Ever Shambling Onwards...

POOMAINT Ahoy.

In a rather large kind of way. Yike. In fact, it's something akin to "Holy Jesus Buggery Bollocks!" kind of way. With a side helping of "Holy Mary, Mother of Hairy Arsed Fucknuggets". I am clueless how anybody could expect this to actually be done in a manner that's even close to half-arsed in twice the available time, let alone properly in the available time (<2 days).

Given a week I could bodge it enough that it works & looks okay. I have until friday. With half of friday being eaten by an appraisal (which I also have to prepare for) and another episode of POOMAINT also ending on, you guessed it, friday.

Arsebuckets.

I shall, I suspect, be a little frazzled for the immediate future.

Well, work today is much more relaxed. Because both my manager and I were in a hurry this morning I managed to conduct our weekly demotivational meeting in five minutes and without either of us leaving our desks at any point.

So now I have one day to finish adding frills to the POOMA, I'm in project management training on Thursday (deep joy! It expect I will have flashbacks to DICW lectures...) and then the rest of the week is mainly to be spent finishing off other bits and bobs. Should be quite relaxed...

Of course, I really can't be bothered to do anything at all at this precise moment in time, and will probably be given another bit of POOMA work to do later in the week. I usually am. But for the moment I'm relaxed!

We are now at POOMA alert! I repeat POOMA alert!

Once again one of my projects has developed high speed goalposts, which are moving at speed away from the projects current position. I have a deadline at the end of the week, but am still uninformed about the form and function of the final product. Joy. So, in the finest POOMA tradition I'm going to build for them (in record time, I might add) a site which does what I think they want. If it's wrong, tough. They expect me finish the project on time without so much as a proper brief, let alone a specification then they're going to get full on POOMA randomness!

I shall be busy this week, and then again for the next few weeks as I catch up the other work I'm just dumping this week...

I got the %&^!ing thing working!

Now I am truly an expert with XML, XMLDOM, msXML and DTDs. I have persuaded the damned thing to behave, and now I can spend the afternoon arsing about with XML files to get data into the system...

Special Extra Bonus! Now that I've got the damned thing to accept the fact that a DTD exists and should be used rather than just saying "this thing says it's got a DTD - what's a DTD?" it actually accepts non standard character entities - kind of useful on a multilingual site...

Well, I've still not recieved the missing copy for the previously mentioned site, so I'm leaving that alone for the moment, and working on one of my other "top, highest priority, more important everything else" projects (I currently have three of them), for which I officially have a deadline tomorrow, but actually it's next tuesday...

...and b*gg*r me sideways if the damned thing isn't bending over backwards to do everything I want it to do. It's a messageboard system with tiered access, interdependencies between access levels & a whole bundle of bizarre rules. I've mentioned it before. It looks like it's behaving itself just fine, and not throwing out any major problems at all.

This worries me.

When I load up each page to find the problems and they all work first time, I start to think that I'm missing something supremely important somewhere along the way, but I have no idea what it could be!.

POOMAIAM Productions has hit a snag. It's my old favourite from the days of the massive redesign (*1) - Content. I'm looking at moving over an amount of information from the old website, but I'm thinking "There is no way I'm letting this drivel come near this site".

For example, the opening sentence of the first paragraph in the research section for this particular school is as follows:

"School is research active in a wide range of areas [...]"

On any other school, this would at less embarrassing, but for the school in question it is really quite poor. I'll leave it you to work out what this school teaches...

These areas of the content are supposed to be getting replaced, but the new site goes live on friday and I've seen no evidence that it's even been looked at yet... So it looks like I'll be getting the deep joy of writing the content again... It's not my job, and I'll get complained at for doing it, but it's the only way to get it done - write something they don't like so that they replace it quickly.

(*1) - particularly famed for the performance of sister production companies POOMAIAW, POOMAIAD and even the less often seen POOMAIAH.

There's just no pleasing some people...

I just performed another feat of POOMA, deemed as essential at the last meeting (ie, last friday - giving me a not huge amount of time to get the work done - namely 1 morning, shared with other regular monday morning work...) and presented it in an early afternoon meeting. They decided they didn't want it after all. Barely even looked at it.

Bastards.

Having compressed what should have been at least two days work into about two hours, I did consider nailing them to their chairs, supergluing their eyes open and making them at least look at it for a few minutes.

Moral of the story: Do not ask people to do the impossible and then not even bother looking at the results. Or if you do, do not expect the impossible to be done for you in future.

... and call it PooMAiaM Productions. Standing for "Pulled Out Of My Arse In A Month"

Some history:
One of the projects that I've been working on for several months made, at the outset, a decision that I disagreed with. They decided they wanted a design for a web page that I thought was a bad move, and gave them a long list of reasons why. They decided those reasons were not important. I got an agreement that if they later changed their minds, I would not be expected to rebuild the site from scratch in less than half of the time than it had taken so far (ie: been working for six months to get this far, I need at least three months to re-do it properly).

They just decided to agree with me. After six months work on the site, I have been given four weeks to replace it. Not only this, it's not even my top priority site for at least a fortnight. In fact, I'm unlikely to even be able to look at it again for at least a week.

Even more annoying, my manager agreed to this.

This is an impossible deadline unless I ditch something else, which I won't be allowed to do. Oh well. She'll just have to take the flak when I miss deadlines...