I went to The Wherehouse today to get my fill of Tom Jones, as I mentioned I had a craving for yesterday. Let me state now, for the record, that The Wherehouse has a pathetic fucking selection of Tom Jones albums. The only one (yes, one) they had was an old greatest hits album. And they only had one copy of that! Unbelieveable.

As you can tell, I’m a little irritated over the whole thing. What this basically amounts to is that now I have wait until Friday and head over to Fred Meyer on employee double-discount day and hope that they have a better selection than The Wherehouse did. And pay full price, at that, since The Wherehouse had no used copies of Tom Jones stuff, either.

I suppose having no used Tom Jones albums implies something about Tom Jones fans and their retention of his records. Score another point for ol’ Tom.

On a whole different topic, you know how you go to the Microsoft Support website and search their Knowledge Base and the articles are all numbered like “Q123456” and stuff? Well, after working with the developer support team on an issue for, like, months now, I finally have a resolution to a SharePoint Portal Server memory leak I found, and they’re going to put a Knowledge Base article in about it! When it’s out, it’ll be Q319472. I’ll put a link in here when I find it, which should be in a week or so. I’m stoked. (No, it won’t have my name in it or anything, but I’ll know it was me who found the problem!)  [UPDATE: It’s out!]

And, in the world of Liberty City… Last night I played chauffeur for a mob boss’s girlfriend and gunned down a bunch of Triad guys. The missions are getting a lot harder now. I thought I was doing pretty well on the “drive this person around for a while” missions, but now I’m having to get out and gunfight… I can’t wait until I get the sniper rifle. The gun combat in that game is a little difficult.

Oh, and I felt sort of good when Business 2.0 declared the movie Freddy Got Fingered as one of the 101 Dumbest Moments in Business for 2001. Call me crazy.

Sitting here in a minor state of hypnosis (taking a short breather between massive server upgrade projects), I decided that I definitely need to get a Tom Jones album. Something about his rendition of Prince’s song Kiss not only gets me movin’, but cracks me up at the same time. (Yeah, yeah, that was actually “Art of Noise featuring Tom Jones” but still…)

Besides, any guy who can get panties thrown at him everywhere he goes deserves a little respect.

Maybe I’ll go do that today.

Bit of a follow-up from yesterday: I found a website that has the Tron figure collection for dirt cheap! I ended up buying all the rest of them. To make up for lost time. Or something. Just a sec, I’ll justify it…

Oh, and a while back I tried to listen to some of the vinyl albums in my collection and the turntable didn’t start up. I thought it might be a fuse or something (it’s like 20 years old if it’s a day), but it turns out there’s this little pin that’s connected to the A/C plug that came unsoldered. Of course, it’s too small to solder yourself, so I started looking for spare parts.

Good luck finding spare parts for a 20 year old turntable.

I did, however, find the same model turntable that a guy was selling online for $55 (which is a real bargain if you’ve ever priced turntables). I decided to buy it since that way I’ll have spare parts for the next time this thing goes dead.

And I continue to progress through the world of Grand Theft Auto III. Last night I hijacked an ice cream truck and bombed four gangsters, ran a mission as a limo driver being chased by the Triads, and [barely] won a street race. Admittedly, I’m feeling pretty accomplished. (Those Triad guys in the game, though, are real bitches. I just drive through that section of town and they shoot at me. The next mission I’ve got is to kill 25 of them in two minutes using a flamethrower. The problem there is that I can’t frickin’ find 25 of them. They all run like scared little girls.)

I wonder if Tom Jones plays GTA3… Hmmmm….

I went to the local Suncoast store this weekend and picked up one of the coolest movies ever, Split Second. My friend Aarron introduced me to this one. Story of a cop in London, 2008, who lives on anxiety, coffee, and chocolates. Sort of a low-budget Blade Runner deal. “Feeling on edge?” “YEAH.” “Good. Here, have a chocolate.”

I also picked up, while at Suncoast, a red Tron light cycle. They re-released the Tron toys for the 20th anniversary of the movie. I used to have one of these (same color and everything) but my mom sold it out from under me at a garage sale, as she did with all of my He-Man figures. I’m still a little bitter over that (as she’s well aware) so I feel vindicated after getting the Tron light cycle, like I’ve reclaimed a piece of my lost childhood for $25.

The Winter Hawks lost last night, though I’m sure they’ll make it up in the playoffs. It was disappointing to watch, especially after they trounced Seattle so harshly just two nights before. Either way, I came out with an autographed stick because I contribute to the education fund. Can’t complain about that!

Another total sidetrack - I’ve decided that, while Janet Jackson is hot, her hair is definitely a deal-breaker. For example, her look on the cover of her Design of a Decade album is fabulous - cute, sorta next-door-girl. But on the Velvet Rope album, she looks like one of those funky dogs with the dreadlocks. Ick.

Saturday night I went to see a hypnotist show put on by my mom’s cousin, Jerry Harris. (Yeah, the link is to an article about a county fair; I saw him in a lounge.) I had seen the show on a home video my grandfather had made, but seeing it in real life was a totally different experience. I wasn’t too excited to go at the outset, but after seeing the show, I can hardly wait to go back. It was pretty funny and well executed; if you ever get the chance to check him out, I highly recommend it.

Last, but not least, I’ve been really getting sucked into Grand Theft Auto 3 lately. I like it because it’s sort of like an interactive gangster movie, but light on the “movie” part. So far I’ve driven a lot of people around, car-bombed a guy, and hijacked a payroll van in it. My stats say I’m only 9% done with it, which is very cool; I haven’t even gotten onto the other islands yet. I think it’s making me a little paranoid, though

• I cruise through the bad part of town now and totally expect to get carjacked or beaten with a baseball bat. Then again, maybe that’s just because it’s the bad part of town. Hmmm.

Warning: I’m gonna geek out on you now. If you understand what this one says, cool. If not, don’t worry about it. It’s not a topic for everyone.

So.

I went to a lunchtime training at work today on SQL. I know a meager amount, enough to get by in my daily programming duties. I pick up a little here and there as I go, and I manage to get the job done.

This guy at work taught us 25 different ways to use the SELECT statement in SQL. It was unbelieveable. I understand it so much better now. Little tricks to get query results properly formatted and such… doing calculations on result sets… it totally rocked.

The last example he showed was how he helped his eighth grade daughter solve a calculus problem in SQL. Not the most computationally efficient process (the SQL Server version of the program took 50 seconds to run; the VB version took 8 seconds), but the fact that you can do it is pretty darn cool in my book.

Also, the concept of NULL is a lot more clear in the context of SQL. I guess I never realized that (at least with SQL Server) you have to specifically ask for values that are NULL or they don’t get returned in the result set. For example, the statement

SELECT name, city, state FROM address_table WHERE state <> ‘CA’

will not return rows where the state is NULL. I guess I figured it would, since NULL obviously doesn’t equal ‘CA’ but apparently you have to specifically ask for those, like this:

SELECT name, city, state FROM address_table WHERE state <> ‘CA’ OR state IS NULL

Funky. But it was cool to learn that stuff, especially some of the more advanced syntax involving calculations on the result set (totals, etc.).

Well, enough geeking for now.

SQL SELECT - Minute to learn, lifetime to master.

I’m pretty busy today, so I’m going to have to be brief…

I just noticed there’s a new volume of the Moulin Rouge soundtrack out. I guess I’ll be spending some hard-earned cash on that one soon; it’s got “The Pitch (Spectacular! Spectacular!)” on it - how can I pass that up? The first volume has ingrained itself into my brain, I suppose this one can take its rightful place alongside it.

The review on the Amazon.com page for this new volume says that “there are but two kinds of people in the world: Those captivated by Baz Luhrmann’s heady, postmodernist musical romp Moulin Rouge–and everybody else.” I think I’m going to have to agree with that. It’s not for everyone. Though I think many of the folks who didn’t like it might be missing the point anyway.