Knocks it out, 2 days to 5 days

So I have had a huge problem with a software vendor at work that has drug out for over a year.  They basically promised certain things and have been miserably inept on making good on these promises.  I have not been shy in lambasting them for their poor performance, so much so that at this point they basically will not communicate with me. Well since they are unwilling to fulfill their scope of work I have been having to try to find ways to reverse engineer certain things.  One example of my challenges was being handed a pack of 11,000 single pdf files and then needing somehow to be able to sort and group them into multipage pdf’s based on the file naming scheme along with the pattern the last alphanumeric character in the file name follows.

Just for the hell of it I described the scenario to my buddy Charlie who is programmer.  I thought what I needed would be pretty hard to deliver programmatically but low and behold within an hour Charlie had a program in my email for testing.  After giving him some feedback on the results he sent me additional revisions that delivered on what I needed, saving me mountains of hassle and time.

I have spoke high praise of Charlie many times before here on the blog.  He is one of the kindest guys I know and would literally give you the shirt off his back.  This is just the latest example of why he is awesome.

Yesterday I made arrangements to transform this 3 day weekend into a 5 day mini-vacation.  No I don’t have any special plans made.  Sometimes it’s just nice to have a blank slate that you can fill  or erase as you please.

I finally got around to ripping two videos off my GoPro – my latest head shave and the aerial video from the Memorial Day picnic.