Very Busy Time
OK, I’ve been remiss yet again in keeping this thing even somewhat updated. I guess I tend to use it in bursts, much like 90% of other blogs I read.
Well, the last month or so has been frantic. Too many deadlines line up with the beginning of the school year (hmm, I wonder why?) and I had several projects that had those kind of deadlines.
I’ve been ‘managing’ a student worker (Brent) for most of the summer. He’s working on a project for our gym (Solheim for those of you in the know) to track people coming in and leaving. It is a card swiper system, so everyone will have to start carrying their ID cards to the gym now. That project had an initial ‘go live’ date of, oh, about now, but due to some matters outside of our control that date has slipped somewhat indefinately.
I have also been involved in our launch of a campus portal (MyLETU). I’ve been doing mostly support programming (just little pieces as they are needed) and haven’t had any large involvment in it other than some calendar functionality/debugging work.
The real project so far this summer has been a new Campus Security application. They ‘currently’ use an Access database (if you can call it that) to track students, their registered vehicles, any/all issued tickets, and a few other little things. This system has been a standalone program for far too long. The Campus Security department has had to maintain a copy of the student’s information (address, phone number, CPO, student ID, etc) separate from the University’s main information database. As a result, the data they have is horribly out of date and just plain wrong. That has been one of their biggest complaints in the past.
So, jump forward about five years from it’s creation … A group of student’s in a senior Computer Science class started working on a web-based application to replace what they were using. The only problem is that the group never consulted with IT, so they did everything, well, wrong. The group never finished it, and eventually it sat idle for about a year.
When the project was next resurrected, it was at Campus Security’s (henceforth Security) expense as they hired a student worker to finish it off. The student (and a Computer Science professor who was ‘managing’ him) met with myself and my boss so that we had a clear plan for the future.
One and a half semesters later (the end of Spring 05), after having been reassured several times that things were progressing well, I was given the project to ‘polish off’. Ha! It hadn’t been changed one bit since it had been handed off to the student. Let’s just say that after a summer of clean up work (different database, better logic, new procedures, new fields) it still isn’t done. And that’s what I’m off to work on now …