Thirteen business days to go, and the company still doesn’t have a replacement for me. In fact, we don’t even have any promising candidates — the most hopeful one got shot down by our CEO, and the second canceled her interview.
May 2005 Archives
I’m no expert on poisons, but when I see the following statements on the same bottle, I have to scratch my head:
- Non-Toxic
- DANGER: Harmful or fatal if swallowed.
If this makes sense to you, could you let me know how, please?
This message was in my inbox today at work:
Steve,
On Friday afternoon I tried to add a new contract under [name removed] account and it would not work. Can you let me know when this is fixed.
Other than the signature, this was the whole message. There was no indication of how I might reproduce the problem, and there wasn’t even any indication of what the problem might have been.
Sigh. I still haven’t been able to convince people that it’s really helpful to include the error message when they’re reporting a problem. I could go through the logs, but even then I have about a five hour period to look through, assuming that she wasn’t wrong and it was in fact Thursday, or something like that.
So, off goes a message asking for more information. No hardship there, but I’m still amused by people’s perceptions of how computers (and programmers) work. Really, they’re not magic boxes, and we’re not magicians. It’s all logic.
In case you’ve been wondering why I haven’t quite been on top of E-Mail this week, here’s how my schedule looked today — the rest of the week has been fairly similar, though the days have thankfully started later:
3:40am Wake up, shower.
4:30am Leave to bring Christine to Manchester Airport for a 7am flight.
7:45am Get back from Manchester, go directly to Mid-Vermont Christian School for chapel (I was running sound for a visiting choir there).
9:15am Finish chapel, start setting up for the elementary school concert tonight.
11:00am Done setting up, go home, get a prayer letter preview up, and look into prices for a Whirlwind EC-SPEC cable (rugged network cable for my sound system, which I’ll write about soon — neat stuff!).
11:30am Go to sleep (I didn’t exactly go to bed early last night).
3:15pm Wake up (told you).
3:20pm Check phone messages, including one which has a price for the cable I’d looked into a few hours back. (I repeat my assertion that Whirlwind cables are ridiculously expensive, although I think it’s actually the connectors that add most of the cost.) Make a few phone calls to see if I can find a better price.
3:40pm Work on prayer letter queue. It’s backed up more than I’d like, but I don’t think I’ll be able to clear it until tomorrow.
4:15pm Received a phone call from a vendor with a better price for the Whirlwind cable. Ordered it. Back to work on prayer letters.
5:10pm Bring three boxes of letters to the post office (the cut-off is at 5:30pm, not 5:00pm, if you’re wondering).
5:15pm Stop by McDonalds Drive-Thru on my way back to Mid-Vermont Christian School (I figure I need at least one meal that isn’t Dunkin Donuts today, and while McDonalds wouldn’t have been my first choice, it was the fastest, and on the way, and will help make me look forward to meals at home tomorrow).
5:30pm Arrive at Mid-Vermont, make some changes to the stage setup, and make sure the signal path is solid.
7:00pm Showtime. The theme was an old-time gospel radio show, which worked well (nearly all of the kids were excited about wearing jeans as part of their costumes!). It was very cute (if a mental stretch) to see pre-kindergarten and kindergarteners singing “Give me that old time religion cause it’s good enough for me”. :-)
8:30pm Show’s over. Start cleaning up.
9:40pm Finish cleaning up, go get gas for the car, then head home.
10:05pm Check phone messages (someone left a blank message), play with cat, get a drink (orange juice). Look at E-Mails. New prayer letter customer! Write a quick message home, then this journal entry.
11:35pm Go to bed. :-)
Two milestones:
Christine was able to create a web site last night with very little coaching from me, and there didn’t seem to be any frustration involved. (She’s almost as demanding regarding usability as I am, so either she was keeping quiet so as to not upset me, or it’s actually starting to take shape.)
I’ve just given a paying customer the keys to his web site. He knows it’s beta quality as of yet, but he’s also getting a whole let of personal customer support from the developer, so that counts for something.
My main goals at this point are (in no particular order):
Beef up the tests, so that I’m finding the problems instead of my customers.
Get some documentation up at Technically Sound, particularly regarding the templates and style sheets.
Get a calendar module working. I have the Reflection 1 version, but need to make it work on Reflection 2.
Get comments working in the blog module.
Test coverage is up to 45.9%. Six modules are completely covered, and two others used to be, but dropped when I added a few new features that don’t have tests yet (no, I’m not a good XP programmer).
This has to be the best one I’ve ever seen:
I think I’ll do better if today ends up being a ‘personal day’ for me. My nightmares about JDBC and tomcat context ReferenceLinks to JNDI objects have left me too weak kneed to show myself at the office.
