WangNet

Yesterday's placid-zen like calm has been replaced with 'bleh' today. Maybe it's the lack of sleep.. hmmm.. there are probably a few contributing factors that should not be discussed at the moment.

I am certain that if 'meeting?'-the-merc comes and pesters me one more time about his crappy reporting services reports he might get dropped kick. The guy's reports are scarey bad. I was slated to do them, being the reporting service guru for the team/group, but I was busy doing other massive components for the project. Fine. His reports are butt ugly, disturbingly large (I am talking 19 inches wide? WTF is that!?), and so freaking slow. He also has been trying to build a parameter control (I and another team member built this report viewer extension that allows us to use our own custom picklists and what not on a control that comes up with the report in a windows form app) and it looks spooky.

His testing methods was to drop a control in the reporting service solution (different project in the solution) and try and run it. Wow.. epic fail, right? Hosting and few hundred other things are out the window. I told him a few times, "just check out the main form. Drop a button on the toolbar that goes to a function where you call the report viewer with your controls. When done just undo the changes." He keeps coming back with issues and errors from his form in the reporting service solution. Ug.

Well my associate Falloutboy had an extended meeting with The Boss. He and her discussed many things including her perceived attitude, the lack of ANY information in emails for errors, the dislike of having to play email-go-round for about ten or twelve emails to actually pry the information out of her or the testers, the snippy put down emails we were getting on a daily basis, the general over use of negative reinforcement, and so on.

After she left him and I had a pow-wow regarding the talk. It seems that she has altered her opinion of him and might take some of his commentary under advisement.

The question is for how long?

The second question is do I wait for her to swing by and talk to me, or head her off at the pass and raise it up? I learned my lesson back in Febuary/March (after multiple headbutts over the fourish months before that) that any perceived criticism (with solutions - I ALWAYS provide solutions) no matter how it is present is always a "bad thing". After a while I just stopped caring. Apathy was a decent blanket to hide under when the rounds for "is there anything going on or wrong I should know about" was presented.

Oh office politics make me "lullz" as the kids say.

After another weekend of work and some long hours all my work items, new code requirements, and general email shenanigans have been cleared up. I am officially 'coasting' at this point of the project. It's a nice relaxing feeling knowing the testing, shoring up the reports, and other miscellaneous tasks are not mission critical to the success of this beached whale of a project.

Callou callay!

... people would be maimed by now!

Work has taken a serious degrading turn today, but all I can do is laugh at it while my associate Falloutboy seethes with rage. Take in account that when we get errors from when our boss, a reputed programmer, it is usually a screen shot with zero information. The screen shot doesn't include the exception or indication of what is broken. An example of attrocious communication: It took about five emails between the boss and myself to nail down what she was talking about. I know that not EVERYONE has twoish years of testing background in the guluags, but the common courtcey of one programmer to another you figure she would include: where she's at, what she was doing, and how it came about.

Here's some work item humor: "Missing backend stuff". Yeah, that's the title. My first was "that's what she said", the second was "I wish I was", and the third was "and how!"

Random amusement today from the office:

I was tasked with copying an old stored procedure, reviewing it, fixing anything outdated, renaming to the new system's conventions, and dropping it in the new database. Easy cheesy, right? The only new code was one minor thing changed in four places. I reported it back to my boss's right hand man, and went on with my other work.

An hour or so later he strolls in, and has me pull up that stored procedure. I was thinking, "what did I gloss over?" and "did I make a mistake somewhere?". The first thing he does is inform me that I misspelled an input variable. Wheew.. two characters later and a 'find-replace all', I turn and wait for the rest. All I was greeted with was "KTHNXBYE!" and my door slamming closed. Woah.. seriously? An email would have sufficed to bring it to light, but to walk over, have me log in and access that server, and then pull it up to do a 'find replace'?

It seems time is not as a precious of a commodity as I thought or led to believe. Heh..

Today has been a good day so for. I slayed an annoying bug with one line of code, finally nail specs down on one of our catalog companies, and get to shoulder a massive burden of getting a sql script to populate the column that was lacking in the aforementioned bug.

In addition I have had minimal contact with CB for the first time in the better part of a year. The project's on questionable legs at the moment, but I am tired of looking at it.

Off to go make complex joins look simple!

I've been working for the last three hours on this lovely overcast saturday... booooo! hisss! Damn crunch time... but I (and my associate) have been told that we are not trying hard enough, not caring deep enough, and not taking it serious. Nothing beats some good ol' negative reinforcement to recharge those burned out batteries!

Twoish weeks out from our project's deadline and our boss is working up a furry of excuses, anger, and pointing fingers… I called it and said it was because of a meeting in the last day or so of OTHER people pointing fingers so they are not the last ones without a chair when the music stops. Yup.. that was confirmed. Panic is a bad thing especially from those above you. It’s thankfully not going to affect my quality of work, I’ll just ignore it and continue plodding on with all these damn last minute, sweeping changes that are coming down the pike.