I'm back....

[John Esak]

Well, I've been in California for the past week and I purposely did not
answer _any_ email. We had planned SO much stuff to get done in such a short
time span. I went out to our CA plant with Rick (Rick Walsh, our new hire)
and boy was it great to work with someone as capable and good to work with
as he. I'm so happy this list brought us together. Actually, I could not
have thought of any other place to advertise for filePro people... Rick's
talents are so widely varied outside of filePro, though. I (we) struck gold.

We accomplished so much, including building three of my bar code work
stations, putting in a multi-camera web-cam system, installing a couple new
computers and refurbishing a couple others.  Not too mention making sure we
ate at every fast-food place known to man, along with a couple really good
restaurants as well.

I had forgotten something SO basic about the new systems we were putting
in... all the testing I had done was with the working system in NJ and this
is just a "qualified" duplicate.  When we put it up and running in CA I
realized that things were not calculating right... viz... the date and time.
The same thing which bit me once before bit again. I had forgotten about the
3 hour time difference. All my subroutines calculate the 3 eight hour shifts
in a day based on @tm... I was finding shift at 2pm in the afternoon
(usually shift A is 8 to 4 during the day... :-)  That is because the server
was at 5pm so it was shift B in the East. What a dumb oversight, huh?  Well,
after considering how hard it would be to do the right math on the time
including the change of day... Ken reminded me that I could just use TZ. I
now set it for the west coast qualifier as PST8PDT and hot dog, everything
works again with NO change. Boy, I'm glad for that... because there are
other small complications based on @tm and @td which now are once again no
problem.  Thanks Ken.

BTW Ken and his family are heading out for a vacation in FLA and stopping
here for the weekend... you can be sure I'll have him frequenting The FP
Room all weekend. (I asked if he wouldn't mind me letting you all know
this... so if you want to talk to one of the real BIG brains behind filePro,
visit the room. ( www.tinyurl.com/yuag7 )If you've never been there, a
small, secure client will load first and then you will be brought to a login
prompt. Login as yourself, some variation of your name.  We consider the FP
Room a professional forum ad don't go in too much for "handles". If you have
a microphone, you can join in verbally, if not, you will have to interact by
typing... Regular speakers will work find to hear whether you have a mic or
not. Also, of course, any mic/headphone headset combination will work great,
too.

See you there. Try various times on Saturday...  Of course, we'll be
watching lots of movies and generally relaxing lots of the time over the
weekend. It's a vacation for Ken after all. :-)

Take care all,

John Esak

Visit The FP Room www.tinyurl.com/yuag7 24/7