la morena

i experienced one of the amazing expression of gratitude from the people of la morena in guatemala. this past november queenship of mary parish sent the 4th delegation of amistad y fe to guatemala to access and strengthen the friendship between the parish.

the people of la morena were so grateful for the our friendship and support to their community. they willingly share whatever meager things they have. they shared their life stories, their meal and their accomplishments.

i found beauty in their simplicity and honesty.

barnes & noble harry potter's midnight magic party and etc....

It was a great experience to see thousands of parents and their children lined up to get their copies of the last book of the Harry
Potter series "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows".

I volunteered to help out the store at princeton marketfair mall. I was one of the people assigned to keep the lines organized. I found out that there was a group of young men who started lining up at 9 am in the morning of july 20th. they were 11 hours early and the store security had to kicked them out. there was a booth for potion recipes, face painting, custom contest, trivias, etc.

chinky and correne came later after watching the movie "hairspray". they enjoyed the movie and was surprised to see the sea of people. chinky stayed for awhile to watch the activities but left around 10:30 pm. correne was all over the place joining a couple of contest and had her face painted a couple of times.

the crowd rouser had the people count down the start of the harry potter sale. it was a riot! just like a new year's count down. correne and myself was assigned to help out directing the customers to the cashiers. correne was so patient and enjoying the reactions of the people coming in.

we stayed till 1:30 am when the last customer got served then i bought the book for my little girl.

thank you debi, jeff and robin (b&n princeton marketfair).

Week of Surprises

last thursday, we attended the church choir practice. we are preparing for the advent carols. we sang all the songs with much gusto. after the practice, the director asked some of the members to stay. when the other members left she told us that she will be moving on and look for other opportunities. we were all surprise. with all the preparations, the coming holidays and the good things happening in church this is the last thing you would expect to happen. we wished her the best and thanked her for her leadership and the music.
walking out the church, we spoke to some of the members. we reassured each other that we will continue to serve our parish. we would pray that our parish priest will be guided by the holy spirit in choosing the right person for the job.

New Office Location

Monroe office

I got to the office around 9 am. The boxes were already in my new cube. It took me 45 minutes to unpack all my boxes. I worked on a work order that needed to update a field on an oracle table.

Here are the steps I did to accomplish the job.

1. imported the text file which was delimited by ‘|’ to a spreadsheet.
2. imported the spreadsheet to access database
3. exported the access table to an oracle table using odbc
4. created a pl/sql program to update the target table using the new table.

pl/sql program:

declare
v_adean char(13);
v_addc char(1);
v_adcsl number(5,2);
cursor adcsl_cur is select adean,addc,to_number(adcsl) from aditemf_adcsl;

begin
open adcsl_cur;
loop
fetch adcsl_cur into v_adean,v_addc,v_adcsl;
EXIT WHEN adcsl_cur%NOTFOUND;
update aditemf set adcsl = v_adcsl
where adean = v_adean and addc = v_addc;
commit;
end loop
commit;
close adcsl_cur;
end;

The whole process took 30 minutes.

ideas and singing....

got up this morning with lots of ideas and plans. i need to focus on how to accomplish all these things. it started yesterday when i read the transcript of sir richard branson's interview with jane pauley. it got my entrepreneurial juice flowing again. first i need to get a new computer and install all the softwares i need for my trade.
we went to church choir practice this evening. a good number of people attended. we learned a new and beautiful piece by david haas "carol of the child". we are preparing for the advent carols this coming december.
more on ideas and singing later......