Stalk This!

So our air department has a data entry reduncancy issue.  They have to enter the same information in multiple unconnected systems in order to do their job.  It's not just a pain in the butt, it dramatically reduces the number of transactions they can complete in a day.  One part of this involves the printing of either the FedEx label or the USPS envelope.  FedEx has made available a web service for performing all kinds of transactions with them, including printing your own shipping labels.  To be able to use their system, however, you have to pass a certification process which understandably involves your printing a variety of test labels and sending them to FedEx to verify, so they are sure that they will be able to properly scan the barcodes.

I completed a piece early this week is basically wired so that the user just enters the record locator for the ticket request.  Once they have selected that record they just have to hit a "Generate Label / Envelope" button, which pulls up a form pre-populated with the Sending and Destination addresses and with the FedEx account number already entered.  From that form they can make any changes if necessary (almost always not), and click one button to create the FedEx ship request which gives them the tracking number and creates the shipping label to be printed.  Or, if the tickets are being sent by mail they can click one button to print the envelope.  Assuming the data was entered correctly into Sabre to begin with, the user never needs to enter any of that information again - the label or the envelope just pick up the existing data from the other system and print them out.

Now, actually getting the binary data for that FedEx label was a chore in and of itself.  It comes back from the web service as a string, which needs to be parsed through and then written one bit at a time to the final image file.  While parsing through that data you have to watch for an escape character, and if you hit that you have to read the next two characters to find the high bit and low bit in order to correctly write the escaped bit into the image.  Once you have the final image, then there is the challenge of sending it to the printer properly sized.  If the image gets distorted at all then the barcodes will not be able to be scanned.  It was a fun and interesting challenge.

The end result so far is that the users are very, very happy with the interface.  And just a few minutes ago I found out that we passed the FedEx certification on our first try.  This makes me very, very happy.  I have happy end users, I have happy team members, and that makes me a happy boy.

Spent last night mostly sick.  I'll spare you the details, but I didn't really get to sleep until around 3:30 am.  I tried to work today, got some work done in the morning, but by lunchtime I just couldn't concentrate anymore.  I wound up emailing in sick and taking the afternoon off.  I spent a solid hour just soaking in a hot bath with my ears under the water and a washcloth covering my eyes.  I didn't even hear Kris come home from work.  I felt progressively better as the afternoon wore on, which was nice.  I don't know if it was stress, or a very mild flu, or what it was.  I'm just glad it's mostly gone now.

In the evening we went to check out the Ice! exhibit at Gaylord Palms.  It was pretty dang cool, an exhibit of ice sculptures kept at nine degrees.  The ice slide was pretty sweet.

After that, we went over to Downtown Disney and caught the evening showing of King Kong.  I loved it.  Lots of nice references slipped in, both to the original and the 70's remake, but my favorite was the empty "rat monkey of Sumatra" cage in the ship's cargo hold.  That and the part where Kong went past St. Patrick's Cathedral and I thought, "hey, that's right where we stayed for our honeymoon!"

Oh, and we're buying a house the day after tomorrow.  Did I mention that?  I can't remember if I've mentioned that before....

It's nearly midnight, and I am just now getting back to my hotel room. I walked out the door at 7am. I'm too tired to write much of anything coherant aside from again saying how much I love my new team. Raf and Amelia were givens, and Ronnie has been very good to work with face to face. On paper he is my boss but we are working very much on a peer level, which is exactly what the team needs. There is not an ego to be found in the room, just four people whose only focus is to just get the job done. I'm definitely in it for the long haul.

Oh, and there is a wicked dueling piano bar in Fort Worth. I drank (a little), sang (a lot), and just generally had a great time socializing. You wouldn't have recognized me.

So, we had a very nice long weekend. On Thanksgiving Kris and I had my mom over for dinner, and we had boundless quantities of food. Enough that there were leftovers to take us all the way through the long weekend. We also went out and saw the new Harry Potter (good movie, and Barty Crouch Jr. is the new Doctor, yay!).
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The exodus continues.  We are losing the man with the most intimate knowledge of our legacy systems.  We are losing the woman with the deepest knowledge of our database design.  We are losing the super-star developer who has essentially re-architected our entire system for the better in the past year. We are losing a very strong QA person.  We still have no business analysts.  We are still short a director.  And tomorrow we have a three hour staff meeting that carries the strong odor of "Who Moved My Cheese".

I still have no intention of quitting, but...  good god, when is somebody in the upper echelon going to take notice and stop the bleeding?