October 2007 - Posts
I'm tech editing a book, working late as usual, football game on and kids in bed. As I was going through the book, there was a quick sentence:
Be Pithy.
I gathered the meaning from the context, but decided I should look it up. Despite being a writer, I don't have a great vocabulary, but I do have a shortcut to Dictionary.com. It means be brief and forceful in your expression. A good idea when dealing with management and pitching an idea or arguing a point. You often don't get a lot of time to work with a manager on your one little project.
I hate contests. I mean it's nice to get people involved and I start out with the best of intentions with them, but going through entries and judging them isn't something I relish. I've been through 100+ entries and I'm down to about 20, working on trying to get the top 3 and then pick 12-15 more.
The top three are hard, actually 1 and 3 are hard. I've picked the iPod winner, which was a great Ode to SQLServerCentral. Being someone that's written poetry, I like the creativity, and the work put into it, so I'll award that one.
Maybe I should give up and just send out 20 shirts :)
Well, lots of mistakes. Here's a good example of one:
Friday Oct 5 mistake.
I decided to go the budget route to get started and see if this is interesting. So, if you like the podcasts, send a note to the webmaster at sqlservercentral.com and I'll see if I can get a little more investment from Red Gate. I'll probably buy a few things myself, but this recording stuff gets expensive quick.
I'll describe some of the equipment I used, but basically it's a mic, Audacity, and my rumbling, stumbling voice. In case you want to see how it goes, here's a shot (courtesy of my daughter) of my desk, the sound editing in progress and big Diet Pepsi by my side.
MicrophonesI had a logitech desktop microphone that plugs into a sound card, but I really couldn't get good sound from it. The audio was too low, hard to understand, so while I'd bought it years ago, the $15 investment was wasted money.
I bought a Shure C608 with a line level (1/8") plug that plugged into my Dell desktop, but it had some scratchiness and low volume levels, so I decided this was a bad idea as well.
This setup looks close to what I got for $50. I added a desktop stand to bring this up to about $65.
I decided one more try here since I'd heard a pre-amp makes a difference. The microphone had an XLR plug, so I went to the audio shop and spent $100 on an
M-Audio FastTrack USB device. This can take a line level plug, like a guitar, or a microphone XLR plug. I got the single plug version instead of the double for $200. If I need to upgrade, I will. One hint here, upgrade the drivers. I almost took this back until I did that.
I'd like to reduce the rumbling and scratching in my voice. I'll try this on the Mac, but I think I might invest in the
Blue Snowball Mic. It was recommended on
GeekBrief and they do a great job. For $150, I'd be at the place I am now, but I'd have a shock mount as well.
I did buy a pop filter, which is basically a screen. It helps suppress the "S" and "P" harshness in your voice. It was about $30 and worth it.
Software
So far I'm using
Audacity, recommended on a number of Podcast sites. It works well, it's easy to use and I can put together multiple tracks.
However, on my XP SP2 system, with 2GB of RAM and an AMD 3800 processor, it flakes on the second or third track sometimes. So I end up recording the short parts (intro, music credit, etc.) and saving those off as MP3 files. Then I record the long editorial and add everything else in. Not sure what's wrong here.
I'm likely to upgrade to better software at some point since the flakiness really bothers me.
I saw a very
interesting post about estimating software from Steve McConnell, of Code Complete fame. He compared his estimate of building a fort for his kids with the actual results and then talked about the mistakes he made. I decided to do something similar and I'm just getting the posting down, but I made some notes earlier.
I'm currently in process in building a loading shed. For those of you that don't know what that is, it's a three sided structure for horses to live in. As opposed to the barn, this sits out in the pasture and shelters horses from wind, rain, snow, etc. We wanted one (and by we, I mean my wife) so we could keep horses out in the pasture without having to bring them back to the barn regularly.
So here was my estimate.
- Planning/Design - I'd been looking at plans over time, but I thought I could sketch out the rough design with a materials list in about 30 minutes. I added about 20 minutes to measure the neighbor's shed first.
- Materials - 2 trips to the store. 1 to Home Depot for lumber, screws, etc. 1 to the ranch supply for the metal to cover it. I didn't have a timeline here because I'd combine these trips with other trips and would get them done as I could.
- Framing - I needed to set 4 posts for the corners and then frame horizontal stringers and a few joists for the roof. I thought a full day would get this done.
- Sheathing - I haven't done any work with metal, so I'm allowing two days to get this stuff up. It should be easy to screw on, but the corners, angled cuts, recharding the battery for the saw, etc. will waste time.
I started last week with these results.
- Planning - I went to measure the neighbor's shed and it took about 8 minutes to measure. However I asked him first rather than walking into his pasture and so lost about 20 minutes chatting with him. Good thing I'm not paid hourly. After that, it was about 30 minutes to sketch the design and write down the raw materials I needed for the framing (phase 1), so overall I was only slightly over.
- Materials - I went by Home Depot after taking my son to karate. We loaded up on materials, 12 bags of cement, lots of wood, and a few misc. screws and things. Again, good thing I wasn't paid by the hour, especially with the little kids along, but I knew better than to estimate a trip to Home Depot. I always get a little lost in there (grunt, grunt). However after the first weekend, I need more materials, so I'm at least due for one more trip to the hardware store.
- Framing - I'm about 1/2 a day in from a full day on Sunday. Granted there was time out for lunch and I was distracted by the Bronco game, but I got about half the framing done.
There's more to come on this, but first a few notes on things I missed, and which you probably miss in estimating things for work.
Design ChangesFirst I added a fifth post in the back, being slightly worried about wind and a 12 ft span. Then my wife decided a 12ft wide shelter doesn't work, so we need to go 16 and include a post in the middle and space for a panel. The contruction part of the design doesn't change for me, but it does mean I need to get more materials, so more trips. It also adds a little work.
Second I made the mistake of not getting into details with the client (my wife). Of course if you're married, you know that probably doesn't matter. :) (I love you, Tia) She'd asked for this to be built up on the west side of the pasture, high up the slope. As we started siting things out, we realized it was a steeper slope than we guessed. Not undo-able, but as we walked around, so spied a flat spot. And naturally this flat spot was on the complete other side of the 5 acre pasture, a good 700 ft from where a ton of materials had been dropped. OK, not a ton, but about a 1/2 ton. So we had time to move the materials to the other side of the pasture that I hadn't counted on.
BreakageThings go wrong. In almost everything we do, something will not go as planned. In this case we have this really hard clay soil in Colorado. When I'd dug a few holes for the posts around the barn, we'd sheered the bolt that connects the auger to the driveshaft. I'd purchased more bolts, but I'd forgotten about the issues. We got 1 1/2 holes dug and sheered another bolt. Fortunately I had a spare in the tractor, but only one. We sheered that and then I went to work by hand to finish the hole. We were delayed by my wife running to the hardware store (a much shorter delay than me going) to get more bolts. Then there was the Bronco game, which delayed me getting back out there.
WeatherI'm not sure what you equate this to, maybe some external influence or other tasks at work, but it gets windy here. And that makes for a miserable time. I framed out some side rails and the first roof angle, but I had to cut down the post in a blustery wind and by the time I got done, I knocked off for the day. Monday was again windy and I went to at least dig the last two holes, so I made some progress. But I broke two more sheer bolts (averaging 1/hole now). We had spares, thanks to some thinking ahead, but instead of having holes done, I need to finish them with the manual process. I also had to spend some time cleaning stuff up in case it rains. Overall the external forces delay caused more delays since I had a couple more tasks to do.
OverallAs Steve noted in his blog, the deadline doesn't matter and neither do the overruns. If I'd estimated this at 4 weeks, I'd still do it and I'll keep going. I'm not too far behind and I'm trying to track my work over the next week as I do something everyday to keep moving. I won't have the momentum of a single weekend, but by doing something every day, I keep some focus.
I don't think my estimate is too far off, but this is a fairly simple project. However it's only similar to, not exactly like, things I've done before, so I'm going at it a little blind.
Like most software.
Doing payments for articles, expenses, and a few articles. This is definitely a paperwork day. As much as I like the writing and other work on the site, and as much as I enjoyed DBA work, I hate paperwork.
We've automated quite a few things, but some things always seem to fall through the cracks. Ideally we'd have some sort of real-time application to enter expenses into, but I'd probably forget to take time to do that. At Peoplesoft we could read in our AmEx card expenses and mark them as corporate or personal, but that failed on a regular basis and didn't seem to save time.
There is probably only a limited amount of stuff that can really be done with this since it's so ad hoc and there should be some sort of control to prevent abuse of the system.