Two stories that caught my eye:

• Faced with global fininancial meltdown, the Courier Mail turns to the manager of Fridays nightclub, a local drinking spot popular amongst those who work in the financial district of Brisbane City, for expert analysis.
• An article where a heroic London-based Australian readies his Alan Border memorial cricket bat to protect his family from the threat of violent looters, inferring that taking up arms with any other weapon is ‘unAustralian’.

Oh, the hilarity!

Richard Ashcroft

Richard Ashcroft – C’mon People (We’re Making It Now) from Alone With Everyone (2000)

Ha, this seems weird to me now but I used to date a girl who was obsessed with all those Smash Hits compilations and all those cds filled with songs by Backstreet Boys and NSYNC.

She had one in her car, I can’t recall it’s exact volume, but I remember that this Richard Ashcroft song was on it and it was the only one I could bear listening to. Strangely now, this song reminds me of her.

And now that I listen to it, I realise it’s quite terrible.

I’m sorry, I’ve been busy. Anyway, I’ve finally gotten around to putting something up of use. The UN Internship FAQ. People kept commenting on my blog entries or sending me private message asking questions so I collated their questions and added in a few relevant notes to help people out. You can read the FAQ here.

I have been keeping my publications up to date which you can see here. I’ve also updated my ‘about me’ page for all you identity thieves out there.

“So i walk outside today to notice dad down on his hands and knees acid washing the tiles around the house, wearing a blue-mesh headpiece similar to what I’ve seen a few days earlier lying about the kitchen used to protect the collected mangoes from bruising – only to find that the bag really was one of the bags used to collect the mangoes.”

Oh, but it gets better.

“Dad then began to get up off his feet for me then to notice him wearing a white shirt with the disfigured face of David Hasslehoff on the front. He turned around, revealing the the back of the shirt which was adorned with the phrase ‘BRING BACK THE HOFF’ in giant letters. Ahhh the life of dear old Toshy boy.”

To clarify, this shirt was actually a shirt that I had owned for a charity fun run a few years back, that I thought I had thrown out. I think Dad may have gone lurking in the the bin for this gem.

Not quite the shirt worn by my father, but you get the idea

To be honest, I suspect he might do it on purpose occasionally, but man, I had to share this one with the world.

Often on Access forms you’ll use a textbox control. Usually, unless you delete them, the textbox control comes with an associated label control. Lets call my example “txtGenericTextBox” with a label called “lblGenericTextBoxLabel” with the string “THIS IS A LABEL” in the caption property of the label.

Now, what if you want to get certain values of that label in your VBA code? For instance, lets write the caption of the textbox label to the screen. Easy-peasy!

MsgBox Me.txtGenericTextBox.Controls(0).Caption

This will display the caption of a label associated with txtGenericTextBox. As such, you can access a host of individual attributes of the textbox’s label using similar methods.

How is this useful? Well, in my case, I’m developing some field validation for a data entry form for a beforeUpdate event. I’m looping through all the controls on a form that have the word “Required” in their TAG property. An example of similar code is shown over at DatabaseDev.co.uk (article link here).

But I want nice ‘user friendly’ error messages. I don’t want the user seeing ‘you haven’t entered proper data in the field txtGenericData’ – I want it to use the nice clean label caption which reads much better.

There may be many more easier ways to do what I’m doing, but this seems pretty straightforward. Hopefully it is of some assistance.