Hi team. Wednesday night, who woulda thunk that I'd still be blogging after a whole week? Wowsers.

Mrs M is as tired as something really tired at the moment. As I mentioned in an earlier post, she is a teacher of year ones - I guess that might translate to "first graders" in other parts of the world. They're pretty trying at the best of times, and I imagine it's even a bit more of a hard slog with a rapidly expanding baby bump, hormonal changes and all the other new experiences associated with being pregnant.

To stretch her even further, she is currently doing the role of Assistant Principal for this term. It's a fantastic opportunity, and I'm pretty gosh darned proud of her because I know she's so well respected in her school and the selection for this job is just confirmation of that. But it's also an added strain: a new role to learn, the pressure of trying to make a good impression to validate the Principal's faith in her, and extra duties involving some work at home make her quite the tired young lady. Anyway, the role will end when she goes on maternity leave at the end of this term, in about 8 weeks. After that she'll be able to get a good rest. After building us a new pagola, painting the back fence and putting in a retaining wall. I mean, all that spare time and all...

Heh heh. Just kidding, wifeykins.

I might just add that as I write this I'm listening to the band Tarkio, who were the former band of Colin Meloy, now lead singer and writer for the Decemberists. If you're into beautifully constructed songs and haven't heard the Decemberists...oh words fail me. Tarkio was pretty brilliant too.

Ok, what else....oh I had two incredibly boring meetings today. One of them doesn't bear describing. The other one: we've just built a 'pilot' release of a new website. It's called a pilot for the same reason a sit-com has a pilot, i.e. so the stakeholders can look at it before it's in general release and decide if there's any drastic changes needed, or indeed if the whole thing can go live to the general public at all. It was made clear in all of the official documentation between the customer and us consultants that the pilot release would be completely devoid of any customised look and feel - it would be a "bare bones" site just showing the functionality, and the more visually appealing look and feel would be part of the next release. Got it so far? So, a few weeks ago we released the pilot and handed it over to a representative of the customer, who will test the site on behalf of them and sign off if it meets the specification. During the handover, we constantly reminded this person of the agreement that NO LOOK AND FEEL CUSTOMISATION IS PART OF THIS RELEASE. We could tell it didn't really sink in.

So we got his testing results document last week, and it was predictably full of "failures" where he expected it to look better, or for some text on the screen to read differently. Which part of NO LOOK AND.... do you not understand?!? How difficult is that to understand? Anyway, today's meeting was about how we would respond to the customer. I realise we must be professional and respond nicely to them. I just thought my suggestion to my boss that a simple two-word response would suffice could have been given more consideration.

Funny I don't seem to be any closer to that pay rise. Weird hey?

Righto, that's it from me.
cheers,
Macca