Posts Tagged ‘sidework’

What a Pain

By Chief Oddball on July 29th, 2009 at 10:26 pm

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I thought I’d wrapped up all of my side jobs, but one came back to haunt me this week in the form of some changes that needed to be made to something I did a couple weeks ago. A whole lot of changes.

Actually, let’s just say that the client’s entire frigging site design is broken — and was from the get-go — and I must fix it. By the end of the week.

I’ve been trying to put in a couple hours on this job each evening this week, at least since Monday when I received the changes. I’ve made some progress, but not nearly as much as I expected given the nature of the changes. On any normal website, these tweaks — “fix gaps here,” “align these blocks there” — would have been fairly simple. But on this website, they’re not simple. Because the site was designed in ImageReady (yeah, that old Photoshop companion program before it was merged into Photoshop itself). And then cut up into ImageReady slices. And then saved automatically into HTML by ImageReady.

If you’re not a web designer, you won’t understand the significance of what I just said. Let me put it into layman’s terms: What I described was an old-fashioned way for inexperienced people to quickly throw a web page together. The problem was, the method resulted in a badly-coded web page that was assembled using the most inflexible HTML known to man, and which looked fine as long as you didn’t touch it, but which quickly went to hell in a handbasket once you started trying to fiddle around.

Worse, somebody started fiddling around before I was even brought on board with this project (yes, the design and its assembly have been done by someone else who remains unidentified). So what once probably looked like a very nice design on ImageReady’s canvas has already been rendered a jumbled, gap-filled mess. Now the client wants me to fix all these little things.

That’s hard enough on the face of it, but there are additional factors working against me, to wit:

  • I’m having to make all of my changes in a Remote Desktop session where I have access to only Notepad. (This is because the site has built-in ASP.NET dependencies that have stymied my efforts to get a local copy running on my machine.)
  • I don’t know what the original design looked like (in ImageReady) before it got sliced up, nor do I have access to the master files.

I’m rapidly discovering that this is going to take a lot more time than I’d hoped, to the point where I’ll likely need to spend Thursday and Friday evening, followed by all day Saturday, to meet the deadline. I am also starting to think that I should email the client tomorrow and let him know that the hours involved are going to result in what may be a bigger charge than he thought. This guy is usually very laid-back when it comes to money, however — being rather flush with it himself, as I understand — so that probably won’t be a concern, but I don’t want to drop a bomb on the guy.

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Trepidation

By Chief Oddball on July 1st, 2009 at 12:41 am

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A lot of stuff is going through my mind right now.

It was a strange day. The weather, ironically, was analogous to my mood: It started off cloudy with a few spurts of rain, then the sun came out. Soon, clouds moved in once again, only to vanish nearly as quickly as they had returned. Then, this evening, it poured rain not once, but twice, with an overcast period in between. Mother nature must have felt like she was being catapulted from one extreme to the other.

That’s about how I felt today, too.

For a start, I don’t think I slept that well last night — it was a slow beginning to the day, and one mostly executed in a haze, as my eyes felt perpetually tired (complete with an annoying muscle spasm in the left lower eyelid, in fact, which probably made me look like one of those twitchy-eyed anime characters). In the early afternoon, before lunch, I had an acupuncture appointment to keep. Fortunately, the weather decided to brighten up just then, and I decided to take the GTO.

After an invigorating drive to the clinic, I received some good news: My blood pressure was back to normal. When I first started acupuncture, the doctor checked my blood pressure and found it a little high. In retrospect, I’m chalking it up to the tremendous stress I had been under for the entire week preceding that check. Things have been going a lot better since this past weekend, and I think I was able to cool off a bit. I even think the tip of my tongue is a little less red than it’s been, although the doctor didn’t seem to agree. (According to Chinese medicine theory, the color of one’s tongue is indicative of the level of “fire” in your heart. If the tip of your tongue is too red, you suffer from too much stress and worry. Mine’s been pretty red lately.)

I felt pretty energized by the time I got home — not sure whether it was the acupuncture, the GTO driving, or both. Apple had made a nice chicken fricassee for lunch, which I enjoyed with a side salad and some black olives. I thought things were going to get better from that point on. Unfortunately, they got worse.

In addition to having continual problems working efficiently, I was treated to some disturbing developments in other aspects of my life which contributed to a general undermining of my Great Faith in the Universe™. I’m not going to detail any of those developments here, but what really kicked me out of my comfort zone was that some of them forced me to take a look at the way I do business, and how the roles I’ve assumed at my place of employment are affecting my overall skill set.

There really is no better way to describe my business acumen than “Jack of All Trades, Master of None.” Throughout my career, I’ve always worked for relatively small software shops — with my current place of employment being the smallest one yet. Now don’t get me wrong; I like these close-knit companies where everybody knows each other on not just a professional level, but a fairly casual level as well. When he still lived in the local area, I used to hang out and play video games with my boss (sometimes, at his specific request, in lieu of actually doing any work!). The trade-off comes when you realize that you have to assume so many duties at the company — “wear so many hats” is another way of putting it — that you wind up spreading your skills thin across an increasing number of specialties.

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One Insane Week

By Chief Oddball on June 21st, 2009 at 10:40 pm

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Only on rare occasions do I look forward to the dawn of a new Monday. However, I’m going to take the arrival of tomorrow morning as official closure on this week from hell that we just got done wrapping up. It was hell not only for me, but for essentially my entire family as well; partially for the same reasons, and partially for different reasons altogether. The end result for all involved, one way or another, was exhaustion. At least, I’m happy to say, this weekend got progressively better, finally ending on a high note.

It all begin at the beginning of last week, when I learned that my great uncle had passed away. I belong to a very small family, so the loss of even one of its members — particularly one as cherished as “Tex,” the only great uncle I ever had the opportunity to get to know — is always keenly felt. As hard to take as losing him was, the experience was nothing short of a nightmare for my mom, grandmother and the rest of Tex’s family, as his final days were a flurry of emergency medical response and hospital bureaucracy that put some of the worst aspects of the U.S. health care industry in the spotlight. In the end, though, the family can at least rest assured that Tex is now at peace, and no longer suffering the mind-robbing effects of Alzheimer’s Disease as he had been for the last several years.

I’m the only child of two only children, so that should tell you all you need to know about just how small my family is. Not having any actual aunts or uncles, it was my mom’s uncle Tex who filled that role for me, and we always had a great time together. As early as the mid-1980s, he and I would go out shopping at the record store and have lunch together at one of my favorite restaurants, where we would talk and laugh and snark about countless things — like that time at Bill Knapps in 1987 when the “Happy Birthday” song got stuck on an endless loop, and we giggled about it for the rest of the afternoon.

Visiting the video arcade at the former Wonderland Mall was another of my favorite “Uncle Tex” activities, and for my birthday one year, he gave me a suede leather pouch filled with quarters. I still have it. Although most of the quarters have been spent, I saved a few of the originals, whose dates indicate they were minted in the early ’80s.

Into the 1990s, I became enchanted with Tex’s stories of World War II, particularly the Battle of the Bulge and all the other lore he used to tell me about. Sometimes he would tell stories I’d heard before — like the tale of the briefcase-bomb assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler, since chronicled in the film Valkyrie — but I always listened with rapt attention, because they were always just as good the second or third time around. When my wife and I recently started watching the Band of Brothers miniseries on HBO, I found myself telling her further details about some of E Company’s actions — especially the tale of General McAuliffe’s famous “Nuts!” reply to the German call for his surrender, one of Tex’s favorite war stories. My wife finally asked me how I knew so much of this stuff, and I had to stop myself and realize that it was all because of my Uncle Tex, and the further reading that he inspired me to do on my own.

Like every member of my small family, Tex was an incredibly generous and caring person, someone whom you knew always had your back. It’s a different world now — almost every last one of the places we went or things we did no longer exist to be enjoyed by future generations — but I count myself extraordinarily lucky to have had the times with him that I did. Although they are times that won’t be repeated, neither will they be forgotten.

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Pulling Back the Veil

By Chief Oddball on November 24th, 2007 at 3:04 pm

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Happy belated Thanksgiving!

Alas, it seems I’ve left you all hanging. Again. Seems like just yesterday I was on here saying that “tomorrow or shortly thereafter” I’d be posting about some great, mystical revelation I’d had, but of course, a thundering silence was the sole result. I doubt I need tell you that work was the reason for last week’s hiatus. On the upside, it may have been the last work-related hiatus this site will see for a while.

Last time, I posted about getting neck-deep in the shit as soon as I got back home, quickly returning to my round-the-clock schedule of jobs, side jobs, friendly jobs, favor jobs, and hey-whatever jobs. I won’t get into the details, but I was also starting to get involved in a huge project for a guy who recently quit my day job under acrimonious circumstances. As this guy and the honchos at my day job started to get into a royal pissing match with each other, I found myself caught in the middle. Some real questions were raised, some concerns were brought up, and I didn’t know if I could even believe any of it — being that everything spoken by either side was shrouded in their own agendas.

In the end, I decided I’d had enough of this kind of crap. It looked like all of these various masters to whom I was answering would have me working 24/7 for the rest of my life if I would allow it, so I figured it was time to stop allowing it. And it’s here that I must thank my boss and mentor-type figure for giving me a real look inside the company for which I work on a daily basis, giving me a dose of unvarnished truth and allowing me to form my own evaluations.

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Welcome to Wednesday — It Blows.

By Chief Oddball on September 12th, 2007 at 11:49 am

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From the word go, this day has seemed determined to test my patience.

This morning we were awakened by the ungodly sound of some sort of strange sawing, thumping, hammering combination that seemed to be coming from all around us. In fact, it’s coming from our neighbors. We live in an attached townhome, but until now, the 6-inch poured concrete wall between our units has prevented us from hearing anything our neighbors have done. This morning, though, they appear to be engaged in some kind of whole-house renovation. There’s constant hammering to be heard in every room of our home, and a pick-up truck with a mobile workshop in a trailer is in their driveway, from which continuous grinding, circular-sawing or something is going on. According to the lettering on the trailer, they may be installing hardwood floors.

Meanwhile, my previous employer has started to really tax my patience, now that I’ve taken this side job with them. They want to get their huge new web portal (one large enough to be run by its own company) built and online with 90% of the proposed content by October 15th. Not only am I designing it from the ground up, but they have one engineer who’s going to write the entire content management engine from scratch. What blows me away is that these folks have been in the business of developing websites for longer than I have, and yet the CEO — who has always had a penchant for unrealistic deadlines — still just doesn’t get it. Either that, or — and this is the more likely — he deliberately sets deadlines that are beyond insane as a way of ensuring that everyone works at a manic pace for the entire duration of the project, which is a pretty shitty way to treat people in my estimation.

If that wasn’t bad enough, last weekend I spent approximately 14 hours developing a prototype of the site homepage, only to have them come back to me on Monday and say that they had decided to change the focus from a primarily fact-driven base of information (drug information, medical research, etc.), to a community-driven resource (forums, comments, etc). This, of course, completely shifts the weight of the various content and renders the homepage prototype useless.

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Trials and Tribulations

By Chief Oddball on September 5th, 2007 at 10:09 pm

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In retrospect, it all started last Wednesday. I was in a cerulean blue funk, feeling stuck in a predictable rut of work, and knowing that any real payoff for my efforts was still a distance away. My Xbox 360 was “in the shop,” if you’ll excuse the colloquialism, preventing me from unwinding with a good game of BioShock or even the light-hearted DOA Extreme 2. The Labor Day holiday — which I badly needed — was still several days away. Everything that wasn’t work related seemed to be in a “holding pattern.”

So last Wednesday, when I got the call from one of my former co-workers asking me to come into the office on Thursday to discuss a new project, my first, base inclination was to run away screaming. But in my dismal frame of mind, in which I wanted to accomplish absolutely nothing, I thought that perhaps the specter of a challenge — and a healthy monetary reward at its conclusion — was just the kind of kick-start I needed. So I agreed to the meeting, and journeyed to my former workplace last Thursday for a little “group think” about an interesting new web portal that’s in the works.

Since my previous employer wants to build up this portal, they wanted me to do the web design. This is exactly the kind of work I usually do for them, except this time it’s a Business-to-Consumer site, not B-to-B, the stakes are a lot higher and an appealing design matters a lot more. I have to create the identity of the site from ground zero, including a logo and a color scheme. I’m good at this, but I’m running ragged with two side jobs already on my plate, and this is not helping. Worse, I realize that it’s my own fault for taking this project (on a spur-of-the-moment hope that it would improve my outlook on life, I’m sorry to say), and I have no one to blame but myself if my schedule starts going by the wayside.

At Thursday’s meeting, I told them I wanted to have everything done by October, because that’s when I’m going up north and I don’t want anything to ruin the first (and possibly the last for the foreseeable future) road trip I’ll take to my home town in my “fun car.” Of course, everybody was happy with that — why shouldn’t they be? On my way out, I was handed an “Oh, by the way” assignment — a printed document template that I needed to design. It was very casually mentioned and seemed to be a real low priority.

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The Ever-Morphing Workload

By Chief Oddball on July 26th, 2007 at 6:05 pm

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Here I am, back at it — on Windows XP. I do love Acronis TrueImage — it’s the software that enabled me to save an exact copy of my entire 21 GB OS drive, then flawlessly restore it in one hour when I decided I was done being Vista’s whipping boy. As an extra special bonus, the restoration was done from an external USB hard drive — no messy DVD swapping. Also, I’d like to add that the “faster application startup times” advantage I mentioned having with Vista appears to have been a placebo effect. Once I got XP back on here, I noticed everything was starting up much faster than I remembered — and certainly faster than it did under Vista. Hmph.

Anyway, the subject of today’s post — made completely at random — is my ever-morphing workload. I recently wrote about the longtime client that wanted me to redesign his website, and then concocted a number of rather grandiose ideas about the project — user forums, mini web applications and soforth. Well, after writing up my very extensive estimate and explanation of conditions and considerations, he decided to pare things down significantly — several times — until now, all he wants is for me to put some new photos up on the same old, stale design he’s currently running.

Well, I’m not going to complain — whatever floats your boat there, dude. When people see the real-world costs of their grand plans, if they previously had no frame of reference as to that cost, it tends to dial them back a notch or two. Sticker shock, if you will. But I believe I said once in recent memory that I won’t be a charity case anymore — I’m no longer a college kid, and I’m done with that.

And hey, this means I get to actually relax this weekend, and maybe even the next eight or nine too, as opposed to working them all like I was otherwise gonna have to do. (It also means I get a lot less money — just having me add some photos won’t cost my client much — but in the endless time vs. money debate, I’ll take time…every time.)

Meanwhile, a recent gig for my former employer went off (almost) without a hitch this morning, despite their calling me yesterday and shaving a day off the timetable I’d given them. Originally I’d promised them their deliverables by Friday, but they informed me yesterday that their office won’t be open on Friday, and requested that I make it Thursday. Curiously, they weren’t open last Friday, either — are these guys working four-day weeks now? Anyway, I met their revised deadline, and to my pleasant surprise, they decided almost everything was perfect as-is. I just have to add a couple more banners, and make one particular image stand out with some kind of animation. Other than that, job done. This is good, because I’ve worked on it every night so far this week, and I’m tired of it.

Bonus gaming tidbit: In my leisure time, of which I haven’t had very much lately (I had to do that Windows XP restoration at 3 a.m. last night), I’m continuing to make rapid progress in Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition. I love this game. In fact, I love it so much that I think I’m seriously going to play through a second time, and unlock all the “Second Round” bonuses. I very rarely do things like that, but this game is just fraggin’ awesome! There’s also the “Separate Ways” chapter to play after I beat the main story, plus a couple of minigames that were also included in this edition. Best $30 I’ve spent yet on a game for the Wii, no doubt.

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Work & Play

By Chief Oddball on July 22nd, 2007 at 7:52 pm

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Since it’s been a long time since I posted anything of any substance here, and because I have some developments in both my work life leisure life to mention, I thought I’d divide today’s post into two parts: Work and Play.

Work

At my day job, things have been great for a while now. I’ve been working on a redesign of one of our websites (a huge ordeal) for a while now, but last week took some time out to create an email newsletter that we plan to distribute to people who have expressed interest (or purchased) one of our larger products. I spent three days on the design, development and preparation of the newsletter’s first issue, and everybody is very happy with it.

Our technical writer was given free reign to develop some content for the issue, and he created some great stuff that’s not at all like the usual, overly-salesy tripe that management normally forces him to churn out. In the past, I’ve pointed out that a newsletter should not be used as an excuse to spam people with advertising about your products, and this time it looks like we’ve learned our lesson. I’m interested to see what the response will be when we send it out in early August.

On the side job front, I’ve scaled my client list way back, to the point where I may soon only have one regular client left. Mostly, this is because I decided to be honest with myself — I don’t really like doing side jobs, nor do I need to do very much on the side to keep things running smoothly. Following the advice of (ironically) one of my past clients, I’ve decided to “be the bad guy up-front” with most of these folks and get tough about what it is I’m willing to do, and for what price. In other words, no more accepting humongous, open-ended projects with massive scope creep.

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One Of Those Days

By Chief Oddball on May 4th, 2007 at 9:53 pm

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Today was one of those days — where if somebody were to show up with a sunny smile on their face and say, “Hello!” the first thing I’d be inclined to do is tell them to stow that happy somewhere physiologically unpleasant. Maddeningly, I can’t even give you a good reason why I’m in this craptacular mood. It’s not like I just suffered some permanently debilitating injury, or had my life turned upside-down in some other particularly poignant way. I can take a few stabs at it, though — I’m sure I can come up with a few reasons. Just not good ones, mind.

It isn’t helping that I encountered yet another Flash issue (YAFI) today while working on my yet another Flash project (YAFP) du jour. To oversimplify it, I have to create some banner ads in Flash that employ an interesting interactive twist. Much to my relief, at the beginning of the week, I ran some tests and discovered that the interactive idea for this project was actually going to be easy to implement. With that behind me, I figured it’d just be a simple matter of creating a Flash project that preloads an image, displays some nifty little animations and takes you to our website when you click on it.

Well, I should have known better than to use the word “simple” when discussing a Flash project. The preloader doesn’t work, an impediment for which there is no excuse, considering it’s the exact same preloader I wrote for my last Flash project (wherein it worked fine). The image, also, isn’t loading now, even though it loaded perfectly during my brief test earlier in the week. Oh, and the button you click on to go to our website? It won’t go there. Despite my following every tutorial on the web, which all told me to do the same thing, which never worked no matter how many times I tried it.

I’m quickly starting to consider Flash to be the DotNetNuke of the design world. DotNetNuke is a content management system that we use at my work, and while it’s great if you’re web-stupid and just want to quickly and easily throw up a decent website, the instant you want to go “above and beyond” in any way, you become mired in a stinking, fetid pool of euthanasia-inspiring development hell. Similarly, Flash provides an avenue by which you can create some truly inspiring things, then murders your will to do anything at all with its myriad of bugs, idiosyncrasies and other infuriating issues that all conspire to hamper, maddeningly, the most inane of its functions. Which is why I believe sincerely that regardless of how good I might become at developing in Flash, I’m never going to like it.

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