It's Friday at 10:05 a.m. The phone rings. It's the mayor's secretary. "Mike, where are you? Everyone's up here waiting." Oh no! Panic! I've forgotten another one of the mayor's on-the-fly meetings to check on the status of my project. I have a choice to make. I can fess up and admit that I totally forgot about this meeting and endure that "look" from every one of the city's top brass. Or I can say nothing about the missing reports and embark on a demo with lots of guided imagery and "let's pretend that..." Or I can pull out that golden oldie: "We had a network outage right before I could print out the reports for everyone, but believe me; you guys are going to love where we've taken this thing."
Right in the midst of all this 90 mph thinking, I spot the trusty Post-it note that I scribbled on Monday afternoon when the mayor stuck his head in my office to spring this latest one on me. If only it hadn't become part of the decorum and merged into the yellow yonder of all my other Post-it notes. If only it had an alarm of some kind to signal that the time of the meeting was approaching. If only that alarm would sound each time I accessed the System i (or AS/400 or iSeries) no matter where I accessed it from. If only it would do this for my entire programming staff. If only we had Consult/400's Reminder software installed, I could have put a reminder that would do all these things into the system in about the same amount of time it took me to write that Post-it note. I could have easily reminded my staff and myself yesterday afternoon to get everything ready for this meeting that I'm currently late for. And just for good measure, I could have replicated that reminder with a few keystrokes to come to us again at 9:00 a.m. this morning, 9:30 a.m., and 9:45 a.m.
In fact, Consult/400's Reminder can be used for less-frantic situations as well. I can use it for adding to my to-do list in my message queue, for reminding me to pick up the proverbial bread and milk after work so that I won't have to endure that look from my wife, or even for reminding me to meet my wife for lunch so that I don't forget and have to endure a long, cold weekend.
Reminder can even be used to schedule broadcast messages to the entire user base. For example, when we decide at the beginning of the month that the 15th will be the day for a maintenance upgrade, I can immediately put broadcast reminders in the system that will be sent on the 12th, 13th, and 14th to notify users that the system will be unavailable on the 15th after 5:00 p.m.
Reminder is very feature-rich, with automatic cursor advancement, anticipatory value defaulting, cursor-sensitive prompting, cursor-sensitive online help, and automatic weekly and monthly reminder generation. It's now available for a free 30-day trial at www.consult400.us. The Readme file in the self extractor explains the few easy steps to get Reminder from your PC to your System i. Extension keys are available by contacting
It's 10:10. The phone rings again. "Tell them we're on our way." I think I've decided to go with the network outage.
Mike Midkiff is president and founder of Consult/400. Mike has a total of 24 years of programming experience on multiple platforms and started working with the AS/400 when is was released in 1988. He can be reached by phone at 304.638.0400 or by email at
Partner TechTip: Sometimes You Need a Reminder
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