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Portland Differences #5 – Fred Meyer

In Minnesota, you go to Target, or Walmart, or Shopko, or something else. In Portland, you go to Fred Meyer (wikipedia). Fred Meyer is a grocery store type Walmart but nicer type store. It usually has a Starbucks, electronics area, organic section, etc. There is one a few blocks from my apartment, and there are stores all over the city (all over the Northwest for that matter).

It is a refreshing change from running to Super Target every other day, or Walmart, or even Cub Foods or Coborns Grocery store.

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Life Product Reviews

Starbucks – 2nd Office, and Barfly Mag

I have really never been to a Starbucks before, aka “I hate coffee”. Well, there are tons of them around my apt, and since I have T-Mobile hotspot on my phone plan, I might as well use it. Today I ventured out to a nearby Starbucks, laptop in hand.

Since I don’t really like coffee, I decided to try their new Orange Creme Frappuccino. Whoa, good. But $4.05! It was pretty empty when I got here, and I had some issues getting on the Internet. Not sure, I had them reboot the router, and it worked. Pretty nice, air conditioning, music in the background, people sitting around, and I can get work done at the same time. There are power outlets scattered around (not enough in my opinion), and since it was empty when I came, I got a table close to an electrical outlet.

Since moving to Portland, I am contracting, so I have been working out of my apt, so now, I have a ton of “2nd offices” two or three within a few blocks of my apt, depending if I want to walk East of West. Next, to find some good local shops with reliable Wi-Fi as well.

And for the after work Internet fix – bars with Wi-Fi. There is this awesome site, Barfly Magazine, that lets you search on location and amenities at pubs around PDX, and here is the search for Wi-Fi. If you want air-conditioning, etc, you can filter it all out there, pretty sweet.

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Business Intelligence Geeky/Programming SQLServerPedia Syndication

SSAS: AverageOfChildern and Semi-additive measure requires a time dimension

In SSAS (SQL Server Analysis Services), if you have a measure group, with some measures as AggregateFunction of Sum and some of AverageOfChildern, you will see a red squiggly line on the measure group and if you highlight it (or build the cube), you will get this error:

Semi-additive measure requires a time dimension.

The problem starts with the AggregateFunction property of your measures, where some are Additive, some are Semi-Additive. You can see which are which by looking at MSDN here. What I found will get rid of the error, but still might not help you is this: if you go to the properties of your Time dimension, and check its type. By default dimensions are created with type “Regular”. If you change your Time dim to type “Time”, then rebuild, you won’t get any errors, and you can deploy.

Now, this might be all good, but in the case I ran into, it still didn’t work for me. AverageOfChildern only applies to the Time dim. Not what you would expect from looking at it. Say you have a measure, that you want the Average (AVG) instead of Sum, you would think that picking AverageOfChildren as a AggregateFunction property would do the trick, well it doesn’t. If you do this, deploy, and browse your cube, you will still see that the values are Sum. WTF right? Well like it sparsely says in the docs, it only applies to the Time dim.

In order to get the Average of a measure, here is the best way to go about it that I have found.

1) Create a Measure from the field for Sum
2) Create a Measure from the field for Count
3) Create a Calculated Member (Measure) for the field, taking Sum/Count from step 1 and 2.
3a) you can check for 0’s in the count by using IIF()
3b) for best performance, check your NON_EMPTY_BEHAVIOR and if it applies to you, it should speed up your results tremendously. Usually you can just choose the fields you are using in your calculation and it should be fine from what I have seen (I am no expert though)
4) make sure to hide your Sum and Count measures if you don’t want your clients to use them by setting the Visible property to false.
5) Build, Deploy, Process, Report

 

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Geeky/Programming

Video Editing Software – MOV Cropping and Compression

My digital camera takes some sweet video. It comes back in .MOV QuickTime format. Thing is, a 3 minute video is like 300 MB.

What I want is the ability to compress the video so I can upload to YouTube. Another cool thing would be a feature to “crop” the video. There is a lot of dead space around the edges of the video, kind of like a picture. I would like to crop it (then it would zoom in on the actual content).

I look online and they are all crappy/don’t work, or have some catch where you need to install a bundle to install it, etc.

I would even pay 50$ or so for something that actually worked.

Does anyone know of any good video editing software that handles QuickTime and isn’t a piece of crap?

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Geeky/Programming

So You Want To Be A Hax0r – Step 1

So you want to be a hax0r? l33t even? Your first step is to find a cool handle.

Looks like Aaron figured out how to do it (but he still hasn’t figured out how to set up permalinks in WordPress yet). What’s your handle? And don’t say Neo, or Trinity, or Morpheus. Don’t even think of “Zero Cool” or “Crash Override”. You can only use “Acid Burn” if you are as hot as Angelina.

I took a “hacking” course from SANS a few years ago and we had to come up with handles. I took my name and figured out that an anagram for it is ScaleOvenStove – dorky but not too dorky,

Ok l33t hax0r – pick your handle. Next time we will jump into the world of “phreaking” (and if you don’t know what phreaking is, you shouldn’t even be reading this far)

 

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Uncategorized

Portland Differences #4 – Apartments with Recycling

Since I moved into my apartment here in Portland, there is one thing I noticed. They make it really easy to recycle. All the places I lived at in Minnesota, none of them offered recycling. Here, when I moved in, I was given instructions on how to do it, etc.

One small difference, but really a huge one in a way. Most apartments don’t recycle at all, and there are a ton of people who live in apartments. All the plastic and glass for sure is easy enough to recycle, so why not?

 

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Business Intelligence Geeky/Programming SQLServerPedia Syndication

SSRS Exporting Report to Excel – Keep Formatting on Export

When creating Reporting Services (SSRS) reports, I usually use FormatCurrency() and FormatPercent() around values to make the report look good. Today I found out that when you use those, and export to Excel, you lose the ability to sum the values, because everything is exported as text.

The right way (or at least the way that I have found that works) is this. Remove all the FormatCurrency() and FormatPercent() functions. On all your currency fields, highlight them, then in the properties area, there is a “Format” property. I set that to C2 (C for Currency, 2 for the number of digits after the decimal, so if you wanted zero, it would be C0). Again for Percentages, same thing, highlight all the fields, and set “Format” to P2 (P for Percentage, 2 for the number of digits after the decimal).

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Geeky/Programming Product Reviews

Data Recovery – Where Did My Files Go?

Right before I left for Portland, I was moving some files around on my USB hard drive, and I noticed something was wacked, like 100 GB was in use, but I couldn’t see any files! They had disappeared.

Well today I finally got around to recovering the files. I tried 3-4 different products at first. All of them let you download a demo and see what you can recover. The one I have used before – OnTrack – doesn’t even work on Vista, so that was out the window.

I finally came across one called GetDataBack. It showed EVERYTHING that I was missing. The others showed partials or not even some folders I had, just weird. GetDataBack is nice too, once you do a scan and it finds everything, you can save that recovery session, close the program, and come back, and you don’t have to rescan everything again. My scan took 3.5 hours to complete, so this was a nice feature.

The hardest part about everything is just moving data around, I didn’t have enough free space on my main drive to restore everything at once, so I had to restore some, and then move it over the network to my other machine, then go back and restore more, rinse, repeat.

GetDataBack set me back 70$, but it was worth it to get all my music, documents and photos back. I can tell you this, once I am done moving everything around, I am backing up everything online.

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Geeky/Programming Life

T-Mobile Hotspot Access with Total Internet Add-On

A few months back when I got my T-Mobile Dash, it comes with the “T-Mobile Total Internet Add-on” which says “T-Mobile Internet with Hotspot”.

Ok, cool. Access to their hotspots at Starbucks, Hotels, Airports, etc, right? Well fine, but what is my username/password for the site? (hotspot.t-mobile.com)

Tried my phone #, and T-mobile password, nothing, just couldn’t figure it out. Finally stumbled across it on howardforums wiki – 10 digit phone number and last four of SSN, and on login it asks you to change.

So now, cool, I have access to the hotspots, This week it looks like I am going to have to try to get out of the “office” and work from a Starbucks for an afternoon, just to get some human interaction 🙂

 

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Life

Jamming – Craigslist and Audio Cinema

As I mentioned in a previous post, I met up with some guys that I met through Craigslist on the musicians forums, and we jammed on Wednesday night.

We met up at Audio Cinema, in the an area full of warehouses on the SE side of Portland. At first I couldn’t find the place, it was like under a bridge and just like in a weird street, but finally found it.

We rented a jam room for 2 hours (15 and hour) which came with a PA already set up.

I brought my acoustic guitar and a mic, and there was 3 other guys, a electric guitar, a bass, and drums. We jammed out pretty good, played a couple covers to just get warmed up, then we just started playing different chord changes to see what we could come up with.

It was very laid back, no pressure, and a fun time. The other guys have wives and kids, so it isn’t like we will be rock stars or anything. We plan on getting together again in a week/2 weeks. Should be fun.

Oh yeah, hit up the Kingston which is like 3 blocks from my apt for some beer and nachos (don’t even get me started on nachos, its like the 20th time I have had them in 2 weeks!)

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