Tired

Walked around downtown in the morning, and was surprised to see a heavy police presence (cops with videorecorders sitting on top of vans) and taped-off streets and alleys in the centre. It's Christopher Street Day (the Germans call it thus, in English) and clearly they were expecting trouble from one side or another. According to the local paper I missed a great parade, despite the rain: 170,000 people watching, no numbers for participants. The Church was there to protest against "moral pollution" (moralische Umweltverschmützung) and was apparently roundly booed for doing so. Good.

Re-imported the customer's data, which took all of this afternoon and evening, and discovered that I had missed many separate bits of info first time through. Boo sucks to me. Everything now looks complete, and had better be so because I've wrapped it up and sent it to them by e-mail. The bill will follow in the usual way.

I discovered something very interesting about browsing data, or perhaps only about myself: I spot many more errors and dubiosities when looking over a selective list of a very few fields (like an excel table with many rows but only three columns), than when viewing all two-dozen fields of a single record and flipping from one record to the next. I don't know why I haven't thought of this trick before, it seems on balance to save a lot of time compared to sequential record-viewing, even taking into account the time I need to make these separate viewports (i.e. the dozen or so three-column excel tables); plus of course the advantage of simply working better. I shall have to remember that for next time.

A colleague from the database support forum has mailed to ask whether I'd like three months' work translating his company's database and supporting materials into English. Yes please! I've made an offer which I think entirely fair, we shall see how they respond. It's in Münster, in the frozen flatlands of the North, but I wouldn't necessarily have to work on-site.

To Hamburg again on Monday afternoon/evening, only for a week. (The job is three weeks long, but I'll be coming back at the weekends.)

That is all. Good night, sweet dreams.