Ha Ha.

Funny and sad at the same time because I could see this happening:

A biker is riding by the zoo, when he sees a little girl leaning into the
lion’s cage.

Suddenly, the lion grabs her by the cuff of her jacket and tries to pull
her inside to slaughter her, under the eyes of her screaming parents.

The biker jumps off his bike, runs to the cage and hits the lion square
on the nose with a powerful punch.
Whimpering from the pain the lion jumps back letting go of the girl, and
the biker brings her to her terrified parents, who thank him endlessly.

A New York Times reporter has watched the whole event. The reporter
says, ‘Sir, this was the most gallant and brave thing I saw a man do in
my whole life.’

The biker replies, ‘Why, it was nothing, really, the lion was behind
bars. I just saw this little kid in danger, and acted as I felt right.’

The reporter says, ‘Well, I’m a journalist from the New York Times, and
tomorrow’s paper will have this story on the front page… So, what do
you do for a living and what political affiliation do you have? ‘

The biker replies, ‘I’m a U.S. Marine and a Republican.’

The following morning the biker buys The New York Times to see if it
indeed brings news of his actions, and reads, on front page:

“U.S. MARINE ASSAULTS AFRICAN IMMIGRANT AND STEALS HIS LUNCH”

Disney Christmas Dorks

How big of dorks are we? Here is our sparsely decorated Christmas tree without our Disney ornaments:

This is what we’ve taken off:

Yeah… we’re dorks.

iTunes, iPod Sync Problem

I’ve converted two movies to my iPod this morning, but for some reason, my iTunes will not sync one of them with my iPod. I keep getting the message:
was not copied to the iPod because it cannot be played on this iPod

They would both converted to mpeg-4 by the same application with the same video profiles. They both play fine in the iTunes player. One just won’t sync. Here are the properties as iTunes sees them:

This one won’t play:

This one plays fine:

I’m confused, any ideas?

Coldfusion .columnList Variable Attribute Presents A Problem.

The problem:

I need to grab both column labels and row values from my database based on nothing more than a passed table name. Getting the data is easy, and getting the column labels is easier thanks Coldfusion’s variable attributes but it isn’t quite what I want.

The cfquery results attribute “.columnList” returns the table’s column set alphabetized, and can’t be resorted. Running my simple select * query and outputting the column list gets my the following columns:

CLIENT_ID, CLIENT_REF, OFFICE_CDE, POSTED_TIMESTAMP, SYSTEM_CODE, TERMINAL_NUMBER, TRANSACTION_CODE, USER_ID

That certainly is every column in my table, but they are sorted alphabetically and not presented in the order that they are defined in the database itself. This is where my problem starts. The fields in my database where defined in this order:

CLIENT_ID, POSTED_TIMESTAMP, USER_ID, CLIENT_REF, OFFICE_CDE, TERMINAL_NUMBER, SYSTEM_CODE, TRANSACTION_CODE

A Quick Fix:

I’ve found a temporary solution utilizing the tools of my environment. Making use of the IBM systables, a simply query gives me the column labels in the intended order. When I merge both this query and and a data result query into a structure, I get a nice encapsulated back box that takes a table name and returns the accurate information I’m looking for, determined by the datasource.

SELECT NAME, TBNAME, TBCREATOR, COLNO FROM sysibm.syscolumns ORDER BY COLNO ASC

I’m not entirely happy with solution, first and foremost because this solution obviously ads another query into the process, but also because it kills any portability I might have had for my application. In addition, it also seems that if Adobe would go to the trouble to build in a .columnList variable attribute, they might provide an optional parameter to determined a sort order? Maybe in the next version.

I’m open to any other suggestions.

Thought For The Day:

Isn’t it funny and yet frustrating how the rewards of hard work seem to masquerade as mere ‘luck’ to the people who aren’t really working?