From the PHONE

Just seeing if I can do this from my phone... Late in my kitchen - who needs twitter? Open the floodgates!

Broke people get dumber. Dumb people ruin nations.

I'm broke, like everyone else I know. All my money goes to mortgage, food, education, health insurance, transportation to my job, Gas bills, Electric bills. I don't have cable, and I drive a 10 year old car.

People get all fired up about wealth redistribution. You know what wealth redistribution looks like? When it's done right, it looks like Social Security; elderly and sick people getting what they need to live. When it's done wrong it looks like AIG spending margin and fee money on $500k executive retreats. Taking their profit (which came from investors like us) and using it to pad their lifestyles.

Don't give me any crap about hard work. I just read this:

Although sociological research on the subject wealth is relatively new, economists have long been studying wealth. Economic research has shown that family wealth has grown considerably over the past several decades as housing and stock markets have soared (Wolff 2002). Wealth inequality has also increased substantially over the same time period. Inequality in wealth far surpasses inequality in income. The top 1% of U.S. families control over 38% of the country’s wealth, and the top 5% own almost 60% of all wealth. One of the potential consequences of this rising inequality is that families with wealth will use it to create more opportunities for themselves and, particularly, for their offspring.

from this site: http://www.allacademic.com//meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/1/0/3/9/0/p... It's a good paper. I know that we don't read 20-page papers any more, but it's a good read.

My point is, we have been living in essentially the most free market of all economies since the eighties. Bill Clinton, though a democrat, still geared the nation's finances toward the free market. As a result, the rich are REALLY rich and the middle class are poor, and the poor are broke.

Broke people get dumber as a whole. Dumb people ruin nations. You cannot save America by creating an environment which allows the super-rich to sustain itself and actively exclude anyone else. You can save America by funneling it's resources back to the people where they belong.

Without Reason You Are Blind, Without Faith, You Are Dead

So at work today, we had this chat about creationism and spontaneous generation of life. We were all pretty much agreed about a few points. But I think I made the guys think a little.

• Don't confuse "evolution" with "spontaneous life origination". They are very different. Evolution is what happens when genetically stronger lions are better hunters so weak lions die before they can breed. Eventually every lion is genetically predisposed to be strong. Spontaneous life origination is when source elements somehow get together and form a protein. Then that protein meets other proteins and then DNA happens and then somehow a cell happens. Only morons don't think that life evolves. Every year, flu season makes that rock solid case. Spontaneous generation, however, is conceivable, but ridiculously improbable, and so far, completely un-doable in a laboratory.
• One possibility for the origin of life is that God created everything. It is conceivable, no less probable than any other idea, and completely un-debatable in a scientific context.
• Another possibility is that since life could not have originated on such a young planet as earth (I mean come on! a few trillion years for all that Amino MAGIC), it must have originated somewhere else (in an elecro-chemical environment that is unknown to us) over a few quadrillion years, and then hitched a ride on an asteroid and then landed on earth to begin the slow evolutionary process. Seems about as likely as any other idea, and that adds a few years to that time window in which life was supposed to have originated.
• So we have all of these ideas that are pretty much equally plausible (unless you have a closed mind). I guess then it comes down to what you feel most comfortable believing. Maybe another way to put it is: if you are basing your argument for the non-existence (or existence) of God on the origin of life, then you make a very bad argument. The fact that life and the evolutionary process exist neither prove nor disprove the existence of God as anything more than a semantic necessity. I.e. God fills the semantic hole of "first" or "best" or "forever" and all that stuff. Don't get me wrong - I am not arguing that God doesn't exist. Far from it. I'm just saying here that mixing up all the good science that's going on with any theological argument doesn't do service to either side of the debate.

Expression Engine Over Drupal

So, I've started to mess around with EE. Sorry all you Drupal-ers, but it is definitely worth knowing. However, having worked a little bit with both, I see some definite personality traits...

First of all, Drupal is WAAAAY more flexible. But you have to really know Drupal to get it to fly. Making your own module is a labor of love. When it works, then it is awesome, but it is really tricky.

EE is more of a way to shortcut around all of the annoying parts of PHP programming - you know, writing while{} loops and for{} loops, and having to figure out SQL syntax, and all that. Also, the URL structure is pretty sweet. I mean it is cool when mysite/offices/city/chicago takes me to my chicago office homepage. There are a few annoying things about it, but overall, it works pretty well for what it is - a framework for CMS.

This is what happens when you

Error code 0x800a0e7a with the message: Provider cannot be found, It may not be properly installed.

Essentially this is a fancy way of telling you a few things.
1. Stop using ADODB - switch to OLEDB
2. Stop using Microsoft JET 4.0 in your connections. I mean geez, ACCESS??? for cripes sakes.
3. If you are stubborn and need to ignore #1 and #2, then go to the Application pool settings in IIS 7.0 on your server and enable 32-bit support. I know, it's like only using 4 cylinders on your new Ferrari, but what are you gonna do?
4. Also, download the hotfix for Microsoft JET 4.0 (you have to call in to get this..)

bummer - Oh well, this is why you blog - so you only have to figure these things out once.

So I wrote this monster query that I'm pretty proud of. The data is in a MS access database so that explains some stuff, but the challenge was like this:

• AR Data is in three tables: ARCustomers, ARSummary, and ARDetail. ARcustomers is self-explanatory, ARSummary is a table with the invoice data (total, date, invoice number, etc.), and ARdetail is a payment table with amount, posting date, etc. The tables are linked by indexed fields in each one.
• I needed a report that broke down invoice date and amount outstanding as of a "cutoffdate' so the parameter of this query is cutoffdate. Essentially I needed to see what the current billing looked like on any given date.
• every "summary" record gets one corresponding customer record. But customers can have multiple summary records (multiple invoices)
• Every detail record has one corresponding summary record but each summary record can have multiple detail records. Why they didn't use the invoice number is beyond me...

So I made an ado connection called ADOCONN and connected to the database. Then I created an ADO Recordset called ADORS and I opened it using this query:

SELECT s.customer, s.customername, s.invoice, s.summaryid, s.total, s.invoicedate, d.totalpaid, s.balanceowed, s.lastpaymentdate FROM (SELECT a.balanceowed, a.lastpaymentdate, a.customer, a.invoice, a.summaryid, a.total, a.invoicedate, c.customername from arsummary as a INNER JOIN arcustomers as c ON a.customer = c.customer where invoicedate <= #" & Cutoffdate & "# and total <> 0 AND invoicedate >= (SELECT MIN(postingdate) from ardetail)) AS s LEFT JOIN [SELECT sum(amount) as totalpaid, summaryid from ardetail WHERE PostingDate <= #" & Cutoffdate & "# GROUP BY summaryid]. AS d ON s.summaryid = d.summaryid WHERE (s.total <> d.totalpaid OR isnull(d.totalpaid))

It returns 9 fields: customer, customername, invoice, summaryid, total, invoicedate, totalpaid, balanceowed, and invoicedate. The total paid field basically gives me the payment information as of a cutoff date. Also, no invoices printed after the cutoff date are included. Works pretty well, but it goes a bit slowly on big tables.

A couple of truths about drupal:
1. Drupal as a CMS NEEDS and idiot proof content editing box. And don't tell me to use tinyMCE. We need a good one. So many times, a page has tanked because of misunderstood tags. The problem with tinyMCE or FCK is that you really can't have native php or html code in your body text because the text editor will screw it up.

2. Drupal needs javascript for a lot of its good stuff.

3. Drupal is very fun, but I'm a little worried that I'm missing out on some of the really advanced stuff. but that is why I am hacking away at this site.