Steven Reimer

In a couple hours, Julene and I are meeting with our potential home builder to discuss our options. In all likely hood, we will need to put our house up for sale very shortly in order to satisfy their requirements. What it comes down to is that they don't want us to try and sell our house too late so they won't be out of pocket when the house is finished. They want us to list our house right away. We really don't want to move twice, but that may be our only option. A quick browse of available rentals reveals that renting is more expensive than owning. 

I've added more pictures finally. I only seem to do this when prompted by friends overseas.

Wow. Time is flying. It's December and there's snow on the ground. Julene and I are trying to come up with gift ideas for our kids. Preferrably gifts that take up little of the precious room that there is in our house. We have realized lately that there is no room left in our house. Something is going to have to give soon. In the new year, we hope to investigate buying or building. Building means a pile of decisions like location, wall color, flooring etc. Buying an existing house means finding something that meets our list of must-haves. Either way it's going to be interesting.

In other news, Joel is cutting teeth. This means some grumpy days and sleepless nights. He has 2 out so far and working on more. Abby is still growing up and continually surprising us with her vocabulary and ability to form sentences. She's even learning how to reason and manipulate.

Work is still incredibly busy - having more work with less people. But it's good. I'm glad to be employed and I'm glad I'm not bored.

Merry Christmas to all!

I've lately become a fan of awk. One of the recent tasks I needed to do was to take a couple columns from 1000+ line spreadsheets and insert them into database tables. What I did, was save the spreadsheet to csv format and then wrote a one line awk script to extract the desired columns and build an insert statement.

Here it is:

awk -F"," '$9!=""{ print "insert into table_name (col1, col2, col3, col4) values ("$7","$9",'''text1''','''text2''');"}' spreadsheet.csv > insert_statements.sql

The beginning statement $9!="" tells awk to only take rows where the ninth column is not empty.