Apr 02 2008
What A Long, Strange Trip It’s Been
I had two possible titles in mind for this blog post. The other one was “It’s Alive!” but I decided to go the Grateful Dead route instead. First, because I’m grateful it’s over. Second, because I almost feel dead after working until 2:30 AM or later last weekend. What am I talking about?
I’m talking about BOB Version III. 
We just rolled out a major upgrade to BOB, and it took a lot of hours to get to this point. Many of those hours were “midnight oil” types of hours. That’s what I do; I work weird hours. A lot. And here I am at 2:15 in the AM writing a blog post. Why? Why do I do this? My wife (my long-suffering but ever-understanding wife) would probably be asking the same question right about now, if she were awake. The answer is…
There is no answer. I’ve done this for years. Over time it has helped my career at times. Over time it has probably hurt my health at times. But I can’t help it… sometimes I just get the urge to figure something out.
Like this chart, for example.
What does this represent? My posting activity on BOB on an hourly basis. You will note that over the past years there is not one hour of the day where I don’t have at least one post. The 4AM hour is my weakest effort; I will endeavor to improve on that. Just not tonight. 😆
Oh, and the obvious question… am I the only person with this level of posting activity? Well, at least I thought it was the obvious question, and since it allowed me to stay up a few more minutes while I investigated it… I did.
I’m not.
There are other people on the board that have posted at least once in every hour of the day. Some of them are globe-trotters and post from different areas around the world. Some of them are made-up users like “Listserv Archives” that don’t really count. One of them is my alter-ego account that I use for system administrator activities, so that’s really just me again.
So I have to ask, what’s wrong with these people? 😆
In any case, there are a ton of new features on BOB that are now available, and most of them work as intended. So it was a long, strange trip, but a worthwhile destination. 😎
I hoped you used a BO product to build that graph, tho it doesn’t look like it! 😛
Good job on BOB v3, it looks pretty good.
And yes, some people are just like that, you have a problem to solve and time is irrelevant – I can definitely relate!
– Josh
Josh, of course it was Excel. I don’t have any Business Objects products set up to query the BOB database online. I capture the numbers and download them to Excel and work from there. Sorry to disappoint you… 😛
Dave, you know that we all appreciate your hard work. BOB is your baby, and you’re a great Dad (in many ways, it seems)!
names, we want names … who are the other gluttons for punishment?
Hi, Chris… I hope you will understand but I don’t plan to name names. 🙂 I have an extremely high regard for privacy issues, and as a result the only time I will ever use my private access to the BOB database to post public information is when I can do so without exposing individual information. For example I posted a few statistics about the top level domains used to register on BOB a few years ago.
I will give you a clue… they are users with at least 24 posts. 😛
gee, that narrows it down
Completely understand the privacy thing.
Here’s one for you: Has there ever been a user that’s posted every hour during the same 24 hour period? (an all nighter if you would).
I’m guessing not, so the followup would be what’s the record for consecutive hourly posts?
😆 Interesting questions…
Dave logs in and starts writing some sql code…