I've had a few distractions lately. Must call insurance company. Must call hospital billing office. Must go to PT. Must acquire car. As soon as I found the car, it was more must call insurance company, must get to DMV. Needless to say, some things have fallen by the wayside. Like homework, and complete and total involvement in engineering projects. Apparently the obsessive-compulsive disorder becomes inoperative when there's too much to obsess about. This could be a good thing.
This semester, computer engineering seniors take a software engineering class. We have this big, semester-long group/class project: a database for managing horse show data. Probably not too difficult if you know how to structure a database and have some knowledge of how horse shows work, but we…don't. My group comprises Mountain Girl, Humility Boy, and a kid I haven't worked with before. His alarm clock doesn't work too well and he misses class, so I guess I'll call him Alarm Clock. Since he's missed some project work meetings, he's been stuck with delivering the presentation of our proposal to the class. (Each group has to present a proposal and management plan and the professor will decide which management plan the class will follow).
Ordinarily I'd have everything all planned out, a basic idea of where to start the design, how to break down and schedule tasks. But my participation in the last couple work meetings consisted of writing down some very general basic steps for the design project and then it was back to must acquire car, must call hospital…
Today is presentation day. I spend the morning at the DMV, messing with tags and title transfers. (I did devote some time over the weekend to reading MySQL documentation.) The presentation is not on my horizon, hey, Alarm Clock is handling it, right?
AC goes last. Our plan doesn't offer much in the way of specifics and we didn't do too well in the fake details department. Poor AC finds himself saying, "Well, like the other groups—" rather often.
"Why is there a whole blank week in your Gantt chart?" the professor asks.
We all get a vacation? I think.
"Because Microsoft Project hates me!" says MG. "I put it in there and it wouldn't let me modify it! Augh!"
I've got to get my focus back. My group needs me.
390 words | October 6, 2004 08:41 PM | Ivory towerWelcome back to the land of the slightly more regular life.
That's funny about the horse show. I ended up writing a Horse Show program only because my wife was riding western and it was just embarrassing watching them do carbon forms and take 30 minutes to figure out the scores for 40 contestants.
In our shows I had to keep track of a couple things:
events
horse/riders
which events which riders were entering
the 1st through 6th place for each event
the total scores
Most of the work was just laying out stupid dialog boxes and doing printing in Win32. Never bothered with a database, I mean how much data are we talking here? 30k?
They used it for a year and it worked great, but the next year they went back to paper and pencil, because they were too lazy to carry the PC & printer from the office out to the arena. Oh well, go figure.
Thanks! Life is getting more normal all the time, which means I get to think about engineering instead of the day-to-day logistics of being an invalid. It's a nice change.
Well, for the software engineering class, the professor shows horses and is a database specialist, so that's why she came up with this project (she has the same complaints you did). It's a little more involved than just horse shows, the idea is to create a product that could be used by any organizations or individuals involved in horse shows (horse show associations, show organizers, riders who could log in to track their results, etc.). A program like what you designed is one of the modules we have to write. I'll be sure to not mention your system to my classmates.
Posted by: Nee-chama at October 10, 2004 07:17 PM