Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Week 12 - Semester 1 Summary
needless to say that i haven't done a peep of IE this week and do not plan on it. maybe on the weekend, but that will even be pushing it.
This is meant to be a summary blog of how i feel the semester has gone, i don't think i can say everything about it because it's not over yet, and we still have to do design spec which we're planning on doing next week.
4/5 of our team members do java and that pretty much rules our any other work this week. It's so dumb that they have given us so little time effectively to do the assignment because we still had to do tut. exercises until last week. grrr.... damn time consuming, good for nothing unit, i don't want to program.
anyways this semester...
i think it has gone pretty well, the only thing that has been crap is other units impeding on this one. I think that when we spent the time on the working we got work done and to quite a high standard if i do say so myself. We are working well in the team and are roles are pretty well defined and we are able to know what we have to do to get the job done.
Now i think i'll go through the team members and talk about how i think they went.
V: Really enthusiastic at the beginning but that wanned. High quality of contribution and timely delivery of inputs. Important member of the team for design stage and implementation. He failed to see the importance of some of the analysis things that we did, but none the less did provide useful use case descriptions. Continuously fails to comply with standards and governance for attire, and i whole hearted disagree with. Never late, but can be self centered at times.
Vish: Out of the blocks slowly, we didn't really know what to do with him, so we didn't do much with him. We put him to good work in the analysis phase working on the work flows and really getting to grips with the system. He did several drafts in client meetings which was welcomed both by the team and by the client. Very useful for document writing although he struggles with our template and I don't think that he really understands word as much as we do. It is frustrating to change his stuff to fit the template, which i normally end up doing, but it's better that he has done the work though.
Alex: Very useful at notetaking and chairing meetings. Her understanding of the current system is not probably eclipsed by anyone in strike and the proposed system better than the client. She is very good at proof reading, which is very useful for both me and pokey for which english is our 3rd language, after leetish and java (not really). Her analysis skills are second to none, although she struggles to be confident enough to push herself to do more, which she is most likely capable.
Pokey: Project management expert. Emails were flooding in in the first few weeks, which was a poon. We got over that and we got fowarding working on strikesolutions@gmail.com email address so that he didn't have to loggin for us to get email. good PM, laid back but organised. pushy when needed, and also relaxed when needed as well. Good choice for PM although i tend to run the putting together of the doc, but he allocates me that job and he also assigns sections of the document for people to do, rather democratically which is a good style of leadership. he is open to lots of ideas and is easy to please and a great PM to work with, i would love to have him as a boss in the real world. All that being said he occasionally lets the team down, i'm thinking of incidences such as the document handing in problems, the graphics drivers on his laptop not ready for presentations and going away so that i was PM (although that wasn't really a bad thing), I appreciated the opportunity.
Me: I think i have worked consistently and to a relatively high quality all semester. I have been in charge of signing off on the quality of the documents before printing and i guarantee you that so far they have all been 99.99% correct, which i am very pleased about. i have played my part in the team well, especially in my role to put documents together. I am a bit of an all rounder so i think i will be helping everyone out over the course of the project. I think i lacked a little bit of understanding for the system at the start but quickly gained understanding after a few more meetings. I am troubled to find that different members of the team have understood the system in different ways, which is good, but also could prove challenging when trying to design the system. The main problem with me is that i am a bit arrogant and only want to do things my way sometimes, a bit anal you might say, which is probably good for a quality manager. Probably haven't done enough for the design spec as of yet too, but who has?
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Week 11
here is an article from the interwebtron, substitute the word "melbourne" for "luke" and then you will have an exact representation of how my week was.
MELBOURNE coach Dean Bailey says today’s 76-point defeat at the hands of Adelaide was a “step back” for his club after the round seven win over Fremantle.
Bailey kept the players in an unusually long team meeting after the match to emphasise the “two or three things that really let us down” – and it will be back to the training track for the Demons to work on their skills and decision-making.
“For me, it always gets back to the ability to execute a skill,” Bailey said after the match.
“Today, I reckon we took a step back. We probably fell back into a pattern we had before the Fremantle game.
“Our skills today and decision-making were really poor at times. We didn’t move the ball as well as we would have liked.
“And against the Crows here, they really make you pay.”
Bailey said the Demons were “playing in patches”, which was clearly not good enough at AFL level.
“I thought we started OK … (but then) they kicked two goals in the last minute of the first quarter which was disappointing. The second quarter, they got away from us, and from then on with the mistakes we made, they really hurt us.
“I was expecting us to use the ball better today, but we went back into our shells a little bit.
“There are signs in there, small snippets of the game where you can say we actually played reasonably well, but you can’t do that against a good club.
“You’ve got to play well and be competitive for longer than what we have been, and when we’re not competitive and not using the ball well teams are unfortunately scoring heavily against us.”
Bailey praised the efforts of Clint Bartram, who tagged Andrew McLeod and held him to just 12 touches, and also saw further good signs from Austin Wonaeamirri and Cale Morton, who kicked three goals and set up a couple more.
“He’s a work in progress (Morton), but he’s doing some things that would suggest he’s a good decision-maker and he’s going to be a very good player for us.
“I though Bartram’s job on McLeod and (James) McDonald’s job on (Tyson) Edwards, they stuck to their guns pretty well and they probably broke even or might have just pinched the match-up.
“We were happy with those two, but not enough done by everyone else, and the game’s about 22 contributors.”
Client meeting was good, some technical issues in the presentation, but that was okay in the end. Pokey made a pretty good presentation and he was fairly happy i think and so were the client.
Interfaces, alex and pokey are in charge of that and got some good work done on that on sunday.
We spent some time doing some ERD stuff with V that we are still fleshing out. The meeting room is pretty good for that type of stuff. Other units are really biting my balls at the moment. Programming is a poon, a big poon that won't gain you access to it's enterprise architecture.
We have done a fair amount towards the next doc, put i'm not expecting anything amazing to be done this week because of other assignments.
I really cbf with java especially, not to meantion that i actually do other units and IE and work. Freaking wankers making me work at 150% when i have worked at 110% for most of semester.
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Week 10
It was my job to put everybody's work that they had done together. Formatting as always was an issue. Trying to make all the use case descriptions be similar and get them in the right order was not challenging as much as time consuming.
We stormed like the communists at the end of a month to meet their quota. It was all done by friday morning, all printed and pretty. Double sided *save the trees*! Was pretty good to get it all over and done with so that i could crack on with other assignments. It's not like i don't have about 20 million other assignments to do.
Went to the hall of fame tribue match at the 'G. JUUUUUUUDDDDD! Such a good inside player.... lol. There were fights in the crowd, a mexican wave and a guy who was fondling and kissing the girl who he was with and she didn't seem to be all that in to it and he seemed plastered more than a wall in Venice, lol.
Furthermore i don't have time to blog anymore, i've got assignments to do man.
OH I failed to meantion that i won blog of the week, thanks to everyone that voted for me. Thank you god, i love you, talk to you soon, stay well... and to my mother who has always been there for me when times get tough. To little Jimmy Chou who struggled through the Asian oppression at my primary school, i wish you all the luck in the world.
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