There are two sides to my basement. The apartment, and the "games room". When I moved in the games room was partially complete but still needed some work. I've done renovations in almost every room, and lots of work outside.. now it's time to finish off the games room. Today Grandpa came over and we got started on boxing in the bulk head. We got most of it done except for the part by the windows which will need some special work to make it not cover the windows. Later we'll put in doors, drop ceiling, wood paneling, a built-in tv and built-in shelves. It's going to look great. I think we'll only be working 1-3 days per week so it could take a month before it's done. Finally my pool table can be assembled! It's been waiting patiently for almost 8 months now.

Lately I've been feeling a lot more stress than usual. We've got a project that never ends and new features have been requested weekly for over a year. A large number of new features or changes, and some big ones are supposed to be done by January, but I'm also going to be pulled off to work on 2 other projects very soon which will take up most of the time until then. Plus I'm feeling a bit stressed about preparing for this course I'm taking in January so I don't look like an idiot/newbie taking an advanced level course in a language I have no experience with.

Today I was at a client's for a 1 hour meeting, then a second 1 hour meeting which stretched to take my full day. There was a great buffet for lunch, but also I was trying to demo something and I swear not one thing I tried for over an hour worked. I got so stressed out my nose started bleeding. It turns out my data import program couldn't find data it needed to properly link new data which caused problems, and also I had an old version of a client program talking to the newer version of the server. The versions are not 100% compatible. That's not the first time my nose has started bleeding under stress. It happend 2-3 times this year. I know I have higher than normal blood pressure and it runs in the family. I might need to consider blood pressure medication like my Grandpa takes. I'm only 23!

It's been a while since I posted last. There's just so much going on I haven't had a chance to sit down and type something. This past week I went to Atlanta with 3 other IJW employees to meet with NCR and train them on the installation of our checkin kiosks. The weather was great down there (mid 20's C) and we had a Fry's Electronics around the corner. We don't have that in Canada. I was impressed with the size of the store. It felt like 2 or 3 times larger than a Walmart, packed full of all kinds of electronics. I spent a few hours in there and picked up some goodies.

I was really impressed with NCR's building. It was huge, obviously had an interior designer dress it up, and there were so many cubicles. That place was huge. Maybe one day IJW will be that large.

The first night in Atlanta we had dinner at a place called Longhorns. After dinner I decided to have desert. I chose the Chocolate Stampede. It looked like a slice of some kind of chocolate cake. Little did I know I was going to get half the cake! I asked her why it's so big, and she said "well it is a chocolate STAMPEDE..." Wow. Enough to feed 4 people. I ate half, took the other half to my hotel room and ate it the next night. It was kinda neat.. my body found a way of telling me when was enough. Basically both nights, when I got to a certain fork-full it felt like I was going to puke so I spit it out. Nice eh? :) That was some heavy cake.

I've been working on and off on the Magma project a lot lately (mostly on) and this past week has been quite important. I worked with the front desk staff and trained most if not all of them on inputting tasks and monitoring them. I also worked with the engineering staff on using the PDA's to get tasks and complete them. Things have worked out really well. The front desk staff were all amazed at how little they needed to learn to use the system and how easy it is. Engineering have said the same thing. One guy high up said that there is no other product like Magma out there and that this will be a huge success in hotels everywhere. I've been working 10-12 hour days lately to keep things moving forward and today it was decided to go live with the system! Everyone was quite pleased. Hopefully there are no serious issues and it helps them do their work more efficiently. Several follow up meetings are planned.

Crescendo has been mostly done since it's roll out in July though there were still some non-critical features that hadn't been implemented yet. I've been on and off the project for months and the other day finished adding the last of them. I'm quite pleased at how this project has been almost bug free since it's release and how well accepted it is with the group of users. One of the new features I added was the ability to form-fill PDF files and store a history of the files generated. This is used for contracts. The original document is created in MS Word, exported to PDF, then brought into Adobe Acrobat to have form fields laid on top. Then it is brought into Crescendo and it just works. The trouble is that the PDF library I used to form-fill and merge the FDF with the PDF costs $2500 USD for unlimited royalty free distribution. I've looked at all the free ones and they don't do what I need. Since the software has to work offline I couldn't just buy a 1 server version. Once the client has purchased the license then I'll release version 1.1.0 of Crescendo. 1.0.0 had one of the two major modules complete and the second mostly completed. Sometime this year I think we'll be adding a 3rd major module to the system and when it's fully functional and implemented it will become 1.2.0 Well I hope this entry didn't put you to sleep!