Tuesday, April 27, 2004

Magnatune just added a few new artists. Beat Under Control plays excellent “jazz/dub intense electro funk.” As weird as that sounds, it works. Meanwhile, Rob Costlow‘s piano pieces sound like professional movie scores. Both highly recommended.

Had a good day at work today. I normally start the day with personal e-mails, but found that this ruins my work attitude. I just can’t start working if I’ve started on my e-mails. So, I eschewed personal e-mails until late in the day, and by golly it worked; I’ve been quite productive all day.

Which is good, because I’m in the middle of a mini-crisis at work. One of the higher-ups shot out a horrified e-mail complaining about the current documentation status…just before leaving on vacation for a week. I replied in a way that should calm him down, but meanwhile some of us sat down and brainstormed ways of representing ourselves better.

It’s a common business problem: How do you let everyone else know what’s going on, in a way that makes sense to them?

Our solution is to beef up my clone of Intersect‘s flagship product, CrossPoint (please forgive the turgid marketing speech on that page; I didn’t write it). Instead of tracking tasks by “percent complete” (which can change its meaning depending on how complicated the task is) to “hours”. We’ll track how many hours each task will take, and the number of hours worked on each task per week. We can calculate the real percent complete from that.

This will bring my application ever closer to its eventual adoption by the entire company, and a pay increase with it! Muahahahaha!

Anyvay. On top of this, I discovered that one of our customers completely misunderstands certain MS Word features we’re using in our documentation, and I have to figure out a way to explain this to her gently in a way that doesn’t suggest that she’s an idiot, or that I’m a know-it-all who’s trying to force her to use these features.

But I’m feeling better, overall. I’m eager to write more of the VR story, despite the fact that it’s the least “marketable” of all my stories. That is…well, it’s a reprint. But I won’t get into that story today; I’ve written enough for now.