Blogs

I’ve been using Microsoft Access since Access 97 it’s a very powerful tool is you use it right. You can use it for everything from personal Baseball card inventory control to managing home inventories; even fortune 500 companies use it to manage million dollar systems. As I said if you use it right it can be quite a powerful tool built on some amazing framework. Recently a friend who’s getting into access asked me if I could provide him some resources so that he can get better familiar with the tool. Below is a list of resources I put together for him.

This will be the first posting of a new category on my blog regard Kapow Software a Robotic Process Automation (RPA) tool. Before I begin to discuss my usage experiences and technical information regarding Kapow Katalyst, I figure it would be good to give a little background about it. Kapow Katalyst is a Web Data Aggregation Tool; these tools are used to capture data from websites for analytic’s purposes. Where Kapow excels is it allows you to complete your ETL process from a single execution aka a Robot. Robots can get pretty detailed in length and if you’re reusing code across multiple robots you can insert snippets instead of rewriting the code. Check out the video below for more information regarding this product.

When I interviewed with Coyote a discussion came up of passion and I said my passion at work was turning data into insight for my coworkers. During my presentation about myself to our Executive team and my coworkers I realized what my true passion is… it’s to help people. Every job I’ve had involved helping people and at Coyote it’s no different I’m just using my technical skills to help our coworkers and our customers; outside work I love to volunteer with the Jaycees because we help people and make an impact with the work we do around the world. In our organization’s creed we’ve got this line that can sum it all up for me “Service to Humanity Is the Best Work of Life” so let me ask you what is your passion?

It’s true when they say no news is good news, my Windows Home Server has been just chugging along currently were approaching 180 days without rebooting, which is quite impressive to even to me. Actually now that think about it I made a major change to my setup back in March. I purchased a Dell PowerEdge 700 for 25 dollars on eBay which a real server instead of an old desktop I had lying around. This was a major performance increase and adds additional room to the cabinet for more hard drives, I think like another 2 or 4 which I’m thinking of throwing all my old drives into the pool to just max out the space. Also I’m not sure what to do with the tape drive currently installed.

Here’s another fun solution for you business intelligence people out there. Suppose you wanted to pull data that was updated in the last 15mins based on when a row was last. I’m sure there are many ways to accomplish this but I like to use the DATEADD() function in Microsoft SQL Server 2008. Below is the query using the AdventureWorks2008R2 database enjoy.

SELECT I.ProductID, I.LocationID, I.Bin, I.Shelf, I.Quantity, P.ProductNumber, P.Name, I.ModifiedDate

On September 8^th my campaign to serve the Illinois Jaycees members as their 2013 Membership Development Vice President came to end with me being elected. It’s true competing for the time of our members has gotten tougher each year our chapter, region, and state boards have gotten stretched too thin, burned out quickly, not adequately trained and weaker. As a result our members have suffered. Next year I want to focus on shaping the future of our organization. First increase involvement in the passports to leaders program to develop our future leaders at the chapter level, Offer new membership development opportunities across the state to grow our chapters, Strengthen our weaker chapters through education of tools, resources, new tactics on how to resolve their local problems. Develop and lead an extension task force to assist chapters and regions in their completion more than half the extension completed each failed by the end of the second year, what if we could reduce that by 2 or 3 chapters. Bring new networking opportunities to our members to further add value to their membership. In 2013 I’m bringing the right resources needed to recruit, retain, and develop our fellow Jaycees !!!!