Always looking for better ways to do my job, today I spent an hour playing around with two applications, Jing and Snagit, both from a company called Techsmith. Over the last 18 months, I've spent a lot of time on client training and education, including teaching technical concepts to decidedly non-technical staff. GoToMeeting has been an invaluable tool for troubleshooting user issues and ad-hoc training. But even these web sessions still have me explaining the same thing repeatedly to different users. This is where Jing comes in.

Jing allows me to easily create short videos with audio that I can send to users for them to watch and follow. The free version handles both video and some lightweight screen capturing.

Snagit picks up where Jing leaves off with screen capturing. The free version is on a 30-day trial basis. Even at a $50 price tag, I have a feeling I'll buy it as it's an indispensable tool for technical writing.

I spent this morning learning about heat pumps. When I went outside to check on the heat pump after breakfast, there wasn't much snow or ice on it, but the fan blades had several inches of snow on them and there was a bit of snow down inside the case. A rolling stone gathers no moss and a spinning fan blade gathers no snow. So what was going on?

I also noticed that a metal pipe heading into the heat pump had ice on it. Yesterday, I noticed it was warm to the touch. After some research, I learned that heat pumps defrost themselves, sometimes as often as every 30-90 minutes or when ice is detected. I read an HVAC professional recommend turning on the A/C for a half-hour and and see if the heat pump starts to steam from defrosting. Then, if that doesn't do the trick, pouring warm water over it and into the casing to get rid of the snow and clearing the slush that fell underneath. So I tried all that.

No luck.

For several hours the heat pump was making no sounds at all. Then I thought I'd check the circuit breakers. Everything was fine. So I decided to flip the HVAC breakers anyway. After a few minutes I heard sounds coming from the heat pump. Not long after, the fan kicked on.

After clearing the rest of my driveway yesterday with a neighbor's snow blower, I came into the house and heard that the new forecast for today/tomorrow is 10-20 inches of snow. This round will really begin to cause problems. Houses in this area are not designed for this much snow. Rain gutters are a case in point. 

It will be interesting to see what kind of flooding comes out of this. The Shenandoah River has been high for quite a while after the 20 inches we received in December, followed a few weeks later by a lot of rain. This snow may just take it over its banks.

The Federal Government is closed for the second day. At $100 million per day, this will get very expensive. I can't imagine offices will open tomorrow.

Wow, 30+ inches of snow in this area sure does have a huge impact. My street has not been plowed yet. Half of it is untouched, while the other half is eight inches hard-packed snow from trucks making attempts at the road. Now getting rid of the hard-pack is really difficult, while a snow blower can handle the untouched parts.

I'll be borrowing my neighbor's snow blower today to get the rest of my driveway cleared before the next round of snow sleet arrives Tuesday/Wednesday.

Thankfully, shoveling snow for me is like running and hiking: very relaxing, repetitive, meditative.

I spent today working at Market Street Coffee in Purcellville to avoid getting stuck at the office with the oncoming snow. It turned into an extremely productive day. With colleagues and clients in hibernation, I was free to focus on figuring out how to best handle the new SF133 requirements from Treasury in Hyperion Financial Management (HFM). I can see how Treasury is able to generate the SF133 directly off FACTS II submissions since all the data elements are either on the bulk file or already in Treasury's records. It's a little trickier to perform the same report in a consolidation system, where you can see the same numbers, but from multiple angles.

I settled on tagging both entities and accounts with UserDefined fields set to differentiate "discretionary" and "mandatory." Since nearly all the discretionary/mandatory lines use the same accounts, I placed a calculated account on each one to reverse out the line's balance for the opposite case. So the mandatory account will zero out it's line when looking at a discretionary entity. The rule that will handle this turns out to be fairly simple. I was trying to avoid custom metadata for every line that would require tons of VB to maintain.

The second major snow storm is upon is. The first one dropped about 20 inches. This one is likely to top two feet. The last storm dropped light, fluffy snow that was fun to shovel. This storm is dropping heavy, wet snow. The last one did not cause any power outages. This one will probably be different. Both storms happened with barely freezing temperatures.

It's a good thing I like shoveling. It's a good thing I like making snowmen. It's a good thing I have plenty of sleeping bags.