The photo you see here is of a statuette that sits in a special place in my home and heart.

It represents a long struggle followed by a triumph of teamwork.

This was once placed in my family’s home, before that home was shattered.  Not physically shattered but still, the end result may as well have been the same.

My wife (at the time) had purchased this piece at a local shop.  She’s good at picking out attractive items.  The piece was a gift to me for (I think) Father’s Day.  It was to represent “Dad and the kids”.  You can see “Dad” at the top, hugging the kids.  It sat on a nice shelf, looking pretty like gifts do.

One day something happened when I was at work and this fell off the shelf onto the tile floor and shattered into small pieces.  “Ah, too bad,” said my wife, “it’s broken.  I’ll toss it out and get another one.”

My kids had a different opinion.

They painstakingly sought after all the pieces, looking under the desk and chairs until they found every one.  Then they worked as a team to glue each piece together to make the statuette whole again.

When I arrived home, I got the full story.  This moved me to tears, knowing my kids would care enough to put this back together.

I always thought this piece was pretty, but after knowing what went into re-building it, it has become beautifully stunning in my heart.

Things have happened since then.  I’m praying the kids are still working to put pieces back together.

As they do, I shall hold steady and keep this masterpiece safe for them.

It’s an interesting fact that 67% of internet users will believe what has been posted on public internet sites, research from an independent consulting firm of the Pennsylvania Institute of Science has found.

Surprisingly, when the words “interesting” and “fact” are included in the post, the number increases to 72%.

“Adding a web link to the post,” adds researcher T. Roland Larph, head of the research firm Veridian Dynamics, “will then boost the factuality ratio to 83.7%.  It’s an incredible phenomenon.”

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Veridian Dynamics, located in the hills of Western Pennsylvania, is not an unknown player in the search for understanding human interaction.  The team challenged the often-quoted concept that “85% of statistics are made up on the spot”.  The actual number is actually much smaller than this, hovering between 30 and 45%, according to the team.

More information about how the study was performed can be found in the following journal entry: Human Interaction on the Internet.

“The address as entered does not match our standardized database.”

My response?

“The error message listed above does not match a meaningful concept.”

How can an address match an ENTIRE database?

After a few minutes of head-scratching and experimentation, I found that the ACTUAL error message should have been,

“The address field can only accept numbers and letters and no special characters.”

Aaaargh computer programs (and programmers) have enough trouble staying on the good side of the software users. Why do quality-control folks allow this kind of cruddy error messaging to exist?

This is a perfect example of a meaningless error message.  It contains little factual information and does not tell the user what to do to correct the data entry problem.

Below is a breakdown of what was going through my mind and how I was able to translate this message into something that made sense.

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This nearly-undecipherable message tells me the program is trying to match a field of characters to an entire collection of data which would contain not just addresses, but most likely people’s names, an assortment of dates, maybe prices, and certainly sets of specialised internal data pointers (indexes) as well as hidden scripting processes (stored procedures, triggers, foreign key cascade rules, etc.)

A “real-world” equivalent of this message would be the following message from a farmer,

“The chicken you describe does not match our farm.”

…and don’t get me started on what a “standardized database” could possibly represent.

Well, too late, I’ve started.  There’s such thing as a “Relational Database“, a “Hierarchical Database“, an “Object/Relational Database” but to my knowledge there’s no such thing as a “Standardized Database”.

Now what the original software coder may be saying in this message is:

“We used some logic to try to find the address you entered in a list of known standard postal addresses but couldn’t find it.”

However, since I know the address I entered actually exists, and could reasonably assume it to be in the database that the software is using, I started looking at things that may cause an error message.

The first thing to look at was the ‘#’ character I used in the PO Box number.  Special characters cause all sorts of problems with database-specific languages (i.e. Perl, MySQL, Oracle/Sybase stored procedures, etc) for reasons I won’t go into here.

After removing the special character and pressing the ‘Save’ button, everything worked as expected.  My data was updated in the system.

This was far too much thinking to have to do at 4:45 in the morning.