Thoughts of Canada Day

Does anyone else know what they are going to do for Canada Day? I don't know right now. I heard that the stuff (concerts) downtown were going to blow, but that is from the guys over at X FM, do you never know how good that info is. I figure that I'll just be wandering around downtown if it's not too hot. This week has been pretty much a write off. Friday was the only day that I got a decent amount of work done, and I think that is because just about everyone else was out of the office. Thursday was blown because of a department picnic at Lac Lemi after listening to a consultant go on about iterations in the morning. *yawn* It was okay though except for the managers in the department keeping on asking "how are we going to cost that?" Sheesh. Give it up people.

One of the interesting / funny stories the the consultant told us was how it is hard sometimes to sell iteritive developement to customers. One of the first things he said: don't make your mock ups too good. This is because when the customer sees something that looks like the end product, and they can click it, the just go "well, connect it so that it works". Riiiight. It's akin to seeing a plastine car at a car concept show that you can reach out and touch, and then just expect them to drop an engine into it and make it work. Doesn't quite work that way.

The second story was about tackeling the hard issues first. Address high risk things early. Well, he told us about a project that he worked on and the biggest concern that all the tech people had was if they could get these three computers to comunicate going through all the networks that they had to (he didn't get into too much detail). Anyways, they worked for an iteration (many weeks at least) and were able to get things working using ping. Well, they were really happy with this, and brough the customer in to show them. So the guy comes in and they show him the three computers that show the pings on the screen. The customer looks at this and says "I paid how much money for this?". Oie. I guess that it is hard to explain some things to people when the issue is not in their field at all.

Irish Tenors - Waltzing Matilda