New Job in tri cities WA. Temporarily homeless

It has been two weeks since I accepted a job in Richland Washington. I start tomorrow.

The past two days I have driven over 600 miles in a the largest U-haul truck AND with larger car carrier trailer behind. What an experience that was! After a while I got used to the way the trailer sort of pushes you from behind going downhill. On the other hand, driving up some of the mountain grades of Idaho and Oregon at maybe 45 MPH with the pedal to the metal... there is a terror that comes as you lose speed even while pushing as hard as you can.

My 10 year old son and I have checked into a motel in Pasco WA, where apparently everyone speaks Spanish. It seems we are fortunate to get a room at all, as the tricities annual boat races, which are the biggest event of the the year here, are today!

We attended a church meeting, which, as it happened, was en espanol. We did our best to sing the hymns, but did not stay for the whole service.

Last Ghana project blog

The couple of weeks since the favored ones returned from Ghana have been ... well, lets just say that with graduation approaching, difficult homework in other classes, and the general over-the-hump feeling in this class, CS 4750 has been about the last thing on my mind. I do plan to finish the code I have been assigned, and will have some time now that Brinkerhoffs Mahjong stuff is turned in.

On the subject of CBL, we had some interesting discussions after the guys came back from Ghana. It seems that some of the team felt we were being taken advantage of by a for-profit venture... I tend to think that its not that important. Students do unpaid internships for eeevil capatalist companies all the time. The experience is what counts, and this has certainly been an experience!

Professor Fry, thank you for being willing to take a risk on these projects. It has been a growing experience for me, at least. One I won't soon forget.

Week	Team Meetings	Project Work	Journal Writing	CBL Hours with Client	Other *
One	2	5	0.5	0	4
Two	1.5	9	0.5	0	0
Three	2	4	0.5	0.5	0
Four	2	6	0.5	0	0
Five	2.5	5	0.5	0	0
Six	2	4	0.5	0	0
Seven	2	3	0.5	0	0
Eight	2	14	0.5	0	0
Nine	1	0	0	0	0
Ten	0	0	0	0	0
Eleven	2	2	0	0	0
Twelve	Bah!
Twelve	Even more bah!
Totals	19	52	4	0.5	4

Weeks 9, 10, and 11

Not much to add for these weeks.
Those who could afford the time and expense of traveling to Africa went. They had a fun time. Those of us who either couldn't afford it, or (I suppose) didn't want to go stayed home.

I sort of had some expectation that we the left-behind would be used a resource, and would be doing bug fixing or similar activities in response to emails or other communications from the team members in Africa... this did not turn out to be the case.
We had a call with Professor Fry, who relayed how the experiece was going. None of the student doing the work was on the call, so they couldn't have asked for help even if they needed it.
I was kind of looking forward to providing support to a working installation from across the world. But I guess I should take it as a good thing that the on site student were able to work through all the major issues they ran into.

Since their return is somewhat anticlimactic, fixing the issues that they did bring back has been kind of a slog. Not that anything we have to do is hard, but motivation after delivery of the product is harder to gin up :)

Week	Team Meetings	Project Work	Journal Writing	CBL Hours with Client	Other *
One	2	5	0.5	0	4
Two	1.5	9	0.5	0	0
Three	2	4	0.5	0.5	0
Four	2	6	0.5	0	0
Five	2.5	5	0.5	0	0
Six	2	4	0.5	0	0
Seven	2	3	0.5	0	0
Eight	2	14	0.5	0	0
Nine	1	0	0	0	0
Ten	0	0	0	0	0
Eleven	2	2	0	0	0
Totals	19	52	4	0.5	4

Week 7 and 8

For some reason I have a hard time remembering these journal entries. Maybe because I'm busy, Maybe because (like most of the class) I feel they are a waste of everyones time.

I was really struggling with concentration for weeks 6 and 7. I was working on a difficult issue at work most of both weeks which I could not resolve (it turned out to be a dll that was improperly installed on 9 of 27 machines that pool their work, rather than a code bug), and which the business side of my company was hounding me about almost hourly.

This week I really kicked in the overdrive to be done with my piece in time, which has left me feeling stressed and exhausted.
Maybe a little depressed. I would have liked to go with the group to Africa.
Maybe a little relieved. I have neither the time nor the money to spend two weeks away from work and school right now.

I am concerned about the "plan" to run our system on iis on the same system as the Hospital software. It has NEVER been tested on windows, much less iis with a php plugin. Going forward assuming it will just work is in my view really stupid. I hope it works anyway.

...and once again it is time to reflect on the service aspect of the class... I wonder whether the system will really be usable. UI design (ergonomics) was not a big part of what anybody was thinking abaout as they coded parts of it.
I hope it is usable enough for future students to build on.

Week	Team Meetings	Project Work	Journal Writing	CBL Hours with Client	Other *
One	2	5	0.5	0	4
Two	1.5	9	0.5	0	0
Three	2	4	0.5	0.5	0
Four	2	6	0.5	0	0
Five	2.5	5	0.5	0	0
Six	2	4	0.5	0	0
Seven	2	3	0.5	0	0
Eight	2	14	0.5	0	0
Totals	16	50	4	0.5	4

Week 5 and 6

Well, on the positive side, progress on the software project is very encouraging. It really feels like it it taking shape in a way that it needs to. I have not seen or heard much from Ryan Field, which has me a little concerned about the state of the Application part of the project.

On the negative side, our African client has once again disappeared. My professional experience tells me that we NEED input from the client at this stage to pull off a successful project in the short time we have left. This has me feeling pretty discouraged and generally negative at our prospects for success. I guess my thoughts on "community based learning" come down to this: We are trying to build something powerful and useful for the Martin Luther Health Training School. We are investing a lot of time, care and effort, and for those who are traveling there, money as well. But the value of the project is going to hang on the amount of time, care and effort the client is willing/able to put in. We can't do it without them, and if things proceed as they seem to have started, we may well deliver a fine product that is not what they need or want.

I hope I am mistaken.

Week	Team Meetings	Project Work	Journal Writing	CBL Hours with Client	Other *
One	2	5	0.5	0	4
Two	1.5	9	0.5	0	0
Three	2	4	0.5	0.5	0
Four	2	6	0.5	0	0
Five	2.5	5	0.5	0	0
Six	2	4	0.5	0	0
Totals	12	33	3	0.5	4

Week 3 and 4

Another 2 weeks have gone by since the last update. I don't really have a good reason for missing the last one. I planned to do it Saturday evening as I have before, and then Saturday evening came and I was having so much fun playing with my kids that I went to bed and forgot until Monday.
Anyway... In the last two weeks it feels like the team has gotten off the ground finally. I think we have now had code committed by each member.

Ryan F. has been working on finishing the Application page. He wants to write the whole thing and THEN commit it to the repo. I keep trying to convince him to commit his work as he goes. As it is I don't really know how far he has to go, or if there are issues.
Tyler had a hard time getting started, but after working through the hangups he had getting started, he has been making good progress on the "manage courses" screen.
I'm not sure about Jared. He seems very knowledgeable, has not expressed any concerns, and had lots of suggestions, but has asked for database passwords three times, and had not started any work until this week. I hope to see more
Ryan O. has been coding a lot. I think he has written more code than anyone else. I haven't seen as much of the "Project management" stuff from him, and I have tried to provide some of that, but genuinely DO NOT want to be the one whose job is communication with the client.
As for me, I've been working on install/backup/restore functions for the system, which should make it easier to deploy and test, as well as to make schema changes if they are needed. I spend about 30-40 minutes researching for every 10 minutes writing code.

Oh, and community based service is still all good. yay.

Week	Team Meetings	Project Work	Journal Writing	CBL Hours with Client	Other *
One	2	5	0.5	0	4
Two	1.5	9	0.5	0	0
Three	2	4	0.5	0.5	0
Four	2	6	0.5	0	0
Totals	7.5	24	2	0.5	4

Week 2... missing stuff

I guess there are some technical specifics that need to be in the journal entry each week...
Somehow I missed that the first time around... anyway, to try to get off on the right foot, I'm going to sort of retroactively add them here.

First: Time matrix of project time

	Team Meetings	Project Work	Journal Writing	CBL Hours with Client	Other *
Week 1	2	5	0.5	0	4
Week 2	1.5	9	0.5	0	0
Totals	3.5	14	1	0	4

Second thing: Thoughts on Community based learning:
Hmmm. This is an interesting point. Back last semester the old team chose to go with a Free software license, and use popular open source tools to implement it: PHP, MySQL and Apache. I know we are doing this software project for one small School in Africa, but I can't help thinking if we do a good job, most of this work could be used by anyone. Public School, private School, homeschooling parents. I don't know, maybe that is thinking a little big for a student project

Just so I don't look like a complete retard for posting a nine year old photo, here is the most recent family portrait we had taken. We managed to work out a deal (small local photo business) so that they sold us the digital originals along with the pictures instead of holding them hostage and throwing them away like most of the big outfits do.
It makes me very happy to have those digital image files.
I'll never have professional portraiture done by someone who is not willing to give me the full rights to the work I have paid for.
Don't get me wrong, I expect to pay a little more, but the way I see it, ALL professional photography falls under work for hire copyright and rightly ought to be owned by the customer. But I guess that ends up being a contractual deal, doesn't it.
Wow! I didn't mean to turn that into a rant. Anyway, The folks in the image are
right to left:
Back- Connor: 14, Zac: 12,
Middle- Me: Old, Amie: Slightly older, Joshua: 9, Eloise: 8,
Front- David: 3, Gabriel: 18 months

Gotta love the surly teenagers in the back. [rolleyes] You two will be so proud when you are old enough for YOUR kids to be looking at this photo.

Going back in time... old photos

I came across a box full of undeveloped film last month. 30 Rolls! It cost a fortune to have them developed (and I'm still kicking myself for doing it during Christmastime when we are already strapped), but I figured I'd better do it while there still is a such a thing as 35mm 1 hour photo...

This amazing picture was in among those developed. It is Joshua, who is now 9, in a carrier/carseat, looking very unhappy in the snow. Dated December 3rd, 2001
Those brilliant blue eyes were so striking I just had to post it.

Week 2

I kind of feel like things are getting into a groove for the project.
The site is back up (in fact, it is up in three separate places), so we can definitely hack without fear of bringing the world down.

There are still a couple of team members who have not done much.
I'm a little concerned, but I'll give them a little while. We have a list of tasks on the google code site. I have told everybody which tasks are do-able now...

I hope we don't have anyone who is waiting to be told what to do.
Fortunately, since I am not the "Project lead" I am free to continue acting as technical project lead, while someone else manages the people aspects of the project. That is the way I prefer it.

Week 1

This first week has been pretty crazy.
Here is what happened to my team of software developers:
started with 4.
lost 2 (including the student who was doing a good job as project manager).
Got 5 new members.
Instructor suggested that one or two of the NEW people should lead the project.

That last bit was the source of most of the chaos and problems. One of our prospective leaders -- as his first suggestion -- before even looking at the work done so far --- wanted to scrap all the existing code and start from scratch in C#. Because it would be easier to test. Insane.

I will need to actively push the technical direction of the project. Before it was very consensus driven. Now I'm going to start looking for tasks and handing them out...
I think I'll start using the built in bugtracker in google code.
Hopefully I won't end up in conflict with someone who thinks hes supposed to be the boss.

Lux Aeturna: A humanitarian software project

I created this blog with the intent of writing about my interests and hobbies...
but wait! I'm in my last year of college. I don't have time for interests of hobbies.
A new Semester of School has rolled around and somehow one of the classes has a service component and is requiring a weekly journal entry.
So I guess I will be updating this blog weekly for the next little while.

The class is CS4750, at Weber State University.
The way it somehow ended up a service learning class is that our professor, Rich Fry, managed to get us hooked up with an opportunity to write a software system for a school in Ghana.
Some of my classmates (alas, not me, due to funds)will be travelling to Ghana to install the system and train the school staff in its use.

I am very excited about what lies ahead over the next few months.