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I’m a passing history buff.  I love historical recaps, biographies, and fiction.  It just fascinates me.

When my friend, Darryl, pointed me to Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcasts I was immediately hooked.  He’s covered everything from plight of the Apache Nation, the Punic Wars, and the complicated events after Alexander The Great’s death.  They don’t usually last more than an hour per podcast.  They are easily digestible and I can listen to them while I work or drive.

His latest series has been absolutely riveting. It’s about the Eastern Front (the Ostfront) during World World 2. In the U.S. we know all about the death and destruction during the Invasion of Normandy and our struggles to get a foot hold onto the European Continent. We know very little about what happened on the Eastern Front. Dan goes into great detail about the battles, planning, and strategy between Germany and Russia along that front and exactly how ruthless and cruel it was.

It’s a four part series.  I’ve listened to them over the past month and I just finished the last one yesterday.  Just really good stuff.

Ghosts of the Ostfront I

Ghosts of the Ostfront II

Ghosts of the Ostfront III

Ghosts of the Ostfront IV

If you’re even just a little interested in history, go listen.  You will not be disappointed.

As a software developer you have a virtual tool box of snippets of code, sql, and scripts that allow you to do your job a bit more easily, quicker, and, at times, more fun. I have my own and if you’re in the technology field you probably have one too.  I’ve had some scripts that are specific to particular jobs, but for the most part I’ve had several scripts and tricks saved for years and years.

These tools are usually just quick, dirty and  allow for a bit of wiggle room to add on a few other bits of information.  They’re meant to be easily remembered and quickly altered.  They don’t typically give you a full solution, but at least give you a point to where you can begin.

One of the ones that I’ve used for awhile is for finding a particular term in a Stored Procedure, Trigger, or other database object within SQL Server.  This is really nice if you are on a project with a large amount of people working on the database, or if you are new into an existing project with a lot of legacy code.

Recently, I’ve had the need to ferret out where a particular table was getting it’s initial data.  This was with a legacy system that really had not been worked on in a long time.  In fact I worked on it several years ago, and let me tell you the phrase “Hell is your own legacy code” has now been crystallized and imprinted in my mind forever and ever, Amen.

Ok, where was I? Oh, yeah… Needing to find out when data was being inserted into a table.  I knew I had figured this out a long time ago, so I started looking around in my toolbox.  Here’s what I found:

Select Distinct o.name
,               o.type
From syscomments c
Inner Join sysobjects o on
    o.id = c.id
Where c.text like '%into myTable%'
Order By o.name, o.type

This quickly gave me a list of procedures, triggers, and functions that had that nice little phrase. Luckily there were only two so I quickly found my starting point.  It’s this type of quick and dirty tricks and scripts that make up my day and probably most programmer’s days.  In writing this and looking around for other solutions I found a solution on StackOverflow.com of course.  It’s a bit more rigorous and more lengthy, but still I’ll take my  little script.  It solves a problem quickly and it can easily be extended if needed.

Of course, every so often I would love to show some scripts out of my toolbox here, but as with all plans and good intentions we’ll have to see how well I can execute on this.  In other words, don’t hold your breath.

If there’s anyone else out there that wants to share their scripts or part of their day to day tips or tricks, feel free to post them in comments or drop me a line.  I’m always interested in how other people solve problems and get through their day.

There are a ton of things that I’m trying to do right now.

• Book hours for my contract work
• Work on getting my name out and more exposure around Chattanooga and the Internet.  Which this blog is part of.  Self marketing at it’s finest I’m sure.
• Work on projects that will hopefully bring in money down the road.  Projects that I’ve been wanting to do for quite sometime.
• Prep for our trip to Chile in December.  I’ve got my list of things to do and there’s still a lot of things to do still.
• Keep up with running, biking, etc.
• What else… oh yeah spend time with my family!  Yeah that….

Over the years I’ve dabbled with all the cool and nifty self improvement productivity movements.  GTD, The Seven Habits, etc.  Granted I’ve not had great success with any of those systems.  I’ve taken a few things here and there but it’s still just a mish mash pieces of each that have no really rhyme or reason.

I also regularly read ZenHabits.net another generalized productivity site.  They, ok really he – Leo Babauta, talk more about making small and increment changes within your life.  Small little changes that you can actually succeed at doing, like these posts about making lasting changes, focusing on willpower and simplifying your life .  That is exactly why I am such a fan of this site.

So with that I’m trying to cut out the just obvious time sinks in my life.  Of course there are a ton little distractions throughout my day but I want to start out looking at the big ones.  They are as follows email, Facebook, Twitter to some extent, and depending up where a particular game is Chess.com.  Over the next few days I’m going to try to limit my time on all of these sites. Email will be checked 4 times a day only at predetermined times.  Facebook and Twitter 2 times a day cause I still want to  post and see what’s going on at those sites.  Chess.com is regulated to 1 a day.  Period.

Let’s see how this goes.