch BIT = 0

SET NOCOUNT ON

DECLARE @Temp TABLE(RowId INT IDENTITY(1,1), SchemaName sysname, TableName sysname, ColumnName SysName, DataType VARCHAR(100), DataFound BIT)

INSERT INTO @Temp(TableName,SchemaName, ColumnName, DataType)

SELECT C.Table_Name,C.TABLE_SCHEMA, C.Column_Name, C.Data_Type

FROM Information_Schema.Columns AS C

INNER Join Information_Schema.Tables AS T

ON C.Table_Name = T.Table_Name

AND C.TABLE_SCHEMA = T.TABLE_SCHEMA

WHERE Table_Type = 'Base Table'

And Data_Type In ('ntext','text','nvarchar','nchar','varchar','char')

DECLARE @i INT

DECLARE @MAX INT

DECLARE @TableName sysname

DECLARE @ColumnName sysname

DECLARE @SchemaName sysname

DECLARE @SQL NVARCHAR(4000)

DECLARE @PARAMETERS NVARCHAR(4000)

DECLARE @DataExists BIT

DECLARE @SQLTemplate NVARCHAR(4000)

SELECT @SQLTemplate = CASE WHEN @ExactMatch = 1

THEN 'If Exists(Select *

From ReplaceTableName

Where Convert(nVarChar(4000), [ReplaceColumnName])

= ''' + @DataToFind + '''

)

Set @DataExists = 1

Else

Set @DataExists = 0'

ELSE 'If Exists(Select *

From ReplaceTableName

Where Convert(nVarChar(4000), [ReplaceColumnName])

Like ''%' + @DataToFind + '%''

)

Set @DataExists = 1

Else

Set @DataExists = 0'

END,

@PARAMETERS = '@DataExists Bit OUTPUT',

@i = 1

SELECT @i = 1, @MAX = MAX(RowId)

FROM @Temp

WHILE @i <= @MAX

BEGIN

SELECT @SQL = REPLACE(REPLACE(@SQLTemplate, 'ReplaceTableName', QUOTENAME(SchemaName) + '.' + QUOTENAME(TableName)), 'ReplaceColumnName', ColumnName)

FROM @Temp

WHERE RowId = @i

PRINT @SQL

EXEC SP_EXECUTESQL @SQL, @PARAMETERS, @DataExists = @DataExists OUTPUT

IF @DataExists =1

UPDATE @Temp SET DataFound = 1 WHERE RowId = @i

SET @i = @i + 1

END

SELECT SchemaName,TableName, ColumnName

FROM @Temp

WHERE DataFound = 1

Max's Musings

As if the internet wasn't boring enough

The thing about women’s clothes

Benson’s wristwatch

Gillard goes ballistic

SQL REPLACE – a quick aide memoire

Musicals

Also hot.

Hot

CQ 2012 photos

Search string LOLZ

Searching all tables in a database

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