Busy Begets Busy

Or so it always seems.

I did resolve the previously mentioned Access problem, and feel rather silly now that I have.  Most of the troubleshooting had been done by my partner, who wrote the program, but one of us ought have realized what was going on.

We created the billing app, delivered it, urged them to make regular backups, if only by copying the MDB across the network to their kid’s computer periodically.  That got a “huh, I am clueless about computers, so yeah right, like that’ll ever happen” response.  So we suggested having their son do it.

As it turned out, there was a problem with the subreport for materials repeating itself.  After much stress and gnashing of teeth and such, my partner figured that out and told me what to do, as it was a minor fix.

I went over there and did it.  Eventually their computer crashed.  They had a friend set things back up for them, since I am too expensive, then had to have me fix what the friend did and finish things off.  I retrieved the most recent copy of the MDB they had and went on my merry way.  I thought that was the fixed version, but apparently the fixed version was never anywhere but on their ill-fated hard drive.  We totally forgot this little detail.

Then when they had the problem of material description repeating, it appeared to be different from last time.  When I finally took over troubleshooting in earnest this morning, I stripped it down to essentials and figured out it happened to more than just lime, and the number of repetitions matched the number of instances of that value in the field.  That led me to find the old mail with the fix, try it, and find it worked.  Which got my partner off the hook his last available day to work on it before he goes for surgery.

That done, I got ready to do stuff at the office and prepare to go to the new client later, and arrange to visit the above people to give them the fix.  Then my father called with a problem on his work computer in Vermont.

Ultimately the problem is the software the franchiser provides having brain dead tendencies, but their support eventually gave up and referred him to me.  The problem is that software that has absolutely nothing to do with the network and does not or should not be doing anything across the internet won’t run unless he dials and goes online.  Then it works.  At the same time, his machine is claiming a network cable is unplugged.  Not true.  And apparently whatever is making it think that is what is freaking out the software, which apparently does somehow check for a network connection in order to work.

The plan was to fetch my nephew tomorrow or Thursday, let him stay with us through Saturday, and on Saturday do a major project (or part of it) with his help.  Now I find myself asking Deb what she thinks of joining me on a whirlwind visit to Vermont this weekend.

On that note, I need to go again.  I should note before I do that I was amused to receive in the mail yesterday a solicitation for Google AdSense.  My business site doesn’t get enough traffic for that, though part of it could if I breathed life back into it.  Maybe the blog.  I notice they disapprove of “personal” sites and you have to get special permission to have the Google ads there.  Can’t be that hard though, since many blogs have them…

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