School and Study Tips, LinkedIn Tips, Sony, SCU, SJSU, and Del Mar Posts Have Moved

Are you looking for content on this site and got the error "Sorry, the page you were looking for in this blog does not exist."? If so, then these links may help:

• For school and study tips: The content that was on this site was updated and moved to a new Study and School Tips site.

• For LinkedIn tips: The content that was on this site was either deleted because it was obsolete or updated and moved to the LinkedIn Notes blog.

• For Santa Clara University MBA students and alumni: Information about online social networks was updated and moved to the Santa Clara University MBA Notes blog.

• For San Jose State University students and alumni: Information about online social networks was updated and moved to the San Jose State University Notes blog.

• For Del Mar High School students and alumni: Information about connecting with classmates was updated and moved to the Del Mar High School Connection blog.

• For downtown San Jose residents and visitors: The content that was on this site was deleted because it was obsolete.

• For former and current Sony employees and contractors: Information about online social networks was updated and moved to the Unofficial Sony Alumni Social Networking Sites blog.

For techies: Yes, I know I could have used 301 redirects to make the transition of content from one place to another as seamless as possible for machines doing search engine optimization (SEO) as well as humans. But there are a lot of reasons I didn't do that. To start, I saved some money by moving my web site content with low traffic to Blogger sites. I might further elaborate on the reasons I didn't use 301 redirects in a future post.

Updated Personal Blog, Added Picture in Title

I started this blog in 2005, so 10 years later it seemed like a good time to update it to take advantage of features that Blogger makes easy to add to a site. Most of the features were probably available in 2005 with WordPress plugins, but I wasn't that serious of blogger. I just wanted a decent looking place where I could occasionally share information that I think might be useful to others. The same holds true today, but I thought it might be fun to take advantage of features that are now easy to implement in Blogger.

So during this upgrade of this personal blog, I figured out one thing that might be useful to you if you're using Blogger: How to put a picture next to the title.

You can see in the upper left corner of this page that my picture is next to the title "Rick Upton". It took a little experimentation to figure out how to do this.

Taking Video from DVD+RW Discs to an MPG file to YouTube

I recorded video to a DVD+RW disc. When I open the disc on my computer, I see a number of files, including files with the extension VOB. Each VOB file is a segment of the complete video that I want to be able to play on my computer and upload to YouTube.

To combine five VOB files on my DVD+RW disc into one file called newfile.mpg on my computer's hard drive, I executed the following command:

Combining VTA Light Rail or Bus Schedules into One Personalized Schedule

On the Santa Clara County's Valley Transit Agency (VTA) website, schedules are available in text format. The problem is that I want one schedule that shows me when the next light rail train is coming at a station I am going to depart from, but the VTA site doesn't provide such a schedule. You might want a single schedule to show you when the next bus is coming for a stop that serves multiple bus lines. So here below are some rough instructions as to what I do to combine two schedules into a single schedule, two times (one for northbound, and one for southbound). If you have any questions about the process, post a comment and hopefully I'll have some time to make the instructions clearer.

Removing leading and trailing spaces from Oracle SQL*Plus spooled output

Oracle's SQL*Plus application spools fields with spaces even if you try to trim the fields, because SQL*Plus is "doing you a favor" by making the fields line up. One way to work around this is to concatenate all fields into one big field so that SQL*Plus spools one big field. However, when I tried this with some very large fields, I got an error implying that I was concatenating too many characters. So how to work around this?

Here's what I did: I let SQL*Plus spool a tab delimited file with leading and trailing spaces (trailing blanks for all fields except for a field which uses STRAGG and had one leading space). Then I created an awk script to remove the leading and trailing spaces with code similar to the following:

Showing Outlook 2007 Calendar Appointments in Different Colors for Different Statuses

In Outlook 2003's calendar, appointments and meetings marked as "Free", "Tentative", "Busy", and "Out of Office" all automatically appeared differently on the calendar view to make it easy to visually distinguish them. Outlook 2007 offers the same "Show time as" options, but does not automatically visually distinguish these statuses by default.

I wanted this feature back in Outlook 2007, because I use my calendar not only to block out time for meeting and appointments which I mark as "Busy", but also as reminders for things I'd like to do if convenient, which I mark as "Free". Items I mark as "Free" are things like "Read the corporate newsletter", "Drink water", etc.

One way to visually distinguish meetings and appointments in Outlook 2007 is to manually assign each meeting and appointment a category which is associated with a color. This is what I did at first, but thought there must be a better way.