Oddball Update

Well, the “merge two websites” task at work turned into quite an affair; I think all involved (read: my bosses) are beginning to see that it is not a simple “Ah, throw it up there and it’ll be done in a week or so.” Especially since they all seem so hell-bent on nitpicking absolutely everything about each page I prototype, from whether it’s good form to have any content next to a header image, to whether a particular stock photo of businesspeople should be replaced because the persons depicted don’t have big smiles on their faces. Mind you, I tend to agree with, or at least see the merit in, most of these points. It’s just ironic because such granular review is incompatible with a rushed timetable, and which is the more important seems to have been decided for us. We all want a really professional grade site, so we’re taking the time to do it right.

Of course, this means I’m going to be rather tapped out for even longer than I thought…actually, I’m not currently able to predict whatsoever when all of this might be wrapped up, since there is such a gigantic variable in how much nitpicking and subsequent revision is going to be attached to each page I create. But I’d bet on another two weeks at least. As such I’m not exactly killing myself to work from 9 am to 1 am every day because it’s just insane; that volume of work is fine for a while, but for weeks at a time? There’s no point in running yourself so ragged that you can’t do your job effectively. I’m still going to be working Saturday and Sunday and putting in some extra hours each day for the forseeable future, but I’m not going to continue these 15-16 hour days one after the other like I’ve done this week. I was doing that in an attempt to wrap everything up as quickly as possible, but the rapid enlargement of the project’s scope over the last 48 hours — combined with the mandatory “review and revise” checkpoints — has basically put a choke-hold on the velocity of the project no matter what I do. Thus, I might as well scale back to a more sustainable level. Everybody seems happy with what I am doing so far, so I’d like to be able to continue that level of work without imploding.

In other news, during a teleconference this morning my D-Link DI-624 router rebooted, kicking me off the GoToMeeting (where I was the presenter), the VOIP phone conversation and the instant message service where we were having our confab. This isn’t new; the piece of crap device does this once or twice a day at random intervals, and D-Link says it’s actually “by design” to prevent the unit from overheating. All I have to say is, if it overheats this often, even after I have turned down the wireless transmit power from factory settings, its engineering isn’t worth wiping your dog’s butt with, so in the trash it goes. (Well, in the closet — no sense throwing away something you might be able to use as a stopgap or a wired-only router one day.) I’m picking up a new Linksys WRT54G or 54GS this evening. And my advice to you? Stay the hell away from D-Link networking products.

I also had a lunch meeting on Thursday with the Gulfstream group, who are happy with the site except for some minor changes (yes, they literally are minor). I’m going to be securing hosting for them, so I guess we’ll be billing for hosting charges — I’d like to think in annual increments, since I don’t want to have to keep track of that every month. I’m also going to be invoicing them soon, so some money will be rolling in to me and my crew.

Lately, while working, I’ve been playing back the old cassette tapes I digitized over the past several months. Basically just loaded the whole shebang into Winamp and turned “shuffle” on. Where I can ascertain the date on which I recorded a certain cassette, I’ve entered that info into the ID3 tag of the file, so I can sorta arrange all of my tapes chronologically to a point. Lately I’ve even been cross-referencing my old Oddball Updates from the nineties to figure out when stuff was recorded. In several cases, although I didn’t mention the date on the tape itself, I wrote an Oddball Update later that day about having made the recording. Ha, pretty good sleuthing there. On one tape, I had guessed that it was recorded in 1997 and found that I was actually an entire year off; it was 1996 instead. Is that particularly fascinating to you? Not really, but to me it is.

That’s all for now.

Categorized as Life, Randomness