And The Answer Was

[John Esak]

> 	...and I'm marrying her because she can debug a program faster than
> Ken Brody and John Esak put together.
>

Actually, the paradigm works this way. First, I spend 30 minutes to 3 hours
trying everything I know to find what's breaking... then when I have given
up completely, I call or email Ken with two or three scripts that
demonstrate the problem and take him to within 5 lines of the problem.  He
immediately (usually within 1 minute) sees the reason for what's wrong and
fixes it... or explains it, or whatever.  I call it the FilePro Mayonnaise
Jar Syndrome. I loosen it just enough so that he can open the damn thing.
It's very frustrating. :-)

I'm still waiting for the day he can't figure it out... hasn't happened yet.
:-) :-(

John

The :-( The frowny is only because one day I would like to be born out to
there really being a problem that is unsolvable.  :-)  Last month, though, I
almost hit it when he showed me that a PRINT statement was not allowed in
@once processing. Man, everything seemed to be working until that sucker...
than the strangest things in the world happened... nothing at all that
pointed right to the PRINT as the culprit.  Of course, you are not standing
on a record in @once, so it (the PRINT, and probably other commands as well)
doesn't really know where it is standing, so it can't perform it's function
(which is so record based).  Anyway, a simple change to the dreport process
and it all started working fine, but in the meantime it was one of those
real quizzlers. This one took even Ken 22 minutes... :-)  and that's with my
rapid-debug-diagnosing scripts.

Now, I don't know how to tie this in to the marriage thread... but a little
topic drift should be allowed on announcements of this type. Nice weekend to
all.