When life gets really hectic and you feel swamped with things to do, it’s always amazing to think of people with ridiculous hobbies. I know that no matter how busy I am, there’s always someone building a ship in a bottle or a replica of the Golden Gate Bridge with toothpicks.

A guy in Wisconsin has carved a replica of Mount Rushmore in cheddar. BBC has a story here.

Best quote from the article: “It’s amazing where the power of cheese has taken me over the years.”

The power of cheese! I always knew there was something there.

I was amazed by this waste of resource until I read that he had actually been commissioned to carve the block by a cracker company (looks like Cheez-It from the picture). My opinion of this guy changed. He’s probably the world leader of cheese carvers. If you need a cheese sculpture, he’s your man.

I once worked with a guy who was an expert on one particular obscure investment banking trading system. I was amazed that this one application was all he was interested in. I asked why he didn’t get into web development or .net to diversify his skill portfolio. He didn’t need to. The amount of money he was paid to work on his system dwarfed by daily rate considerably. He was highly paid because he was unique. He was probably one of a few dozen people who could do what he did and I’m sure he looked at me with my popular skillset as being crazy for not finding something obscure. He could be the best in the world at the one system he works on.

Troy Landwehr, the cheese carving artist, has found a unique niche. He’s probably the best in the world (I would think). I’m sure he would never trade that for a 9-to-5 job.

The other day, I was asked a question I get asked on a lot of contacts: “How’s your Microsoft Access?” Then, with excitement, “we figure that you can knock up an Access application in just a few days compared with the weeks it will take for the other system.”

Another question I get asked on contracts is “We have an Access application that is in terrible shape. Can you help us create a SQL Server application based on it?”

I’ve moved away from Access for so many years now (“but they keep pulling me back in!”), but the VBA is still in my head. I may not be able to tell you the difference between Access 2002 and Access 2003, but I can code it just fine.

I’ve seen a lot of very big projects with Access at their core and I’ve seen a lot of very small projects where a developer insists on a full transactional Oracle solution. Access has its place, but there is a fine line to be observed.

The problem with Access is its apparent simplicity. When a project manager or a business user can slap together some forms and call it an application, they assume they can hand it to a developer and he will do the same thing as they did, but faster. A developer, however, will think about transactions, when the data is written to tables, how to control auditing and authentication, etc. In the end, you get an elaborate Access database application, but it may have been quicker to write it in C# or some other managed code.

The simplicity is also a problem because anyone can build an Access form. On 4 different contracts, I’ve been faced with a situation where a business user (and closet developer) “built” an access database which is now used by an entire company and can no longer take the strain. Since the database is usually not as normalised as it should be, it needs to be re-written on a more robust platform. I’ve done this a lot. And it always takes longer than it did to build the original Access database.

Access is a good tool. I know developers who would never ever touch it?even though haven’t explored everything it can do. Ask them to produce a one-user application, they’ll start designing SQL Server schemas and n-tier plans. I also know a developer who knows Access and VBA backwards and forwards but will not admit it when he’s in a contract.

As a report-writer and very generic application creator, Access is a very useful tool. For a seasoned developer, it’s definitely a step down.

We’ll see if I need to create another one this week.

I’ve done some PHP projects in the past for a few clients and found it to be a pretty good language and very powerful. I used an application called HTML-Kit?which I think is pretty popular among PHP developers. It has no auto-complete or anything, but it worked better than notepad.

Now I’m all .Net and Visual Studio. Most hard-core Microsoft people I’ve worked with would never dream of touching php. “ASP is better, so why should I even bother trying PHP?” I expect PHP coders have the opposite argument.

However, I found a product that will let you code PHP in Visual Studio call VS.PHP. You can find the link here:

http://www.jcxsoftware.com/jcx/vsphp/home

I’m going to have to have a look at this.