Monday, December 1, 2008

New Day Dawns and... it's looking the same to me

Another Monday comes and goes.
Drive north on I-380, go to work, write documentation, eat lunch, write more documentation, drive south on I-380, eat, talk to the wife and kids. Tonight, it was take Alex to piano lessons. He's trying to play less choppy and it's difficult to him. It's not easy for him to play flowing. It's more:

phrase 1 (pause) phrase 2 (pause) phrase 1 (pause) phrase 2 (pause)

when the music is written

phrase 1 phrase 2 phrase 1 phrase 2

with no pauses. He needs to practice more - that's the bottomline.

I wish I could show you screen captures of the user interface I have to work with this week. It's ugly. There were design decisions made that will allow our users to use a user-defined value as the title of a menu option as well as the actual menu option. That menu option is going to be in ALL CAPS but the rest of the UI is in Title Case. I understand the need for flexibility. We want to be flexible but, frankly, seeing some fields in ALL CAPS on the same screen as some fields being in Title Case just looks ugly to me. Normally, I use what is called a translation table to change ALL CAPS to Title Case. However, that is when the text is defined by my employer. In this instance, the text is user-defined so there is no way for me to guess what they want to call it. So, you end up with some ALL CAPS field labels and some Title Case labels. I did make decent progress on my work today. It's a challenge to have 4 different things going at the same time and to make enough of a dent in one to make it feel like I'm making progress. I did finish one project that has to be released on 12/5 so I only have 3 more to go. I don't know what I am going to do with the largest, which is essentially a new product. I don't know how I am going to do it.

In other words, it's going to be very interesting. At least as interesting as the instrumental version of Metallica's "Ride the Lightening."




No comments: