elainegrey

Lessee, i "posted" last on Thursday morning.

I have lots of work to do: end of month reports and beginning of a new fiscal year and beginning of a new iteration. However, there's the usual out of the blue stuff, which should not be out of the blue if it's usual?

Thursday was intense with a long meeting with the least integrated Project team members sharing their work: i hope it was not painful and that it moves a step towards more integration. (See my anxieties on Wednesday.) In the afternoon, i led the discussion about our commitments for the quarter and then for the next three week development cycle. I have yet to transcribe the photo of the white board into task records in the tracking database (JIRA). Then long conversations with the guy working on the Product. I leave for home late, there's a fender-bender (only blocking one lane instead of three, like on Tuesday), and i walk with Christine (feeling the asthma in my chest).

Nothing but an eight am phone call on my calendar for Friday: i should be able to get those reports done.


No one joins the conference line on Friday morning, but that's OK because i'm reading email. The Friday out-of-the-blue started with the discovery that, even if institution X is going into production at the end of August, the definition of "into production" is from institution X's point of view. The people selling the product want to have institution X's data in production a month in advance to train institution X. Of course, the security work needed to suit real personal data in the system isn't done (to my knowledge, but i'm not directly involved with that), and the scheduling had been done for end of August. My team and i were also under the impression that we'd turn on other institutions in August, so we hadn't done our per institution work. (Because, you know, we don't know what those institutions are.)

So, when a colleague forwards me a schedule and asks if whatever mysterious little thing i need to do for institution x to go into production can be done to meet end of this month, i have one of those moments of despair.

How can we suit schedules if we don't know them? I hate not getting communication like this.

We had, of course, just decided that we could do work this iteration to make setting up institutions less demanding because we wouldn't know the institutions for another couple of weeks anyhow.

But no.

So i sent email about our Project's plan to do an installation at the end of the month in order to meet this need. But this is read by some folks as though it is a delay, that we are not installing this weekend. I've yet to understand why this assumption would occur: anxieties and jitteriness, i assume. However, talking those folks out of their panic did take time.

So: at this point i think folks should understand that we are going into production only supporting the demo data and that it will be an installation at the end of the month to support institution X. But the operations folks are apparently having difficulty with the security certificate: this is the thing that puts the "s" in the https, simplistically. They're worried about installing a wildcard certificate which will allow https://*.ourdomain.tld to work, and fear they're about to screw up regular old http://www.ourdomain.tld.

We meet on Monday to discuss what to do: one option is to purchase a certificate for https://demo.ourdomain.tld until we figure out the wildcard issue. I, of course, vote for that, as we cant use the wildcard until my Project installs some of the per-institution configuration at the end of the month.

(It's encryption keys for each institution's SAML authentication. If anyone knows a good white paper on creating secure central repositories of encryption keys instead of deploying the keychain with each application, i'd love to hear about it. Of course, we have the right people to figure this out on staff; they're just going on vacation for two weeks.)

So, this weekend's deploy has been cancelled as of Friday afternoon, and another installation that depends on our code has problems as well. My lead engineer and i debug although it's not clear to me that we are debugging the right thing. He is worrying too much, but he's raising valid concerns to every one of my, "But that isn't a problem because." At six i tell him he has to stop worrying. Take off. I realize that he is not as self regulating as he should be.

So, at 6 pm on Friday, i've not done the work for the day. I'm wiped. I turn to genealogy to refresh myself and end up working on it too late into the evening.

Saturday morning, i pick up the genealogy again. What seems so rewarding to my mind is a combination of the research and the relational database backed software to which i am switching. But reward an analysis circuit in my mind much like a tetris game, fitting data together in neat ways, with a continuous learn and reward curve. The element of repetition (what might seem tedious in the data entry) allows applying what has just been learned and provides the sense of reward: yes that is better, faster, more elegant than what i had been doing the day before.

The data import to the new software may have caused some problems, or perhaps those problems always existed: i've run some reports, and see places i need to go clean up details. Some other time.

I mentioned the asthma i felt on Thursday: i've had two waves of cankers in the week, the second wave bringing with it the additional sense of a broader malaise. My sinuses have developed a post-nasal drip (despite constant and consistent antihistamines) which has evolved to a thicker discharge. I haven't been taking the maintenance inhaler: i suspect the post nasal drip is part of this wheezy cough. I'm taing both inhalers now. There's a level of rash issues with new locations developing the prickly bumps and existing locations flaring. Friday i was bundled in a sweatshirt for part of the day, which may or may not be chills or just a cool room. I am either sick or having some sort of immune system flare. I'm not sure what the distinction is (guilt for not managing my immune system?), but my energy levels on Saturday were quite low.

I stayed distracted and Christine slept -- she's had back pain all week and a low grade depression -- until far too late in the morning. Breakfast at Hobee's was actually lunch, and on return home i ended up napping for some hours. I did work in the afternoon, but the monthly report with the milestones for the coming year (Project) and months (Product) are not complete, the task entries for the iteration remain unstarted. In the evening we did not go see "Knight and Day," which looks like amusing fluff, but stayed home to watch the Netflix movie "Blood Work," Clint Eastwood

Today's Meeting for worship is followed by Meeting for Business. Last Sunday i was drained by worship. The Meeting for Business seems likely to be intense this week as well. I weigh my commitments, to myself, to work, to the Friends community. Staying home, worshiping with Christine by sitting together for perhaps a shorter time, and working on those outstanding tasks seem to be the lowest drain on my energy and most likely to lead to peace of mind. I will miss the community time, but i don't think it's the tonic i need.

So, there's a little plan. I need to commit to myself: i am taking Friday off as vacation, possibly Thursday as well.

Christine woke this morning in a good mood, and then suddenly crashed again. Maybe we can find some joy today, as well. We have been enjoying the deck, our walks together, and the cats' affection.

In bad-good news, we realized food was spoiling not because our grocery's quality was going downhill, but because the fridge was set too warm. Fiddlesticks.