10 April 2001
Well, Matt's off - or will be within the hour - for Camp Lejune again, ready to show the Marines their latest effort. Since the effort kept Matt and his co-workers in the office late just about every day last week, for some twelve or fourteen hours over the weekend, and late last night, I hope the Marines appreciate it.
So yesterday I started perusing a document my new task manager gave me. It contained flow charts for all the modules we're supposed to be creating, so I thought it would be helpful. But as I started to go through the charts, I realized they were truly awful.
They had no obvious entry point. They had "yes/no" boxes with more than one "no" path - and no way to determine how to choose which path to take. They had single processes broken out into multiple blocks, and multile processes compressed into single blocks.
In a word, they were crap, and I couldn't make heads or tails of half of them. I went to my task manager and said, "Keith, these flow charts are terrible. Who came up with this stuff?"
Go on, I'll give you three guesses who made the flow charts. The first two don't count.
I wonder if that hoof-and-mouth disease translates to foot-in-mouth disease in humans.
I was only slightly comforted to learn that the flow charts represented the current system, not the system we're supposed to be building. Therefore, most of the terrible-ness of the flow charts is a direct result of the fact that the current flow pretty much sucks. But I was still pretty damned embarrassed. The queen of tact, that's me.
So now I'm making new flow charts, for the new version of the project. I'm trying to make them make sense, but since I'm working from the old charts, it isn't easy. It took me two hours to get the first of eight modules done yesterday. I haven't done flow charting in ages - most of my projects are straightforward enough not to really need it - but this one needs it. What a convoluted piece of gunk!
Not that I'm feeling inclined to be any more tactful today. Something is pollinating - my car is covered with pale, powdery gunk - and my eyes feel like someone dragged sandpaper over them while I was asleep. How can they be both dry and watery at the same time? At least I'm not sneezing my brains out or sniffling too much. Yet.
Worse, I'm tired, because our bedroom is the warmest room in the house, and it didn't drop below 80 in there - despite open windows and two fans - until sometime after midnight. I can't sleep if the temperature is over 75. I was seriously considering going downstairs - there's at least a 10 degree difference between floors - and sleeping on the couch. If I hadn't known the temperature was going to take a nose-dive today, I'd have suggested turning on the air conditioning.
I'm just hoping the cold front brings some rain. If nothing else, it should wash the pollen out of the air.
Word of the Day:
postlude - a closing piece of music; a closing phase (as of a literary work)
Currently Reading:
- Soldiers Live by Glen Cook
Current Projects:
- Kris' afghan
- garden