Tuesday - Work stuff
I got up at 6:00 a.m. this morning, threw on some clothes, stuffed my laptop in my backpack, and headed out to be at the dealership for 7:00 a.m. Thankfully we only had nuisance levels of snow last night, so I only had to dust off Tripp, not shovel anything. (My poor coworker who got a snowblower for Christmas was soooo looking forward to finally using it!). I arrived at Peter’s Honda just before they opened their doors. I thought that all Tripp needed was to have the parking brake cable tightened, but when they got in there, apparently the caliper that it feeds into was bent. I’m not surprised, my parking space at Frogholm is on a hill. So that thing is under pressure every night of the week. But that meant that what I thought was going to be a quick fix (open him up, tighten cable, close him up) turned into a much longer process. They didn’t have the part in stock, which of course meant we were also waiting for the parts place to deliver. Good thing I brought the laptop, cause I was there two hours. I got some writing done, downloaded photos from last weekend and resized them, and used my phone to get caught up on Live Journal and Facebook.
Work was….. Interesting. In the “Chinese curse” sense of the word. I’m trying to poke our product manager on the new project to start talking about the Help. She wanted me to make a presentation this Friday outlining some suggestions for the Help. I wrote back and said we really needed to talk about the product first, because I’m still getting up to speed on what they’re planning (and the Wiki pages full of cryptic bulleted lists aren’t always a whole lotta help with understanding what they’re building). I can’t make suggestions until I know the requirements (I know we’ll want support for both Windows and Linux, but what about mobile? Do we want to have the Help installed with the product or hosted on our web site, etc.) Mid-day today she sent me a link to the Mozilla Help page and said it was a “great example of a Help page.”
Why yes, that is a pretty spiffy Help system. Only it’s not technically a Help system. It’s a Knowledge Base, which is similar (in that it is also user assistance) but not exactly the same thing. And it’s build on a Wiki, which means it is user editable. And the Meet the Team page lists over a dozen leads who manage the team of SIXTY PEOPLE who created that site. Yeah, sure, I can do something like that. All by myself. With a tool that doesn’t do anything like that and no money to buy a new tool. No problem. *eyeroll* Why do product managers do stuff like that?
I had tried to download a copy of the project from our Source Control (Git) but got a “Permission Denied” message. Other Writer said he thought QA Manager was administering Git now (the fellow who was doing it before is gone. I didn’t have the heart to ask if he left voluntarily or was part of the layoff). When I spoke to QA Manager about getting access, he said, ‘You’re not going to put any binaries in my source control are you?” Now, he’s one of those precise Germans who likes things to be Just So. But telling me that I can’t check in binaries (images, PDFs, etc.) because they take up too much space? Not going to happen. I tried to be diplomatic and said that I was sure that the developers check in images. He said, “They better not.” But when we checked, yep, the graphics for the new screens were checked into source control. Now, I will say this much, they’d only checked in the graphics they were actually using, so apparently he’s had an effect (at my last couple of jobs they had checked in two or three entire icon libraries, even though they were only using a handful of the thousands of images….). But he was most displeased. *chuckles*
Work was….. Interesting. In the “Chinese curse” sense of the word. I’m trying to poke our product manager on the new project to start talking about the Help. She wanted me to make a presentation this Friday outlining some suggestions for the Help. I wrote back and said we really needed to talk about the product first, because I’m still getting up to speed on what they’re planning (and the Wiki pages full of cryptic bulleted lists aren’t always a whole lotta help with understanding what they’re building). I can’t make suggestions until I know the requirements (I know we’ll want support for both Windows and Linux, but what about mobile? Do we want to have the Help installed with the product or hosted on our web site, etc.) Mid-day today she sent me a link to the Mozilla Help page and said it was a “great example of a Help page.”
Why yes, that is a pretty spiffy Help system. Only it’s not technically a Help system. It’s a Knowledge Base, which is similar (in that it is also user assistance) but not exactly the same thing. And it’s build on a Wiki, which means it is user editable. And the Meet the Team page lists over a dozen leads who manage the team of SIXTY PEOPLE who created that site. Yeah, sure, I can do something like that. All by myself. With a tool that doesn’t do anything like that and no money to buy a new tool. No problem. *eyeroll* Why do product managers do stuff like that?
I had tried to download a copy of the project from our Source Control (Git) but got a “Permission Denied” message. Other Writer said he thought QA Manager was administering Git now (the fellow who was doing it before is gone. I didn’t have the heart to ask if he left voluntarily or was part of the layoff). When I spoke to QA Manager about getting access, he said, ‘You’re not going to put any binaries in my source control are you?” Now, he’s one of those precise Germans who likes things to be Just So. But telling me that I can’t check in binaries (images, PDFs, etc.) because they take up too much space? Not going to happen. I tried to be diplomatic and said that I was sure that the developers check in images. He said, “They better not.” But when we checked, yep, the graphics for the new screens were checked into source control. Now, I will say this much, they’d only checked in the graphics they were actually using, so apparently he’s had an effect (at my last couple of jobs they had checked in two or three entire icon libraries, even though they were only using a handful of the thousands of images….). But he was most displeased. *chuckles*