yesterday I was laid off

so now I join the ranks of those without a corporate sponsor, the wretched masses yearning to breathe free in an air-conditioned cubicle. It's weird, when I had gainful employment, I felt bad for those who I expected would soon try to hit me up for a job. Now that I am one of the very same in-between jobs, I'm going to take this crisis-opportunity to build up my online references, so that when the economy does turn people will know me for something useful and, Lord willing, employable. One way to do this is to focus on what I do best. I have lots of experience using (installing, testing and submitting bugs for) statistical analysis software.

The following is my own personal take on installing SAS® 9.1.3 Service Pack 4 on Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium. Apparently, as of today's date, June 25, 2009, there is no published solution on the web about how to get these two working together. SAS effectively tells you that it's impossible:

SAS does NOT support Windows Vista 32-bit Home Editions: 
Premium         
Basic 
Reference: http://support.sas.com/techsup/pcn/vista.html

but, as No Limit Soldier Master P says, I got the hook-up !

For those who haven't even installed SAS 9.1.3 yet, follow this guide:

http://www.cropsci.illinois.edu/csmyth/documents/InstallingSAS91.htm

Of course, along with the SAS software you will also need a SAS license in text file format. Fortunately for me, this was provided by my educational institution, though the license you have may be out-of-date (for me, the license expired in 2008), in which case you'll see the following error:

The current date is past the final expiration date

Reference: http://support.sas.com/kb/17/635.html

SAS addresses this in their documentation; you simply need to "Renew SAS Software", which is a program that comes with the freshly installed SAS on your computer. Unfortunately, like yours truly, you are one of the losers running a version of Vista that isn't supported by SAS 9.1.x. What to do ? At this point you'd see the following error (or something like it):

Error: Update lock is not available, lock held by another process

First, you'd think that the words "Home Premium" in Windows Vista meant you didn't have to see or deal with B.S. like SAS not being supported. Then you turn that loser frown upside down - while thanking your lucky stars I was given the pink slip ("walking papers" as I like to call it) by my employer yesterday - because you can make everything right with the following procedure:

1. right-click on "Renew SAS Software"
2. select "Run as administrator"

For me, that seemed to be the piece I was missing.

This first blog post is dedicated to my friends Raymond Barglow and Janet Somers, my brother-in-law Brian Moffat, and in memory of all those recently unemployed or looking for work. Congratulations to my friend JJ Behrens on recently getting hired. On a sad note, my heart goes out to the memory of Michael Jackson, who died before I could publish this blog post, and whose much anticipated comeback will not be.