Enough Is Enough

 As everyone knows, the United States Capital was breached by thugs trying to disrupt the validation of the Electoral College votes for the 2020 National Election for The President Of The United States.  A group of protestors/thugs then laid siege to the capital.  I won’t bore you with my thoughts on this.  I have listened to various political leaders this afternoon.  I would hope that Joe Biden would lead us forward.  You have a hard road ahead of you.  I feel for what you are going through at this time.

Along the line of Joe Biden leading us forward, there are many myths surrounding what the problem is.  The problem is that there are more problems than are being discussed.  I would hope that President Joe Biden would come forward and listen to the problems.  I invite you to come to my office and listen.  I can fill you up a number of issues.  It’s way beyond race.

Setting up an Azure Sql Database - Firewall settings

 I've been working on an update to my golf game application.  I'm going to get it running with ASP.NET Core 5, aka .NET 5.  I've been digging through a lot of little changes, and it's been making me quite crazy at times.  I started working on it locally, then added an azure sql db, and would run my local system off of the azure db.  It was starting to all work great.  I then created an azure web app, deployed the new code, and nothing database oriented worked.  I was going crazy because I wasn't getting anything beyond an http 500 error.

I had some other issues to work on, so I created an azure vm last week to get get some things done quicker than running over the interwebz.  I noticed I had to add the vm to the azure firewall.  Did that, and handled the database work.

I came back around to this today.  I stepped into the code.  The first error was in calling the password manager's signin method.  Poof, no good error, just boom.  I noticed that the error took a number of seconds to actually generate the error.  It seems that the problem was the communication wasn't actually getting to the database.  I went back to the azure portal and decided to look at the sql server firewall settings.  I noticed the option of allowing azure services to access the database.  I set that to true, and the problem was resolved.  

Knoxville is One Of The Worst Places To Find A Job

One should ask themselves why this is true. https://www.wvlt.tv/content/news/567951751.html

Apologies for the forthcoming rant.

Yes, this is the culmination of years and years of mismanagement by political leaders, business leaders, and those that claimed that they were “for economic development.”

Since I was in high school in the early 1980s, and I suspect much earlier, I have been told how the region was a juggernaut, ready to take off economically. Ha, it never has. It has never gotten to the runway to even try. It has never made more than small efforts for show and media.

If you want to take off economically, you must make the commitment. The problem is, our leaders are too tied to the here and now. Business leaders want low wages. They want to limit opportunity for workers to move, change jobs, and limit payrolls. Given a choice between investing in the unknown, or taking care of the buddies in the business community, they chose the business community every day and twice on sundays. The result has been that startups, innovation, and opportunity do not exist here in abundance. This is why I do my work outside the region.

Our political leaders, economic development leaders, chambers of commerce, etc have failed us. It has been this way since before I was born and will be this way for years after I am gone. Why? Because we let this happen. Given the choice between startups/innovation and new vs the existing system, they all choose the existing system. Not once will they speak up. Not once will they do things to promote startups and innovation. They would prefer to promote against local. It’s a sad shame, and the way it is.

Golf Scoring in Azure

Looks like I had some buddies out on Sunday, and didn't notice it. https://lnkd.in/eHujiNQ hashtag#golf hashtag#saas Saved them 30 minutes x 11 players. Calculated everything in real time.

The key things are:

• Everything is handicapped. A good player can play with a not so good player. Everything is calculated on a hole by hole basis.
• The money is calculated.
• Side games are calculated.
• You know in real time what the status of the game is right now.
• Can do stroke play or match play.
• Saves 30 minutes at the end of the round times 11 players in this situation. That's 330 player minutes. Lasts 330 minutes to get back to people's lives.

Golf App for East Tennessee Children's Hospital

My app is running the ETCH AM charity #golf event this morning. https://golfeventscores.azurewebsites.net/PublicScores/SingleScoreMultiplePlayersSummary?TournamentId=31774 Check out the flights at the bottom of the scoreboard, pictures, video, and other great features for your charity, course, and club.  

Sql Server Cursor

I had to write a sql server cursor.  I tend to put things into my blog so that I can keep them around for my own memory.  Here is one that I wrote:
begin
Declare @TournamentId bigint, @token uniqueidentifier
declare tourncursor cursor for select Tournamentid from Tournament where Token is null
open tourncursor
fetch next from  tourncursor into @TournamentId
while @@fetch_status = 0
begin
update Tournament set token = NEWID() where Tournamentid = @Tournamentid
fetch next from  tourncursor into @tournamentid

end
close tourncursor
deallocate tourncursor
end

Why did Sears (and other established companies) Fail?

This isn’t just a sears problem, but seems to be a problem across the board with many companies, not all, but many.

The issue is that companies find something successful and they start to grow. They can get really big. For example, sears at one time was the largest retailer in the US, much bigger than Walmart. Then the founders, and those that are associated with the initial growth move on. It could be old age, wanting new challenges, whatever. Who fills in the spots? It’s not people with the same type of thinking. It’s typically MBAs and people that are accountants, or at least lean that way. The result is typically that growth grinds to a halt. These people try to optimize the business. In the really old days, this was called Morganization, after JP Morgan. Many times this means trying to sell and do things for no other reason than for trying to increase profit margins. When these people win, and shareholders always love these stories, sales start to fall. Why? Because customers tend to not buy on price, but on value. When the value of the product falls, they tend not to buy. Customers want more value for less money. Not less value for the same money.

AT the same time, other companies find out things and give these features to customers. The market place tends to change. If you don’t change with the marketplace, you end up with problems.

Big companies tend to have problems with innovation. Not only is there the Morganization going on, but there is the general problem of innovation in a large company. Sustaining innovation is hard. The finance department and hr tend to be against innovation. The finance department is about controlling costs. Hr is about hiring for known jobs. Both are really hard to do under innovation. In many companies, the hr and finance departments win this battle.

It wasn’t just sears. GM, Chrysler, and ford have this problem. Many retailers have this problem. Ibm is on this trail. It is much more common than people think.