Solutions
by Softech
Fourth
Edition – July 1998
Softech
Solutions, Inc. 300 North C.R. 427 Suite 100
Longwood, FL 32750
1-407-331-TECH (8324)
1-407-331-5570(Fax)
SSI@SoftechSolutions.com
WELCOME! Sit back, relax, get a cup of coffee, and enjoy this issue of Solutions by Softech. We hope you have all noticed that we have a new logo! Along with the new logo we also have all new stationary, business cards, and some new golf shirts. We are planning on giving a few away as a result of this issue, so read on. It’s been a long time since our last Solutions by Softech. We hate to make excuses, but we have just been too busy to get one out! If it hadn’t been over a year since the last one we probably would not be doing one now. Now, while that may sound a little like complaining, in actuality that couldn’t be farther from the truth. We have stayed ‘as busy as we want to be’ (sometimes busier) while continuing to grow at a sustained rate. We think that you will understand where we have been, and what we have been doing after reading this edition of Solutions by Softech.
If a mime is arrested, does he have the right to remain silent?
Solutions
Needed
As you
puzzle freaks out there are probably aware, we
really left you hanging last year with the AEIOU
word question. Well, once again we had two winners
and we decided, once again, to award golf
shirts to both of them. The correct answers (yes,
there were abstemious, arterious, annelidous,
and multiple correct answers) are facetiously,
lateriousneglected to consider words that
might have all the letters in reverse (questionable!).
We also alphabetical order like subcontinental
or uncomplimentary. We would like to thank
A-Word-A-Day (www.wordsmith.org) for the reverse
words, and also arterious, and annelidous, By the
way, since we just mentioned them, AWAD is an
excellent way to increase your vocabulary and is
also very entertaining.
To subscribe: Send emails to wsmith@wordsmith.org with the word subscribe followed by your name. E.g. "subscribe John Doe".
Now for the new puzzle: As usual, we are giving away a golf shirt to the person whose name is drawn from all who submit correct answers. The question for this issue is "How can we solve the Y2K problem for the entire world?" or more simply put "What is the meaning of life?" Your answers must be 50 words or less and must arrive at Softech Solutions offices postmarked no later than Jan 1 ’00 (is that 1900 or 2000 Postmaster General?)
Only kidding, the real puzzle is: You are in a room with two doors. One is the door to life and one is the door to death. There are two other people in the room and you are told that one of these people will always tell the truth and one will always lie. You do not know which one is which and you can only ask one question! What question could you ask that would assure you of knowing which door is the door to life?
Is there another word for synonym?
Y2K Update
Tic
toc, tic toc - well, there are now less than 2
years to go and you still haven’t done anything
about your Y2K problem yet! Well don’t worry,
you are not although alone. It would seem that,
many big corporations have started their Y2K
initiative (why do they call it greater number an
initiative?), that a of small and medium size
companies still have their proverbial heads in the
web surfer you sand. If you are a should visit
www.year2000.com and surf for an hour or two. What
you find will be amazing
Time is the best teacher, unfortunately it kills all of it's students.
More Y2K
If you haven’t
secured the necessary resources to do your Y2K
conversion, do it NOW. From what we are seeing,
both in the demand for our services and the
difficulty we are having in hiring good resources,
this problem is going to get nothing but bigger
for the next 2 years!
We have enough youth, how about a fountain of Smart?
Softech On
The Go
Here is
a brief recap of what we have been doing for the
last year. Suffice it to say we have all been
really busy. We have all traveled a lot, including
trips to California, Canada, Oregon, Israel,
Indonesia and Bahrain. Our Road Warrior
award for the past year goes to Ed who
spent more time than any of us want to spend on
the road.
Ron has worked on multiple projects for multiple clients and has spent a considerable amount of time in California and Canada. Among his ‘favorite’ projects was a benchmark involving porting the PaySys Vision Plus product to a Unix platform. He has also enjoyed his free time in California where he has spent time on the ski slopes and at the blackjack tables in Lake Tahoe!
Ed has come up with a much better way to hang paper with one arm! He is keeping his secret to himself but we know that it involves roller skates and afterburners. He has been going non-stop all year and has been involved in performance tuning, VISA, MasterCard & Private Label communications and certification as well as many other projects too numerous to mention.
Bill has kept busy on a multitude of projects including a major Y2K conversion, several Microsoft Access, Mainframe integration projects and he continues to try to maintain some semblance of order in the office.
Doug Lester, who join Softech in late August, has already reached Medallion level as a Delta frequent flyer and is currently doing multiple projects that involved Visa and MasterCard communications and certification. Doug’s wife, Gisele, a graphics designer, did all the design work for our new logo, stationary, envelops, etc. She did a terrific job and is always ready to take on additional projects if you have the need. Call Doug if you are interested.
Ron’s son, Aaron Merrell, joined us in July of ‘97. Aaron is a Computer Science major at the University of Central Florida and is getting his ‘baptism by fire’ working ‘part time’ for Softech. For those of you who don’t know it, UCF has a nationally acclaimed program in Computer Science, and we do consider ourselves lucky to have Aaron as part of our staff.
Joy Andrews joined us in February this year and brings a wealth of training experience on PaySys’ products to Softech.
We also have 8 other associates who provide us with additional resource help when needed. Softech not only has grown but we have also moved! We changed floors in our building and now occupy suites 308-310 in a much more spacious environment. We are still operating in a Windows for Workgroups and Windows 95 peer-network environment with dial up access to almost all our clients.
Warning: Dates in Calendar are closer than they appear
Techie Tips
Whether
to expand or to window that is the question. The
expansion approach is the cleanest, safest, and we
believe, for applications that are expected to
have a useful life of more that a couple of years,
the only solution. Simply put, you go back and do
the code the way it should have been done in the
first place, if disk storage hadn’t be so
expensive! Change all your record and file
descriptions, convert all your data files and
programs test like crazy and hope that it will all
work! Or, alternatively, adopt a windowing
approach, which with a few notable exceptions will
probably get you through the crisis. Windowing
will dates that are part NOT work for of keys or
indexes to files or for date fields thatin sorts.
Given that there should not be too many places are
used where this occurs, windowing will work just
fine for the rest of the code, and combining it
with expansion should provide a viable solution to
your Y2K problem. The best way to explain
windowing is to show an example of code that has
been modified to adopt a windowing methodology.
The call to the subroutine "FSDTRT1" takes the two dates that are without centuries and, using the two ‘windows’ adds the appropriate centuries to them. It then returns the dates with the centuries back in the fields FSWS-CYMD1 and FSWS-CYMD2 which are then used in place of the original dates to determine if the BACKDATE-ROUTINE should be performed. There are packages available today that can facilitate a partially automated windowing solution. Call us if you would like more information.
If at first you don’t succeed, skydiving is not for you
Softech
around the globe
It has
been a very interesting time for Softech in the
international arena. We have added six new
international clients in Canada, Israel, Bahrain
and Indonesia to go along with the existing
international clients we have in Australia, South
Africa, England, and Mexico.
The Gene Pool needs some more chlorine!
The 1997 Darwin Award competition has announced its winners. These awards are given each year to honor those individuals, who through the ultimate in self-sacrifice, have done the utmost to remove undesirable elements from the gene pool. (Namely: themselves). Last year's winner, you will remember, was the fellow who was killed when he attached a JATO (Jet Assisted Take Off) unit to his Chevy Impala and shot himself into a desert cliff at 300 M.P.H.....
Now this year's winners:
(The late) John Pernicky and his friend, (the late) Sal Hawkins, of Washington state, decided to attend a local Metallica concert at the George Washington amphitheater. Having no tickets (but having had 18 beers between them), they thought it would be easy to "hop" over the nine-foot fence and sneak into the show. They pulled their pick-up truck over to the fence and the plan was for (the late) Mr. Pernicky (who was 100 pounds heavier than Mr. Hawkins) to hop the fence and then assist his friend over. Unfortunately for (the late) Mr. Pernicky, there was a 30-foot drop on the other side of the fence. Having heaved himself over, he crashed through a tree. His fall was abruptly halted (and broken, along with his arm, as it were) by a large branch that snagged him by his shorts. Dangling from the tree with a broken arm, he looked down and saw some bushes below him.
(Possibly) figuring the bushes would break his fall, he removed his pocketknife and proceeded cut himself away from his shorts to free himself from the tree. Finally free, (did I mention he is THE LATE) Mr. Pernicky crashed into a group of Holly bushes. The sharp leaves scratched his ENTIRE body and to even make matters worse, upon landing, his pocket knife had penetrated 3-inches into his thigh. (The late) Mr. Hawkins, on seeing his friend in considerable pain and agony, decided to throw him a rope and pull him to safety by tying the rope to the pick-up truck and slowly driving away. However, in his drunken haste/state, he put the truck into reverse and crashed through the fence landing on his friend and killing him. Police arrived on the scene to find the crashed pick-up with its driver thrown 100-feet from the truck and dead at the scene from massive internal injuries. Upon moving the truck, they found (The Late) Mr. Pernicky under it, half-naked with scratches on his body, a knife in his thigh, and his shorts dangling from a tree branch 25-feet in the air.
Congratulations gentlemen, you win...
The Trouble with doing something right the first time is that nobody appreciates how difficult it was.
Copyright © 2000
[Softech Solutions, Inc]. All rights reserved.