Blipvert Roundup

Blipvert #1

Finally managed to finish “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” last weekend after borrowing it from my sister for the past 3 weeks. I usually take much less time finishing Harry Potter books, the last one took me only 2 days to finish reading, but just couldn’t get the time in read it in one sitting. I guess in a way it was good that I didn’t go through it as fast as the other installments since it gave me a chance to reflect on the links that this last installment had with the preceding books. I found myself looking back at the other books to see if anything that was in this last book had been forewarned before.

My verdict … I liked it. Even with so many long time characters dying in the story, it was a fitting way to close out the series. The translation of prose to film will be quite interesting to see especially when it comes to which parts of the story that will get the chop in the film treatment. If there was anything that I felt a little hesitant about from the book, I have to say that it would be the epilogue chapter at the end of the book. I can appreciate why it was put there especially from the point of view of the fans who have been following the characters in the past 7 books but it did make the ending slightly sappy.

It’s time to move on to a different book to read.

Blipvert #2

The California Fitness gym branch at Sunway Pyramid is finally opening this week. I saw the banner that they put up at the gym area the last time I was there that said that the soft launch was scheduled for 25th Aug and the grand opening sometime early Sept. Could not see the reception area setup yet when I was there as the area was still boarded up. I’m still waiting for someone from their sales team to call me to personally inform me about the launch since that was what they said they would do when the date came. I think they still have my number as I do get SMS msg from them about the other promotions that they are currently running.

I’m looking forward to start working out at the gym after signing up for their gym membership back in Feb. I still need to meet up with the personal trainer that I will be assigned to so we can hash our schedules and routine. I’ve already paid up for 24 sessions with a personal trainer which should take me through the first 3 months of my workouts if I schedule 2 sessions with PT per week. It wasn’t cheap to do so but I’m hoping that the dividends of working with a PT will offset my initial investment. I’m expecting to tone up, get some definition going and help lower my blood pressure levels from my workout sessions with the help of my PT.

Looking at my schedule now, I might be at the gym between 8-10pm on my workout days. Looking forward to that.

Blipvert #3

Had another WooHoo! moment at the office today.

I was sent a Visual Basic script that was used in one of our customer sites in India that was supposed to be used in other sites in Asia. The original charter was that the tool was to be used as it was written by someone who has already left the company and did not leave any documentation for the tool. When I ran the tool in my test environment, I discovered several items that could be modified in the script. It wasn’t a showstopper if those modification was not made but it would mean that the resulting output file needed to be manually modified before it is in the final usable form. Since there was no one who was interested to modify the script, I decided to take a look at the innards of the tool to see if those modifications can be done easily.

I am not a programmer by trade and the last time I actually did any coding work was back in college 11 years ago. I have never done any Visual Basic stuff and could not even tell you how the syntax should be like even if my life depended on it. Somehow, I was able to look at the script and figure out what it was doing by following the logic that was quite well structured in the tool. After overcoming my initial feeling that I would be overwhelmed by it, I was able to quickly see where everything fitted and where the modification had to be made to generate the output that I wanted in the format that the tools was suppose to deliver. I was even able to add new conditions which reflected the recent changes to the tool environment as well as replacing hard coded constants with variables that look up the required values from the registry so the tool would be more robust. Tested the tool successfully and it is now on it’s way to be used in our customer sites in Asia.

Not too shabby for someone who has never done any coding before. It may be just a glorified exercise in code reuse but I’ll celebrate my own successes, even small ones, whenever I can.