The Daily Grind

Today was another in a series of days where it seems like the amount of work to be done is overwhelmingly large compared to the amount of time available in which to do it. Perhaps this is why they call it "the daily grind", because it's like I'm grinding my gears and never moving forward.

The problem isn't that I'm not getting anything accomplished at work. Quite the contrary, I'm busy as a beaver and I get all sorts of things done. What it is, is a problem of milestones. It appears that nothing ever gets accomplished because nothing ever gets checked off my to-do list. Nothing ever gets checked off the list because all the things on the list are huge things. Then, when smaller problems pop up and need to be overcome, it seems like the goal is never reached. By setting a series of smaller goals, I try to fix this problem, and towards the end of the day I felt like the strategy was working.

Spent part of the day in a sales meeting. Our sales department, Marjorie, wanted to get the various people together and standardize some of our lingo and our practices. I was there because I'm a very central part of the whole production flow process. It's my job to get newly-produced terminals installed with the necessary software, get the terminals properly tested, get them registered with our satellite tracking system, and get them assigned to various serial numbers. It's a lot of hands-on work, and I'm hoping I'll be able to aggressively automate it with some of my mad programming skillz. That's the plan, at least.

Tomorrow we're starting testing on a new hardware unit with more bells, whistles, and doohickies. I've also got some more software features to test, and some cables to make and run. going to be another fun day.

I think today marks the end of the Google Summer of Code project, so I'm wrapping up my work there. I'm not "done" with the project by any stretch of the imagination, but as far as Google is concerned it's pencil's up time. I'm going to stay a regular contributor to Parrot, and I'm going to work to ensure that my project gets finished eventually, but my monitary incentives are gone now. Maybe I'll be like some of the other big-time Parrot developers and get in on some grant money for my work. It's unlikely, but would be nice.