my rant

a two post day!! that hasn’t happened in a long while – if ever… (i’m not gonna go back and check)

NEway… i’m at work, which in itself is almost a miracle seeing as how i’m working a VERY limited parttime these days. why you might ask? if i havn’t already answered that question before, i’ll do it now. the project i’ve been put in charge of is to create a demonstration CD of the toolkit used here at motion. a challenge to say the least, as i’ve never done anything like this before. in the beginning of the project which was about 3 months ago – i was given no direction and the planning stages for the cd were non-existant. if i learned anything from Bob Wood’s project management class in college, it was that there are three reasons a project fails, is over buget and/or behind schedule:

1) poor planning
2) poor planning
3) poor planning

oh how true that is. not only was i given no direction, i was never told the purpose of the demo, target audience, what we’re trying to do with the CD, etc. oh, i was promised the information and later on it was assumed that this information had been given to me, however, I NEVER GOT ANYTHING FROM ANYONE!!! (that’s a tender area for me right now)

it was cool at first, cuz i had to figure out the best software to use to create a project. i experiemented with a couple different titles – all being of the free variety or on a trial basis. i first tried a psGold or something like that and that didn’t do much for me and it wasn’t what i was looking for i then stumbled across macromedia director. of course the lack of experience with director was an obsticle to overcome, but i was able to get something put together to get a start, or an idea of what i thought was the direction this demo was going. boy was i wrong – and that’s when things got super fucked up (maybe even before this point).

oh i forgot to mention: there are three tools in the demo – one i was working on upgrading to a ‘version 2.0’ when i started, so i wanted to get that working and looking complete before i started recording any video or screenshots. two was a tool never before pitched to a client and people knew very little about besides the two guys who developed it (and they both are no longer with the company) and the third is something that NOBODY knows anything about and we cannot even install it in our environment, cuz there isn’t anyone who knows how to install it – cuz they’re the same guys who quit and developed the second tool.

back to the story: so now the project has taken on a few additional people who are much more important than i am, and who actually have other things to do during their day (other things that are apparently more important than this demo) whilst this is the ONLY thing on my plate. so we start working on it again – this time i stumbled across a software title called camtasia that will get the job done and isn’t too difficult to use and has the functionality that i’m looking for and creates flash files with ease, which is cool….

to be continued… i’m leaving work now.