You're going to run into a lot of problems if you change the modeling in that way.

Good point! I wish I'd thought of that when I was getting in his face. A coworker of mine whose name is lastname firstname someothername and who goes by a dim of firstname sure had a huge problem getting her ID card and other paperwork making any sense.

Well, age depends on both the current date and the date of birth. i.e. it will become more error-full as time goes on.

Also, from a database design standpoint you'd want first and last names in separate fields, just to avoid problems of trying to parse them into separate fields down the road. Is that similar to what he's getting at?

Yip. I go by my second name, and I took to filling out forms as if that were my first name, because otherwise everybody calls me "Ann". (I moved my maiden name up into the middle spot.)

My company has tons of people whose name is Chan Wu, but everybody calls them Charlie. Not to mention all the Indian developers who say "My name is Lotsasyllables Sudhar , but you can't pronounce Lotsasyllables, so call me Sudhar."

His point about the age was that it wasn't unique enough. There's no such thing as unique enough! DoB is more rarely duplicated, but it still will be. So no primary keyness there.

from a database design standpoint you'd want first and last names in separate fields

Absolutely. But this is just an object model -- its relationship to the actual storage is outside of the scope of the class. We're just going as far as conceptual design.

The idea of shifting something to make it "more unique" without making it actually unique is odd, especially under the guise of furthering abstraction.

OH, he thinks the DOB is a unique identifier? He is on teh crack.

There's a REASON most databases let you generate unique IDs. They're really rare in the domain space, and NO, SSN isn't.

If I have my Tivo connected to the cable box and tv, but not to either a phone line or a broadband connection for a few weeks, what happens?

You won't get program schedule updates, so you'll have to set things to record manually.

The Tivo won't be able to pull program data for subsequent weeks, hence no scheduled recording like SPs or wishlists, IIRC. If you go into your settings and look at the system information, it will let you know how far your guide data goes.

Thanks. I won't have time to get what I need to connect to broadband (and then figure out how to do it) for a few weeks, and the phone option is not a good one because of the set up here.

Perkins, what I did until I got the wireless adapter was to run an extra long (phone first, then network) cord over to the TiVo and force a manual update once a day.