Archive for February, 2009

T.I. Road to Redemption – A surprising production from MTV

2 years ago

by george in TV & Movies

Once in a while, a TV station like MTV who has previously been known to do nothing but reality shows that are geared to the lowest common denominator and of the poorest taste considering the day and age that we live in, will break through and provide something to the viewing audience that really shows that it’s a station that not only has star power through it’s ability to command any Hollywood star, but also to leverage those contacts to produce something really worthwhile.

I don’t say this often, as I have come to think of MTV as the filth that has become the degeneration of our generation and future generations to come, but there is a new show that my wife DVR’ed the other day that I reluctantly watched today, that is T.I.’s Road to Redemption.

What makes this interesting is the story behind this series. Apparently T.I. was brought to trial by the ATF for possession of weapons that were in violation of his previous felony conviction. With this, if the Federal government won a conviction, he could face up to 30 years in prision for those possessions. Apparently he made a deal with them that before March/2009, he would complete 1000 hours of community service–if he was able to do this, he would only face 1 year and 1 day in prison–if he failed to do so, he could face the full term. Obviously it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to know that the decision he made was clearly the best one, but wasn’t so obvious was his move to have MTV produce a show where he goes after 7 teens at risk to the streets and to help them understand what they are doing and the life that they can come to expect.

I have to admit, although I don’t agree with T.I.’s life decisions, to take the extra time on top of his 1000 hours of community service, to help these troubled kids, really gives me hope that Hollywood hasn’t been completely lost to the scum that is what we believe it to be. With people who are too into themselves and what’s in it for them, instead of looking out and using their star power and influence to help those who would be their fans and people who can be influenced by direct interactions with them.

I’ll be interested to see how things progress in the future shows, but for now after watching the first episode, I am impressed and give T.I. credit where credit is due for the work that he is doing. If he is able to complete this community service and have any impact on the kids he is helping, that should earn him a pass to get out of jail free. That is more than what you can say others in similar positions in either Music or Film have done for kids who are clearly at risk.

Error when installing SQLTools

3 years ago

by george in How-to

When you first install SQLTools, you receive an error message:

SQLTools.exe – Unable to Locate Component

This application has failed to start because OCI.dll was not found. Re-installing the application may fix this problem.

To fix this, you will need to install Oracle Client 10g Express Client. Once this is installed, you’ll need to try to launch SQLTools and it should open for you then.

Inserting string with an Apostrophe in MSSQL

3 years ago

by george in How-to

When you try to use an insert statement in MSSQL and the string contains an apostrophe, such as:

insert into test_table set destinationfield = ‘Sometime’s’ where id = 1

Obviously test_table equals the table that holds the data, destinationfield equals the field in the table that is going to get updated, and id would equals the unique identifier of the row that is going to be changed. When you try and run this you will always get a SQL error. To get around this, you want to use double quotes:

insert into test_table set destinationfield = ‘Sometime”s’ where id = 1

You’ll notice that in the first example there is only one single quote at the end of the string. Just adding another single quote will allow the insert to go through.