BeMused

The kids and I are off to our annual outing at Camp Tochwogh, kind of our “End of the Year” outing with the YMCA Indian Guides. We’re leaving tonight, which will enable us to spend all day Friday there. It’s good fun, with archery, a climbing wall, canoes and kayaks, beach volleyball, etc. The kids love it, and we generally have a great time.

Hopefully, Gail will use the time she has with all of us productively. And by “productively”, I mean NOT cleaning house or doing laundry, but working on her pottery wheel.

Aside from that, things are wrapping up here at work. Today’s my official last day as QA (can we all say YEEHAW!), and come Monday, I’m officially an Interactive Media Developer. Damn, that’s a much cooler title than “Associate QA Engineer”…why, I might actually get business cards for the first time in 10 year!

I feel the need for another YEEHAW!!!

so….YeeHAW!

With the change in jobs, comes some last minute hurry-up-and-complete-this-project work. I’ve been trying to design an intranet site for our QA department. Originally I had stated that with all the requests (forums, polls, blogs, search function, etc), it would make sense to go with some sort of CMS such as Drupal or Mambo. I suggested to everyone on the committee to check out OpensourceCMS to check out various CMS portals.

Well, there was some suggestions (very few) and a thought here and there, and eventually it was decided that I should do something from scratch. Wee. So I’ve been working on it on and off for about 4 weeks. Well, just last Thursday it was discovered that the dropdown menu I was using wasn’t available for free to use on intranets. That was totally my fault, I didn’t read the licensing close enough. So I went back to the committee, told them the problem, and now, basically, I’m back to square one.

I’m going with Drupal, and I have to say, I’m really liking this CMS. It has clean code, several templates and modules to install, a good website and seemingly good support in the way of forums. I’ve gotten about half the site to where I want it to be.

Which is good. I only have four days before I leave QA and this needs to be done by then. Eep!

As I alluded to in my last entry, big changes are happening around here and now that I’ve actually got paperwork in hand, I can tell everyone that I am leaving the QA Field and moving on. Still within the same company, but no longer will I have to scan TRDs and PRDs and go through Test Cases and break stuff and file bugs. All quite boring. Actually, beyond boring.

My new title will be Interactive Media Developer, and what that means is I get to work on webpages, doing XHTML, CSS, coding to standards, etc. I SO can’t wait. FINALLY. Something creative, something I can point at and say “I did that!” and something I feel like I can really get into, really enjoy, and really be proud of.

Happy days ahead!

I don’t know why I haven’t been writing lately. Guess I just haven’t been in the mood, or nothing of importance to say.

Well I do have some news, but I’m not going to share it just yet. There’s still some “stuff” that needs to be taken care of, and as soon as it’s all cleared up, I’ll be more than happy to share it here.

In the meantime, things are plodding along. We’ve entered the poetry part in my creative writing class, and man, I just know I’m going to suck at that. I haven’t started revising my short-story yet, but as soon as the second revision is done, I plan on posting that here as well. I’ll never get better if I don’t get people’s honest opinion’s on my writing.

The weather was incredible yesterday (God, I obviously don’t have anything of value to speak to: I’m talking about the weather!). I rode the bike and took the long way home, enjoying the nice warm breeze on my face.

And things roll on…