\u201cGive me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.\u201d
\n\u2014Abraham Lincoln<\/p>\n
If there was some philosophy I could say I truly believe in then this would be it. Likely a lot of it is that I am an inveterate tinkerer and like to take the opportunity to learn new things, but mostly I think I am a bit addicted to efficiency. A process that runs smoothy and without hiccups is one that makes me smile and if I can spend 3 hours doing something interesting and learning a new skill that will carve 4 hours off a mundane and boring task ,then the outcome is guaranteed to make me grin like an idiot.<\/p>\n
Case in point: my boating quiz<\/a>. As I had mentioned previously<\/a> I felt the interface for the Slick Quiz plugin sucked, and was full of redundant entry and irrelevant info that had to be entered regardless of my opinion. Since I could build a customized entry system in Filemaker in a matter of moments, it just made sense to do it my way.<\/p>\n That left the issue of how to get my info from Filemaker to WordPress’s quiz plugin. A quick check revealed that Slick Quiz had made a couple of tables in the WordPress MySQL database. I exported the existing data to get a sample of the table structure and then went in to Filemaker and with (a lot of) trial and error managed to create an export file that I could dump via phpMyAdmin into the correct tables. Voila!<\/p>\n It took me several days of playing with variables, learning software and figuring out that special characters like ampersands and curly quotes were giving me grief, before I could get the system running. I probably could have done a whole lot of data entry the hard way in those few days, but…<\/p>\n I’m not such a big Lincoln fan generally \u2014 I tend to feel politicians are generally less altruistic than history portrays them \u2014 but I am totally on board with this little quote. Spend some time sharpening your axe people; it is almost always the right choice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cGive me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.\u201d \u2014Abraham Lincoln If there was some philosophy I could say I truly believe in then this would be it. Likely a lot of it is that I am an inveterate tinkerer and like to take the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/macblaze.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5667"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/macblaze.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/macblaze.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/macblaze.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/macblaze.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5667"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/macblaze.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5667\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/macblaze.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/macblaze.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/macblaze.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}The Point<\/h4>\n
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