A new direction on the job hunt

Posted on February 6, 2010 - Filed Under Contracting, Mainframe | Leave a Comment

Okay, I’ve moved through the first two iterations of my job hunt–ramping up my profiles on Google and LinkedIn, and refining my resume so I have multiple versions. That looked promising for a while.

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This flowcharting tool will surprise you

Posted on January 12, 2010 - Filed Under Business, Mainframe | Leave a Comment

In the mainframe world, flowcharting is one of those things you hate to do, but is so necessary to give a user friendly view of a system. And I’ve tried them all–Word, Visio, PowerPoint, Dabbleboard, etc. They mostly achieve their aim–to put together a flow chart, but they all make it way too difficult to modify the chart after initial creation.

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Cobol shortcut using sort

Posted on December 21, 2009 - Filed Under Mainframe | 2 Comments

One of the more common tasks for a Cobol program is to take some action on matching records from two flat files. This is fairly straightforward, but it’s still a pain, because you have to be meticulous about testing a situation like what happens when one file hits EOF before the other one.

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The search for answers in a new shop

Posted on December 6, 2009 - Filed Under Mainframe | Leave a Comment

It never ceases to amaze me–you start a new job (or contract, in my case), and things go fine until you need some specialized piece of knowledge. Like in my case, this week, how to do a new copy for CICS? Not only does IBM change the process every now and then, but sometimes shops have their own custom way of doing it.

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Job hunting in 2009–it’s a whole new world

Posted on August 3, 2009 - Filed Under Mainframe | Leave a Comment

Ah, the good old days. When you could find a job in a day or two. Sometimes within hours. 2009, on the other hand, sucks big time.

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Great hotkey program–Autohotkey

Posted on August 3, 2009 - Filed Under Business, Family, Mainframe | Leave a Comment

I found this through PC Mag about a year ago, and have been using it ever since. Autohotkey is free, and does several great things, which I illustrate here:

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Frequency count with SAS

Posted on April 30, 2009 - Filed Under Mainframe | Leave a Comment

This is a trick I picked up at work today. I wanted to see how many times a particular transaction executed within one second for all today’s transactions. (more…)