Week 9

Week 9, the week i win blog of the week. That's right i am going to be very bloggalitious. The way to win blog of the week is very complex and is done in a democratic way, and as we know the people don't always chose the right winner, ie: George W. Bush. So I appeal to all blog reading judges to assess my blog on its merits and also just give me blog of the week because i will ask you so nicely...

Please award me blog of the week!

If i lose i'm not going to be able to deal with myself, because this is something that i set my mind to do at the very start of semester. I will be completely distraught if i do not win this week. It won't be losing by it won't be winning either. There are many ways to get blog of the week; hard work (blogging really well every week), sudden extremely good blog (me) and sympathy (you write a blog about a really sad thing that happened to you). I think only the first should be awarded, but still... i want to win lol. It's not like i've blogged badly all year, and i have blogs for every week so far including the non-teaching week. None were too brief, i think all of them were on topic and to the point.

Furthermore, i put in paragraphs to make it easier to read. I don't make awful amounts of spelling and grammatical mistakes (thanks to Firefox dictionary), i hope, it should be a joy to read my blog. I wonder if anyone even will read this if it isn't very long. I mean the length is going to be the first thing that the managers see, and if it is short it wouldn't matter how powerful the content Jake would probably go to another blog and make sure he is protected against rick rolls.


Anyways i should probably talk about IE. This week is my week! I am the manger of the project, amazingly know as the Acting Project Manager as Pokey is away for the week with his beloved girlfriend and possibly fiance Mel who by all accounts is great and they decided to go have a romantic weekend in some mountain range that's near the poke's residence. All the best to them. I get the power over the masses this week, and boy how i'm not going to use it. I'm planning on just being a caretaker, not do anything dramatic and just make sure the ship is pointing in the right direction, not ordering a new ship and sailing it through the Suez canal on a stormy night.

We had a client meeting on Monday and as per usual we went for 2 hours plus plus. We had to change rooms again which is becoming a pain in the bung whole to tell you the truth. The lollies there are pretty good, and tim tams, oh yeah and the orange juice. I'm so glad they have them because without them i would struggle to concentrate for the full 2 plus hours. We had Hazel come in so that we could try and streamline the timesheet process but making sure that we don't leave anything out of the system. Thank god we did this, we have brought all those timsheets down to about 3 timesheets and a few claim forms.

A problem with the client meeting was Gerald, he was a senile old man who seems to have no idea about what we are trying to do with the system and he just seemed to disagree with things that Hazel and David were saying that were actually right. He also was talking over other people and staring at a member of our group so that they had to pay attention to him, it was really quite frustrating when he was doing it. He wasn't even invited, he just showed up and sat down and started talking. I think he was mainly there for the tim tams, considering that Hazel and David had commented on that and then Gerald said "Where are the tim tams?" about three times. He was really getting in the way of the progress of the meeting.

Hazel was really helpful, she seems to be a big fan of computers. She commented that she loves the idea that uses cannot screw up the calculations for hours and other stuff. We went through the proposed new system inputs for the 3 new timsheet templates and what fields needed to be included in the system and how the system would then process the fields. I know it is pretty late to still be doing analysis but I think due to the complexities of the system that time is needed and finally we are really getting somewhere in the meetings.

I find it very good that Alex leads the meeting instead of the project manager. She does a really good job and can really hold the client's attention, I'm not saying that I cannot, but i think it's easier if the person who is taking notes and is in change of communicating with the client primarily is the one to head the meeting. Also, it's useful that she clarifies points so as to make better notes and better minutes, especially without the recording that pokey normally provides for us.

I think we have a pretty good understanding of the system now and are in a good place to do the functional req. spec. but i think there are a few issues remaining that I think we need to iron out with the client and that will be done in the next scheduled meeting on monday. Where pokey will be back to knock me off my pedestal as Acting Project Manager. I really like how that looks in caps. it really looks powerful and offical, like Brigadier General or Chief Executive Officer.

I'm really enjoying this project as it is so hands on and real. I'm really growing to like the client now and the people who represent them in our meetings.

I have the job now to do a huge amounts of use case descriptions and diagrams, fun fun fun. i'm doing all the ones where the actor is admin. eek, so many to do. I think i should be done by the end of the weekend, i think we might have to meet sunday night or monday early morning to iron some stuff out though. That might be hard because pokey is going to be snowed under work when he gets back, which is understandable.

We are having problems with time management and especially with PASE, the program we use to record when we work on IE. Some team members are very behind in their logging of their time they are spending doing IE. The number of hours we are spending on this unit are huge I think I get close to doing the actual 12 hours a week thing in this unit which is really hard when i am doing 3 other units and working part time as well. I also have a social life (kinda) and an obsession with football and melbourne fc which needs to be quenched every weekend. I really wish sometimes that i didn't make supercoach, it's always waiting there for me to look at. I also curse facebook and to a lesser extend digg and news.google cos they are the main things i waste my time on. Imagine if i wasted my time actually working on stuff. that would be insane.

This blog is getting on a bit, i'm really pretty impressed with myself, i'm not even nearly running out of material yet.

I am actually annoyed at this use case thing. I made a template for the use cases and asked V if it was okay, then sent an email out to all my teammates telling them that i made it and attached the template to the email. I then proceeded to make some use case descriptions and then a day latter everyone gets back to me telling me that the template could be better and what they said that could be better was something that i asked V if it needed to be like that and that was the System and actor columns in the normal flow of events segment of the use case description table. It's going to be really annoying to go back and change the use cases I have done and replace it with the revised template that is still yet to be fully agreed upon.

I think that I am going to have a busy weekend this weekend, and next weekend for that matter. Systems integration is due week 12, enterprise prog every week and an end of year assignment too and i have to do a presentation in strategy and management, which will most definitely be a joy as I am doing it with this wanker I know, i can't remember his name correctly... it's something like curry, no... maybe it's tarri... no... varri, no.... oh yeah Varun Wijewoowoo.

I got forwarding to work in strikesolutions email to all the team members besides pokey because he uses outlook to check that email anyways and forward it to everyone in outlook. This process is now done by gmail, which is much faster, more efficient and saves pokey having to log in to his outlook for us to get strikesolutions email, now it should be instantaneous.

The team wiki is going really well, the team all know how to use it and we regularly use it to upload files that are relevant to the whole group. It's really useful really, the only problem is that the url is pretty long. if i make a link to it i'm sure that jake will think it is a rick roll. I actually want to attempt to rick roll jake again, but i'm afraid if i don't succeed i'll just get pod instead and everyone knows that's easy.

I should probably put some pictures in here, otherwise this is just going to look like text and text and nothing but the text so help me god.

That reminds me of the lecture this week, "The key, the whole key, and nothing but the key, so help me Codd." - Janet. The lecture was pretty entertaining, especially her throws in to the crowd with mintiest. I do wish that her animation/video did work, she seemed so disappointed when it did not work.

Jake commented on my crushed shirt during managers meeting... it wasn't even that crushed and i was going to be wearing a jacket the whole time. And POD was complaining about my button down collar not being buttoned down.

Week 8

This week was really challenging because there was a lot of other work that needed to be done as well as two client meetings. I attended the first client meeting and we spent most of the meeting going through the time sheets took about twenty million hours.

Unfortunately, i was unable to complete my java work cos i'm shit. V is so much better than me, even though i keep telling him he isn't. I'm about to get up and go get him a lemonade. Be back soon...

Obviously V is hijacking my blog. He was trying to convince me to go get him a lemonade from the caulfield plaza. The problem with that plan is that the machine is probably empty. This plan is further flawed by the fact i cannot be bothered to go get lemonade. Disappointing some might claim, i say, logical and lazy.

Back to IE then. Other work is getting the better of me some of the time. i am slightly struggling with the work load and get to grips with this heavily complicated system that they want us to implement.

We are trying to get them to simplify their time sheet system, but they are full of disagreements and hot air. That's really the only other thing, other than the other work we are doing that is stopping us from making progress on this.

Week 7

hey there blog world.

Client meeting today. I look so effing good. owww raaiight.

We handed in standards and governance again instead of handing in business case, lol. That was definitely pokey's fault man, such a wanker project manager that guy lol.

Apparently i am not fit to be deputy project manager, there has been a coup! Apparently alex is more well suited to the job as client liaison. This is actually relevant because pokey is going away. I feel a little less valued within the group after this display of affection.

The client meeting was very informative, but i'm not all that sure that is was that productive. We still can't really decide what we want to do with the system. we want to do what the client wants and we also want to do what is the right solution IT-wise. Jake is really pushing for us to do this proper system with full on digital signatures. Pretty interesting place that able head office, with carers there as well. It really made me feel that this actually was a charity and that what we are doing could in some way help these people.

Luke pocock is the best. We had a skype meeting he was there first one there. We lead the meeting very well, as well. Vish had technical issues and was using a mobile held up to pockey's mic and speakers for half the time. Was a pretty good meeting but it was hard to try and get points across well because of the problems of not having face to face contact for meetings, but all in all i think it went well. V, alex and I were at mine to do the meeting, to A) save bandwidth and B) because i had a good mic and speakers setup and they only had headsets.

We are meeting on sunday night to have a nice good old thrash out on this stuff before the client meeting on monday, which i am attending, i think i am attending the rest of the client meetings as we all need to know what is happening with the system and i think the client is much more comfortable with us now too.

the client meet and great was a royal waste of time in my opinion, i was sick and could not be bothered communicating with many people, i tried to talk to a few clients and other groups but I really wasn't up for it to be honest.

WHY DO I SUPPORT MELBOURNE!!!!!!?????????????!!!!!!!!!!! it's soooo depressing. I hate it when we lose to Carlton.

Week 6

week 6 already, wow.

Business case is due this week, we put all the sections together then asked for comments from jake. I think it was pretty good all in all, i did the exec. summary and recommendation along with the external risks.

the wiki is working quite well actually, i think every1 is getting the hang of the wiki, which i'm really happy about because i'm a wiki nerd.

i really can;t be bothered blogging today, which i know isn't really very productive when writing a blog, but u know, that's life.

really focusing down on this functional req. spec. now, really trying to drill the clients to give us the information we need to make the document, and in the end make the system. without these details that we won't we really are up shite creek sans a paddle.

client meeting on monday should be interesting, it's at Able in camberwell. we will have to put up w/ vish's driving to get there. how i value my life, please vish, just kidding, he's a 6/10 driver, just kidding, he is fine, i don't know why i am writing about this.

until next week,
happy hunting