So… very… tired…
Work has me flat out. Flat. out. It's Sunday night, 11pm, holiday weekend, going on my 13th hour here. It's been like this for the past few weeks. Some days longer. Much longer.
This year has been particularly bad trying to final our games. not just my projects but across the board. Just one of those years. Always trying to do too much. Not enough time.
This year we re-wrote pretty much the entire game. 14 million lines of code. That's a lot. Twice as much as last year. Had we known, or had I known, I would have made significant changes to the budget. Mind you, we blew past our budget by... well, lets just say several times more than I make in a year.
But the end is near. Well, not near enough though. NHL 11 hits the streets Tuesday. The game is good. It's awesome being associated with a title that gets high critical acclaim. NBA JAM will be on the streets in October and that too was a cool project. Right now we're working through NBA Elite. We'll get there but boy it's been work. I haven't played basketball games for... years. But this game is fun. Completely re-written gameplay with new control scheme. I'm not sure how the hardcore NBA simulation fans will take the changes but it's putting the basketball video game genre in a new great direction. And it could use it. Really badly.
On Tuesday, I'm heading to the great state of Louisiana. The low cost test centre we use on our hockey and basketball titles are in Baton Rouge. This was a tough year for them as they've been forced to grow probably a little faster than anyone was ready for. This week is their post mortem session and I've been invited down since I'm their primary customer. I think the conversations will be good though I've got quite the agenda I want to discuss. I'm not sure if they are going to be ready for it. Believe it or not, but I can be a real hard ass sometimes.
HOWEVER! On Thursday night, we're heading into New Orleans. We have sponsor tickets into a pre-NFL concert with the Dave Matthews Band and Taylor Swift then an evening in one of the French Quarter's fine establishments watching the Vikings take on the home town Saints. Woot! Because I booked my ticket late, I couldn't fly directly into Baton Rouge so I'm flying in and out of New Orleans. With this event on Thursday, I changed my hotel for that evening to one directly in the French Quarter. Lucky me!
Oh, and i had a birthday. Yet another one. The great part of the day was Rachel surprising me with tickets to Bard on the Beach (Much Ado About Nothing) and having my friends there as even a bigger surprise! I got out of work early (6pm... that's VERY early) so just being not at work would have been good enough. But this was a thousand times better.
Well... now I'm even more tired. I'm going to be here at work for a couple more hours at least. Sigh.
I hope you are least enjoying your summer...
The Genius of this is Staggering
I believe this pretty much exemplifies the thought process of the moral majority. I saw this movie as a child and thought it was a catchy tune. I watch it now and see deeper truth. We're bred on fear. We're manipulated into our beliefs by charming charlatans all out for their own best interest. They come in the form of advertisers. Of politicians. Of religious leaders. We see this and tap our foot. We should see this and realize that we should think for ourselves. He's not even making any sense!
Well that's just swell. And so's you're old man!!
What if i didn’t want to be found?
So I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed... well, enjoyed may not be the right word for it... but I thought the series finale of Lost was probably the best I've ever seen. I'll even go as far as saying that it was brilliant. They finished the series in the same extraordinary way that they started it. There was no way that they were going to be able to answer all the questions they raised over the past 6 years. So why not answer the greatest question of all? Death.
And I didn't see it coming.
I've got friends at work where we all share 'lost stories' together after each episode. Some didn't like it. They either thought it was a cheap way out or that the several of the past years were just 'filler' if they weren't going to try and explain everything. I don't know. I'm much more inclined to enjoy the journey... not the details. And I don't think I've ever experienced a series on TV that has offered up such a rich and clever voyage. How they were able to make every episode so suspenseful with ongoing twists and turns... I'm not sure when we'll ever see something like this again. It would be crazy to say that there will never be another 'Lost' but this series was certainly unique. I think they broke many of the traditional ways of writing for a drama/action series. Besides being artfully crafted, they writers were able to balance between creating multiple concurrent story lines that felt like it would go on forever and writing like there was no tomorrow. You never knew who was going to die. Who was going to be the hero from one episode to the next. Everything seemed to have a 'purpose' yet at the same time, you almost felt like they were making it up as they went a long. This only added the excitement of it all. Like we were all watching it unfold together, viewer, writer, actor, for the first time.
But anyway. Now its over. I know it was only a TV show but it was like saying goodbye to a familiar friend. It's left a very big void in our weekly television schedule...
Who Knows Excel???
I need Excel help to create a report. While I know what the report should look like, I can't find samples of it on the Internet. Because I am not an Excel guru, I don't even know the correct terms to do a proper search. I would be surprised however if this was never done before. In theory it sounds very doable. In theory.
So in a nutshell, I need a chart to represent how close we are to finishing a task. The main task then all the sub tasks of that main task.
Using a test plan as an example because, well, after all, I'm in QA...
For ease, lets say the following...
I have 2000 test scripts that are estimated to take 5000 hours of testing. So I know that 5000 hours is 100%.
Of that 5000 hours, 500 hours for Feature A, 3500 are for Feature B and 1000 are for Feature C.
So now we know this...
Feature A = 500 hrs = 100%
Feature B = 3500 hrs = 100%
Feature C = 1000 hrs = 100%
All Features = 5000 = 100%
Throughout the project, I know how many hours have been completed for each feature and thus, overall as well. All this data would be imported from another database.
So the dashboard would look something like this...
Total Effort
0% |----------38%|------------------------|100%
Time ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| End Date
Feature A
0% |----------------------55%|-------------|100%
Feature B
0% |-----29%|-------------------------------|100%
Feature C
0% |------------------40%|------------------|100%
So I'm trying to figure out how to create a horizontal 'gas' gauge based on imported data. I can't seem to figure out how to do that in Excel.
So if any of you have any thought, I would be most grateful! Even so much as to offer a great bottle of wine? Or scotch? Or Diet Coke?