I neglect my content, I get a life, I crunch my car, and all within the past week or so. Of course, this also means I haven't written a single thing. I am supposed to be up for work in 6 hours or so, more likely 5 when I finish this entry. Speaking of work, things have been going well. There have been all sorts of issues lately, most of them caused by things that happened long before I got on board the team. The way things work on a large project like this are interesting, and I'm not entirely used to them. So far, it feels like most of the mission critical decisions are made in very high upper-echelons of management, the trickle down effect hitting the team full force days later. So far, it seems the one pressing and redundant hangup is also the one outsourced component. I don't get how outsourcing works, or if it even does. My second outsource experience in the realm of academics hasn't been much better.
Over the past several weeks, my project team for the usability class has been fighting every inch of the way with bug testing an alpha product that the development group claims is beta. There have been major code revisions since we started on the project, and the taxonomy has been a nightmare from wherever the really bad nightmares come from. You know, the ones involving cheese wheels. Anyway, we have been using the Mantis Bugtracker for all our reporting needs. It may be because I have used tracking software like this before (source forge, etc) but it doesn't seem too hard to use. Developers, Reporters, Updaters... New bugs, Assigned Bugs, Resolved Bugs... however, as opposed to the original taxonomy used in Mantis (And in their documentation) the terms have been reorganized into a bizarre mockery of tracking management. When this is all done, I really will look back on the bug reports and our conference folder for email collaboration and laugh. For a select special few, I may even post a few documents. On the plus side, we have finally convinced them that Macs are an important part of the testing process (especially for an educational environment). I still have much to discuss about the notion of clearing the cache every time in order to insure the images for the games load properly from scenario to scenario. I talked with John about a lot of it today, which made me feel much better. I think he sees our team's morale slowly wasting away into nothingness. Most of us really do want to care, but just can't anymore. We aren't getting paid for this work, but we also don't want to do just the minimum to complete the class either. We do want the project to succeed, though I get more and more weary of that goal each time I see a silly bugnote or email.
Speaking of goals, my new goal is to not crash my car. I had a small run-in with a Land Rover on Monday, kicking off this week of ups and downs. It put a nice dent in the rear passenger fender of my car. His car was perfectly fine, which since I am the one who did the crunching is probably a good thing. Amanda, however, was very kind and introduced me to her friend Jen's husband Tony who helped me remove most of the dent from my car. You can still see a small ripple in the panel, but only in the right light at the right angle. Apparently, it is a side effect of the metal being slightly stretched. However, the silver lining to this is that no paint came off, most of the dent came out, and I don't need to pay a body shop a houjillion dollars just to make Kyo (my car) look good again.
Life lately has been capstone, and it seems to be there is little chance of reprieve for that yet. This is very bad, since there are only 60-some days before it needs to be completed. I have solved the adding / editing problem for now, in an attempt to reduce the amount of coding I actually have to do. Once I have that done for projects and tasks, I can debug, test, and possibly work on the initial steps of coding the jGrpah module for Gantt Chart support. However, that is not a full requirement for the project, just an added bonus.
If I can talk some poor, hapless people into it, I should be able to get some guest blogs going while I am swamped with trying to make myself graduate. If it isn't me posting, you'll know it.
In response to "Holy Catchups, Batman!":