Stupid things recruiters do!

Tech recruiters annoy the heck out of me. I clearly have my email address listed on my resume yet they insist on calling me repeatedly and only during the week during normal work hours. If you are recruiter and have left several messages STOP CALLING!

Do you think I'm going to talk to you about a new job while I'm sitting in my cubicle at work where everyone can hear me?

If you have to call - do it after five. Or better yet - SEND AN EMAIL!!

And if you do send an email - BE POLITE! Don't demand that I send you a resume and demand that I send it in your preferred format when we have never communicated before.

and another thing. Don't ask me my salary and then say you can get me a job $7k more and assume that that's good enough. I don't know why but they always seem to think 5k or 7k will be enough to get you to leave your current job. Try $10k-$15. then maybe i won't ignore you- because I'm not really looking for a new job and it would take that kind of pay increase for me to consider another job.

I know you guys are desperate and I know you work on commission but that's not my problem! Some of you guys will say anything to make the sale and then wonder why you don't get any referrals.

Personally I don't even understand why your jobs exists. What do you do? Pull resumes from monster.com and show them to your clients? Why can't they do that themselves?

Do I sound peeved?

To all you recruiters - Email. Don't repeatedly call while we are at work!

Fashion House Jewelry

One of my latest projects is for the website www.FashionHouseJewelry.com

It's a Magento site that runs on Linux,Apache, MySql, PHP and the Zend Framework.

Coming from a Microsoft product background, it's a big jump. I chose Magento because seem to offer all the best features that I wanted to incorporate into my site and seemed miles ahead of the other open source shopping carts available. I've been using my Safari Online subscription to learn PHP and the Zend framework. It's been very interesting so far.

Oh, yeah I forgot to mention. The site sells high quality Cubic Zirconia jewelry at very affordable prices. Everything is in stock. Nothing is drop shipped or back ordered.

Check it out www.FashionHouseJewelry.com , constructive criticism is welcomed.

Regular Expressions

I've recently discoverd that Regular Expressions can be used in VBA. You just need to add a reference to "Microsoft VBScript Regular Expressions 5.5" in the Visual Basic Editor.

Regular Expressions is a data validation language that is used within many other programming languages and is very powerful at validating data. The great thing about it is that once you learn Regular Expressions you can transfer that knowledge to many other languages that implement Regular Expressions.

You can find more information here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression
www.regular-expressions.info/
http://regexlib.com/

Private Sub txtEmail_Enter()
' Using Regular expressions Must add a reference to
'Microsoft VBScript Regular Expressions 5.5

Dim re, s

Set re = New RegExp
re.Global = True
s = txtEmailAddress.Text
re.Pattern = "^([0-9a-zA-Z]([-.\w]*[0-9a-zA-Z])*@([0-9a-zA-Z][-\w]*[0-9a-zA-Z]\.)+[a-zA-Z]{2,9})$"

If Not re.Test(s) Then
MsgBox "Email address is NOT valid."
End If

End Sub

Increase ODBCTimeout property for all queries in an Access Database

If you ever have problems with Access queries timing out you can right-click in the query builder and set the ODBCTimeout property in the property window or you can run this code which will increase the ODBCTimeout property of all the queries in the database. You can just paste this code in a module and then run it and all the queries will have their timeout reset. I have some code that runs about 40 Access queries in a row and some of them were timing out and I found it easier to just change them all at once instead each one manually. Of course if you have too many queries timing out or if they still timeout after setting them to the maximum (6000) then you may need to convert you queries to SQL Server or whatever server database you are using. SQL Server is almost always faster than Access at running queries.



Dim qdfs As QueryDefs, qdf As QueryDef
Set qdfs = CurrentDb.QueryDefs
For Each qdf In qdfs
qdf.ODBCTimeout = 6000
Next

ContextMagic http://www.contextmagic.com/

Here's a free utility that I use all the time. It's called ContextMagic and you can get it for free here

http://www.contextmagic.com/



It adds some commands to the context menu when you right click over an icon or file. My favorite one is "Copy Name to Clipboard". It copies the full path to the item your mouse is over. I use it to email the location of files to people on the network and when I'm programming and need to reference a file path. I use it almost everyday.

Connect to Access from Excel using ADO

Here's the Excel VBA code I used to pull data from an Access query into an Excel Spreadsheet. It also brings in the column names. If you regularly have to pull data from Access or SQL server and then copy it to Excel this can help cut out some of those steps. I usually do a lot of formatting in code after bringing the data in, but left it out in this example in order to focus on the data extraction.

In order for this to work you need to add a refernce to ADO in Excel. In the Visual Basic Editor (VBE) go to Tools, References and search for Microsoft ActiveX Data Objects 2.8 Library. Click the checkbox and click OK.

Dim SQLcmd As String

Dim rs As ADODB.Recordset

Set rs = New ADODB.Recordset

Dim fld As ADODB.Field

Dim Row As Integer

Dim Column As Integer

SQLcmd = "SELECT * FROM [AccessQueryName]"

rs.Open Source:=SQLcmd, _

ActiveConnection:="Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0; Data Source=N:\MyFolder\MyDatabaseName.mdb" + _

"; User Id=admin; Password="

Column = 1

Row = 1

For Each fld In rs.Fields

Cells(Row, Column).Value = fld.Name

Cells(Row, Column).Select

With Selection.Interior

.ColorIndex = 15

.Pattern = xlSolid

End With

Selection.Font.Bold = True

Column = Column + 1

Next fld

Cells(2, 1).CopyFromRecordset rs

Cells.Select

Cells.EntireColumn.AutoFit

Useful Excel and Access Website

http://www.datapigtechnologies.com/




This site is great for learning some advanced techniques in Access and Excel. I really learned a lot from this site when I was starting out with Access and Excel. The videos are short and concise and show how to do some truly useful stuff. There are also some videos on Xcelsius if you want to learn that too.

The site is run by Mike Alexander who has several books out on Access and Excel that you can find on Amazon.com or in your local bookstore. He recently started a blog that you read here:

http://datapig.bravejournal.com/

I think Mike is really creative when it comes to both Access and Excel and highly recommend his website.