Raam Dev

Hello, future.

Found an apartment!

Last week I looked at several apartments in Cambridge -- I would say between 10 - 15 apartments all together. One of the apartments I looked at was in a really nice neighborhood, on a dead end street, with parking and utilities included. The lady who owned the house was originally going to rent it for $1200, but Jim, the rental agent who showed me the apartment, talked her down to $1100 and told me he was pretty sure she would go to $1000 a month if I took it "as is". It was a really nice place and even though it was 2.5 miles from my office, about a 35 - 40 minute walk, the price was unbeatable for that neighborhood; so I told him I'll take it.

I continued to look at apartments the next morning, meeting with rental agents left and right, however I couldn't help but notice the connection I felt with Jim, as if I'd met him before. When we had met at the apartment, we talked about real estate and how you can't go wrong with buying real estate for long-term investment. I told him that I own three multi-family's in Lowell and he mentioned he was thinking of buying some property in Lawrence, a neighboring town to Lowell.

When I met Jim in his office to fill out the rental application, I mentioned that I do computer service repair on the side. He told me that their office really needed an IT guy because their current IT person had recently been extremely unreliable. He introduced me to the owner of the office, a 53 year old lady. She was very nice, but firm and noticeably hardened by the business world. A few minutes later, Jim told me that she grew up in Dracut, which is the town next to where I grew up, and that she started buying property in Cambridge when she was 18. She and her husband now own over 170 apartments in Cambridge alone. When Jim asked where in Pelham I grew up, I told him right on Little Island Pond. He laughed and told me that the owners brother has a house on that lake and that he goes to visit him every other weekend.

I couldn't help but be amazed that of all the people in Cambridge, I happen to meet such a group of people; someone who has frequently visited the very same lake and town I grew up in, and whose boss grew up in the town next to Pelham, and that the bosses brother owns a house on the same lake I grew up on! Oh, and that they need an IT person to help them with their computers, something that will provide me with a little extra cash after I leave the Aerva office -- what are the chances?

Anyway, the original apartment I said yes to did not work out. The landlord decided to fix it up and rent it for $1200. So Jim showed me another place in East Cambridge, which was big, but the neighborhood wasn't that nice. It also was a little far from the office, about 2 miles. Jim told me about a basement apartment very close to Central Square, and said that the girl who lives there now hasn't paid her rent in a few months because of an issue with squirrels, which were somehow getting into the ceiling. He told me that her dad was the building inspector and that the landlord of the building. The girl is moving out January 1st and the landlord just wants to get someone in there who will work with him to fix the squirrel problem. I took a look at the place yesterday and it is awesome. Even though its a basement apartment, the foundation has been cut to allow full size windows. There are hardwood floors throughout and the bathroom is all tile, including the entire shower. The girl who's living there now took very good care of the place, because it looks as if it was just renovated. I used my car to check how far the place was from my office, and its exactly 0.6 miles -- just over half a mile. Thats about a 5 - 10 minute walk!

Here's a satellite picture of the house, and here is the route from the apartment to my office. When I met with Jim to look at the apartment, the landlord was there with him. He was an older guy, probably around 70 years old. He told me how he bought that house for $68,000 in 1968. The house is now valued at over $1.5 million. He bought another house a few blocks away, which was boarded up at the time, for $1675 -- its now valued at around $1 million.

I'm probably going to move in on January 1st, or sometime around there. I'll take pictures of the place and post it up when I get a chance. I'm hoping there is already an Internet connection there, as I have not asked about that yet. The month of January is going to be extremely busy, and important, for Aerva and I'm right in the middle of it all. I have four days this week to work on three apartments and hopefully get them in rent condition. After that, while I'm working in Cambridge, I'll have to coordinate with my brother over the phone and hopefully get the apartments rented. I'm going to try listing them on CraigsList before posting ad's in the newspaper.

Happy Christmas.

(Why merry? All the other holidays start with happy!)

The move is coming!

Finally, I'm feeling a little better and I can tell the cold is going away. Thank god. Usually my colds only last two or three days, but this one has been lingering on for over a week. I told myself that I would go see a doc on Monday if I was still sick when I woke up. Sure enough, I woke up sick Monday morning.

I called my doc and they gave me an appointment at 3:45pm. I arrived at 3:45 on the dot. There were two others ahead of me and after waiting for what seemed like forever, no wait a second, it was forever. After waiting 1 hour and 15 minutes, the doc finally saw me. He told me it was just a bad case of the flu, said I should take some over the counter medicine, jabbed a stick in the back of my throat (which hurt like hell!) to test for strep throat, and sent me on my way.

Today, I can feel my body starting to heal, but I was still coughing all over the place and my head was pounding so I decided not to go into Cambridge. When I talked to my boss today he told me to start planning my move to Cambridge because he needs me full time starting January 1st. Yikes! I was thinking I didn't have to start full time until end of January. I was sitting outside my Ware street rental property at the time and after realizing that two weeks from now I would be working in Cambridge 5 days a week, I quickly drove home to change my clothes so I could come back and work on the Ware street apartments.

After changing, I ended up going to my sisters house instead, to help my dad install the appliances.

So the big move is coming, and a lot sooner than I thought. I've been looking for apartments in Cambridge and surrounding areas for the past few weeks. I would really like to find a place thats walking distance to the office, however right now I'm almost ready to take anything. I searched for apartments on Beacon Street and couldn't believe they were cheaper than in Cambridge! But later I realized the the Beacon Street apartments don't have any parking, and since I have a car, the parking spot included with most Cambridge apartments would be very useful. I've been looking exclusively on CraigsList, and it looks like I'm going to have to pay around $950 - $1000 a month for a decent place in Cambridge. I'm trying to find a studio, since I really don't need much space. If I can find something cheaper, I'll take it. There's a ton of listings for roommates, but I really need my own place. If I get lucky, I can find a place for $750.

Narrowly escaped a four car pile-up

Tuesday -- still feeling sick. On my way home from Cambridge, while I was sitting in stop-and-go traffic, the thought occurred to me that if the car in front of me suddenly slammed on his breaks, I could swerve into the breakdown lane to the left (I was in the far left lane). I kept thinking about it and continued mentally preparing myself for the split-second, no thought reaction time it would take to avoid an accident.

About 5 minutes later, I saw the mini-van in front of my slam on his breaks and slam into the car in front of him. We were going about 45 mph at the time, so you can imagine how fast someone goes from 45mph to 0mph. In less time than it takes to blink an eye, my wrist flicked the steering wheel to the left and I swerved into the breakdown lane, avoiding the 4 car pileup. Luckily the car behind me was also paying attention and with my car out of the way, he had just enough time to slam on his breaks and avoid the collision.

Work myself to sickness

Well the past few days have been interesting enough to finally set aside 20 minutes and write a post before I go to bed. I spent Saturday working on my sisters new house with my dad. I obtained some rather large blisters on the palms of my hands (which by the way looked a lot like stigmata) from scraping up old tiling on the kitchen floor with an ice chipper (!?). I did not realize how much concrete dust I was breathing in until I was all done. There was a pack of new dust masks sitting on the kitchen counter the whole two hours I was working.

Sunday morning I woke up and had a really bad sore throat -- you know, the kind you get when it hurts to swallow. That was my first signal that I was about to get sick. Also, all of my joints started aching, as if they had been under huge physical stress. By Sunday evening, I was really starting to feel out of whack. I was shivering non-stop, I couldn't get warm enough, my stomach was turning, head hurt like hell (behind the eyes), throat hurt, every muscle in my body was sore -- even coughing hurt my abdominal muscles. I hate that feeling -- the feeling as if my entire body was falling apart.

When I woke up on Monday morning, I felt sick, but not sick enough to skip going into Cambridge. Monday evening I worked out, even though I still felt pretty sick. Working out usually makes me feel better, so I figured what the hell. I didn't feel any better afterwards, but I didn't feel any worse either. After my workout I went to my sisters house again to work with my dad. I screwed down the concrete backer board for the tile floor. I put in about 800 screws (with a drill, of course). Bending over like that for two hours really puts a toll on your back!

It probably doesn't help that my basement gets pretty cold at night (around 45 - 50 degrees), which I'm sure weakens my immune system even more than the small amount of sleep I've been getting (5 - 6 hrs a night, even on weekends). I've decided to try and get at least 6 - 7 hrs of sleep every night, and sleep extra on the weekends. Also drinking more tea!

Why I won't install IE7

IE7 needs Service Pack 2.

Service Pack 2 does horrible things to a computer. For example, I have two computers with the same exact hardware specs. Same services running. The SP2 computer runs MUCH slower than the SP1 computer. I'm not just talking about network speed (I know about the TCP connection limitation in SP2 (from 65k connections down to 10 connections! (and I know about the tcpip.sys hack to fix it)). I'm talking about launching programs, opening my computer, etc. All are much slower with SP2.

So, unless someone can find me an IE7 that runs with SP1, I won't be installing it. Besides, Firefox does everything I need on a daily basis, and IE6 is there for backup, in case there's some stupid ASP site that I need to view that just wont work right in Firefox (damn non-standardization!).

Link Action plugin for slGrid

There was recently a plugin system added to slGrid, which is great because I recently found the need for a plugin that creates a link around specific cell content and decided to write one.

Link Action allows you to create a URL around the contents of a cell using the unique database column ID. It also allows you to pass the target page for the URL and optional URL arguments. If no target page is passed, it defaults to the current page calling the grid.

<?php
/*
 * Example usage:
 * $_SESSION["grid"]->SetPlugin("Full_Name", "link_action", array("target" => "users.php", "extra_args" => "&action=edit"));
 *
 * Assuming the database column ID is 24, and the Full_Name is Raam Dev, here is what the cell would contain:
 * Raam Dev
 */

require_once('class.plugin.php');

class link_action_Plugin extends Grid_Plugin
{

	function introspect()
	{
		return(array(
			"name" 			=> "Link Action",
			"description" 	=> "Creates a URL to call an action using the unique database column ID",
			"author"		=> "Raam Dev ",
			"version"		=> "1.0"
			));
	}

	function generateContent($cell, $args)
	{
		if(empty($args["target"])){
			$args["target"] = $PHP_SELF;
		}
		if(empty($args["extra_args"])){
			$args["extra_args"] = "";
		}
		return("$cell");
	}
}
?>

slGrid, Ajax-Based PHP Grid Component

I found an absolutely awesome application called slGrid. It was recently bought by Senza Limiti, a technology consulting company based in Slovakia. They've since made slGrid an open-source application, which is very cool. It uses AJAX and PHP to provide an interface for creating grids by loading content directly from a database. You specify the table and fields, and it takes care of the rest. Check out the slGrid demo to get a better idea of what it does.

Using slGrid is literally as easy as this:


<?php
	$_SESSION["grid"]->SetDatabaseConnection("database_name", "user_name", "password");
	$_SESSION["grid"]->SetSqlSelect('field1, field2', 'table');
	$_SESSION["grid"]->SetUniqueDatabaseColumn("id_field", false);
	$_SESSION["grid"]->SetTitleName("slGrid");

	$_SESSION["grid"]->PrintGrid(MODE_VIEW);
?>

A Dirty Job

Well yesterday the main drain pipe in my Bowers street property clogged and caused the basement to flood with sewage. I had a plumber fix the problem, but I was still left with a basement full of sewage, which smelled badly and would become a huge health risk if I didn't have it cleaned. The longer I waited, the harder it would be to clean. So I called a few places and got some estimates; they all wanted at least $800.

There is no way I have $800 to spend, not after spending $420 to fix the plumbing problem. So I decided to do it myself. A shop vac, gloves, a hose, and my brother were all I needed. Ravi and I started at 7:00pm, but Ravi had leave at 8:30, so I worked until 10:30pm and got most of it finished (80%). The rest I will finish Friday morning.

I was surprised how much I didn't mind the dirty work once I had got started. The smell was only bad when I first entered the basement. A few seconds later my nose adjusted and I couldn't smell anything. I understand now how people can do the jobs that others would think are horrible; its really its nothing more than a job. Just as fear is mostly created in our head, disgust and the thought of filth are largely overplayed in our head as well. The pictures are pretty graphic, so I'll only post one, but you can see the rest here.

As Ravi commented, it was a Dirty Jobs moment when I mumbled to myself "I will never look at shit the same way again...".

Bowers Street Main Stack Clogged

The third floor tenant in my Bowers street property called me while I was at work today. He said that there was sewage flooding the basement and that it smells really bad.

Great.

So when I arrived in Lowell tonight I went straight to Bowers street. As I entered the basement it smelled as if I was entering a sewer. I walked into the basement to find 60% of the floor covered in 1" of liquid feces, brown colored and all. I laid down some things to walk on and checked the main stack. It looked like it was coming from below the house... where the main stack connects to the street sewer pipe. Hmm...

I don't have the time or the tools to deal with this, so I called Roto-Rooter, an emergency plumbing service I've used in the past. They told me they would have someone out there within two hours, so I went to the factory and completed the workout for today.

An hour and a half later, the plumber called me. He told me it was going to be $420. Blah. I needed to get it fixed ASAP. Fourty-five minutes later he's done; $420 for fourty-five minutes worth of work! I keep telling myself that it would have taken me a lot longer had I tried doing it myself, because I don't have all the fancy tools and gadgets he had. It's so hard for me to spend money on something that I know I could do myself.

I guess sometimes you have to know when to outsource.

Started running again

I had a good workout tonight. I felt energized as ever, which I'm crediting to my high complex carbohydrate intake throughout the day (whole wheat pasta with my own sauce (fresh onion and mushroom)).

I also decided to start running again and ended todays workout with a 15 minute interval circuit:

15 Minute Interval Circuit

00:00 - 5 mph warm up
02:00 - 9 mph sprint
02:30 - 7 mph run
03:30 - 9 mph sprint
04:00 - 7 mph run
05:00 - 9 mph sprint
05:30 - 7 mph run
06:30 - 8 mph sprint (tired as hell!)
07:00 - 7 mph run
08:00 - 8 mph sprint
08:30 - 7 mph run
09:30 - 9 mph sprint
10:00 - 7 mph run
11:00 - 9 mph sprint
11:30 - 7 mph run
12:00 - 6 mph cool down
13:00 - 5 mph cool down
14:00 - 4 mph cool down
15:00 - end

It's really amazing how long 15 minutes seems when you're enduring such physical stress, and as much as I wanted to stop, I kept telling myself to overcome the pain. I'm glad I did, because I felt good afterwards.

There's a sense of accomplishment I feel after completing a tough workout. Even if I've had a very unproductive day, finishing it with a tough workout would make the entire day seem worth it. A tough workout is also an excellent stress releaser -- no matter how hard my day was, finishing it with a good workout makes me feel as if I could start the whole day over, and go through it all over again.

1998 Audi A4 Quattro

1998 Audi A4 Quattro AWD
2.8L V6, 5-speed manual transmission
Fully Loaded (Bose sound system, etc)
170k miles
New windshield, new front axle, new front brakes
Price: $3,500

I purchased this car from my friend last week. It drives very solid, its fast as hell (can do 0-60mph in 7 seconds!), and gets much better gas mileage than my truck. My initial tests on gas mileage are around 17mpg -- compared to 10mpg in my truck. The reason I bought this car was because I couldn't pass up the price and I knew I needed something to use for driving to Cambridge.

I was ruining my truck by driving it more than I needed to, so now I can just use it for hauling things around when I'm working on the rental properties, and hopefully get a plow on the truck for the winter.

Check the gallery for more pictures of the Audi, including interior photos. You can also check out the Wikipedia page on Audi A4's for more information and history.

Promoted to Lead Support Engineer

I don't know if you'd call it a promotion or simply an additional title in the company, but I've been given a whole slew of new responsibilities at Aerva with the additional title of Lead Support Engineer (the other being Software Engineer). My hours are being slightly increased and I'm going to be working four days a week, instead of three. It's amazing how much time has passed and how far I have come since I started working at Aerva back in April.

The past eight months have been pretty busy for me, both at Aerva and otherwise. This month has been especially busy, as you can probably tell from my lack of frequent posts. I've been on track with my weekly workouts and remained Vegan thus far. The 53 Ware street property did not sell in the 10 months I had it on the market, so I decided to take it off the market, do some renovations to it, and keep it as a rental property. Over the next two weeks I will be working with my brother to get two of the three vacant units rented. This morning I was having second thoughts about keeping the property though. I realized that if I sell it for a price that includes all the work I'm putting into it, then I would at least get back the money I put into it -- and that is money that I really need right now to pay other bills.

Truck hits 150,000 miles

A few days ago my truck hit the 150,000 mile mark while I was on the highway coming home from work. I happen to have my bag right next to me so I grabbed my camera and took a picture. I thought about how the truck, since it was manufactured in 1999, has driven enough miles to go around the entire planet six times, at the equator! But the funny thing is that it probably hasn't even been out of Northeastern United States, since it's single previous owner was the Rhode Island Highway Division.

Now before you start making comments about how I shouldn't be taking pictures of anything while driving 75mph on the highway, you should know that I'm very familiar with the functions of my camera and that I didn't need to take my eyes off the road for even a second. 🙂

The plane and the conveyor belt

This popular physics question was posted on the tao-gamers.com forum I frequently visit:

A plane is standing on a runway that can move (some sort of huge conveyor belt). The plane moves in one direction, while the conveyor belt moves in the opposite direction. This conveyor has a control system that tracks the plane speed and tunes the speed of the conveyor belt to be exactly the same (but in the opposite direction). Can the plane take off?

Spend some time thinking about the question and go over different scenarios in your head. Try to understand the problem and visualize what's going on. I've heard that even pilots frequently get the answer wrong. I have posted the answer, and my explanation, in a comment to this post. Try to figure it out before you look at the answer!

Project Magnolia

As I mentioned a few days ago, Thea and I are starting a new project together. We'll be using PHP & MySQL on the backend and CSS, XHTML, & AJAX on the front end. Exact project goals have not yet been defined, however we already have a good idea what Magnolia will be: A retail store that allows easy category and item management, while providing the most common tools to serve customers. It would probably make more sense to make use of an open-source shopping cart, however we're both doing this as a learning process and to build project organization skills.

I've created a wiki for the project to help with documentation and development. You can check it out here. I've decided to make the wiki public, as I can't imagine there will be any confidential information added to it. Since the wiki is open to the public, feel free to add your own feature requests to the Feature Requests section of the wiki.

Moving Earth

On my way into work this morning, while stopped at a red light in Cambridge, a long dump truck filled with dirt passed in front of me. I suddenly realized I was looking at a moving part of history. That earth was being removed from the city to allow for further expansion and development -- to be replaced by concrete, steel, and other man-made manufactured products that will eventually become just another area in the city of Boston.

As our civilization grows and changes we seem to feel the need to also change the earth on which we reside. The more we learn about and understand how things work, the more we want to change and shape them to fit our needs and desires. This fact seems to apply to even our bodies; the more we understand how they work the more chances we will take with making modifications and "repairs" to them. We pop pills because their side effects seem to fix, if only temporarily, some ailment we're currently suffering. Doctors use metal rods, drills, and screws to "repair" a badly broken, biologically alive, bone. Entire hips are replaced because the patient is told there is no other option. We have special chairs for our backs, special shoes for our feet, sun glasses to protect our eyes, sunscreen to protect our skin, vitamins to give us our daily nutrients, and the list goes on!

If humans have survived for as long as they have, at least 200,000 years, and they have survived that time period with nothing other than what nature provided, then what makes the humans of the past 100 years special enough to need all kinds of extra gadgets and technology to help them survive? In our quest to better our lives and cure common ailments, is the human race looking, and subsequently moving, in the wrong direction? Are we entering into a technological "dark-age" of mis-guided knowledge, advice, and teaching?

Ware Street Health Department Notice

A few weeks ago, approximately one week after I evicted the tenants from the first floor front unit, I arrived to find a notice from the health department stuck on the front door:

 

First of all, the unit they went into was vacant and locked, so they must have broken in to gain access to the inside. Secondly, there were no debris around the building -- I had spent over an hour cleaning up the entire yard only a few days prior. Improper wiring on the outside of the building? How is the cable TV and telephone wire my problem? That's the cable and phone company's problem! How is damaged siding a health issue? Side door improperly secured?? It's a brand new door with a brand new lock and deadbolt! Front door damaged? Yes its damaged and I'm going to replace it as soon as I start renovating that unit. The rest of the list refers to things inside the unit that I'm going to renovate and in the meantime, no one is living there -- so why is there such an urgency to repair them for "health reasons"?

I requested a hearing to dispute the claims and after a week or so, I received a letter with the hearing date:

The 8th was this past Wednesday. I went to the health department and met with the health inspector. He told me they were under the impression that someone was still living there and that was why they gave the notice. When I told him I was renovating the place he understood and told me not to worry about the notice. He also told me to get a vacancy permit from him after I'm done the renovations and before I rent the apartment.

I've decided not to sell the Ware Street property and instead put about $10,000 into it and get it rented. I'm replacing two furnaces, one hot water tank, redoing all the plumbing in the basement (the pipes are in very bad condition), fixing several broken windows, replacing old single-pane windows, replacing a couple of doors, buying a couple of new appliances, remodeling two kitchens and one bathroom, and fully renovating (kitchen, bathroom, living room and bedroom) the first floor one bedroom unit -- $2500 is my budget for the entire renovation of that unit.

My goal is to have the two vacant two bedroom units finished and rented by December 1st and the one bedroom unit fully renovated and rented by January 1st. I'm doing most of the renovations myself, however I'm going to hire contractors do the furnaces, plumbing, and windows. I'll post updates on the progress of all this stuff as it happens.

A sore body and a new collaboration

I am incredibly sore from Monday and Tuesdays workouts. Ravi wanted to do arms on Tuesday, so we did workout C instead of workout B. That was probably a bad idea, because it didn't give my chest or arm muscles enough time to recover from the previous day's workout. I'm mostly feeling it in my triceps and obliques -- when I lift my arms over my head.

I've been going over Thea's place on Wednesday nights and tutoring him in PHP programming. The past few sessions haven't been very productive, but thats because I had to get his programming environment setup properly. I installed XAMPP and Eclipse (with the PHP plugin). We decided today that we're going to work on a project together; a web retail store which will allow Wholesale Floral Corp to sell discontinued items to the public. Building this application together will be excellent experience for the both of us. We're going to use the Smarty PHP template engine and stick to Object-Oriented programming as much as possible. To collaborate our development work we're going to use my home CVS server.

Internet Archaeology

So today I went to show my apartments to a prospective tenant. The appointment was for 7pm, so it was already dark. Come to find out, the electric company turned off the electricity for two of the three vacant units. I called the electric company a month ago and asked them to put the meters in my name. I told them the tenants had been evicted and I didn't want them to turn the electricity off because I would be doing renovations. So I called them again today and asked why the hell they were off. Apparently, they had no record of me calling in and asking to have the meters put in my name. Grrr, I hate incompetence, especially in companies or those who provide a service.

I had coffee with my boss today and due to uncontrollable circumstances, I'm probably not going to be hired full-time in January 2007, which means I won't be moving to Cambridge in January. I'm still moving, it just won't be when I expected. Instead, it might be sometime early February or even March of 2007. We'll see.

While searching the web for something today, I came across The Original new.gif Tribute Page. It's pretty simple: Back when the web was just getting started, Matt Libby decided to create a tiny GIF image, about the same height as a line of text, which he could use to mark things on a web page that were new. The tiny GIF took off and is probably the most used image in the history of the web. Pretty cool stuff. I almost felt like an Internet archaeologist, discovering a lost piece of Internet history. It reminds me of how quickly sites like Google, Yahoo, Flickr, MySpace, etc., have become common-place names for todays generation of Internet users and how only 8 years ago, most of those sites didn't even exist.

In the opposite direction, towards the future, I read on Slashdot about how Windows Vista is apparently going to use IPv6 to create unique domain names for each Windows Vista computer, to make it easier for computers to share files. I can only imagine the number of viruses that will crop up to utilize this feature. The good thing is that Microsoft may very well be the company that helps kick-start the push towards the whole Internet using IPv6 over IPv4. I'm just happy that I'm moving away from regular computer support and more towards software engineering. I have a bad feeling that Windows Vista is going to be a huge headache when it comes to support.

Also on Slashdot, I read about a guide to camping out on console launch day. I thought it was funny how the author of the guide mentions that he's not crazy compared to the fans who lined up a year in advance for the Star Wars prequels. I'm a Star Wars fan and I'll admit, I lined up to watch Star Wars 1 when it first came to the theater. The line to get into the movie theater started inside the theater in the hallway, and backed out the theater entrance and halfway around the building outside. 🙂

Automation

Today I wrote a bunch of documentation for Wholesale Floral Corp, using the DokuWiki I setup on their Intranet. After reading Time Management for System Administrators, I realized how much more I can do to further automate my daily administrative tasks. One of the key things was documentation, which is something I tend to do as a habit anyway but my problem was always distribution: I needed a way to make the documentation accessible, and easily available, to those who need it, when they need it.

The Wiki solves this problem instantly. Not only is the documentation easily accessible to everyone on the network, but I can also have certain employees contribute to the documentation. I can edit and view documentation from anywhere I have made the web server accessible (in this case, I have restricted access to the Wiki from the Intranet).

I also coded a couple more tools (in PHP) to help make web customer registration functions easier, further automating what would otherwise be a whole slew of repetitive tasks. When you understand how to access, filter, and modify vast sources of information stored in a particular database, it's amazing how easily you can automate things.