April 2014 State of the Blogger

Real life has gotten a little... interesting for me. I've taken on some new responsibilities at work, which is good for my job security and my prospects of maybe someday getting a promotion. It has also dramatically increased my workload all by itself... plus, we're looking at upgrading to the latest version of the software in early June. That means that we need to upgrade the test servers in time for some of our more experienced end users to test them, and that means...

Tuesday. We're making that upgrade on Tuesday.

It wouldn't be that big a deal by itself. I mean, yes, it's a big project and if anything goes wrong it could eat up hours or even days of my life, but once it's done it's done.

Unfortunately, this is the last week in April, and May is (as always) The Month Of The Festivals, when every city in North Texas tries to squeeze their events into that brief moment of nice weather before summer comes and tries to immolate us all. For me, this means last-minute updates to event websites; it means photography at the events, so that we have images we can use to build future websites; it means a heady combination of stress, exhaustion, and overtime which leaves me deeply ambivalent about the whole thing.

...And when we come out of that? Why, yes: it's early June. Time to update those live servers, and very probably everybody's clients as well. No matter how closely we examine the results of the upgrade on the test servers, doing it on the live system is still likely to go horribly, soul-devouringly wrong.

Still, once that's done, I can get some rest... No, wait. Once that's done, we have the other major software upgrade - the one that, if past experience is any predictor, has been subjected to a minimal and insufficient amount of testing and quality assurance; the one whose documentation is written by semi-literate monkeys who have a habit of copying and pasting quasi-relevant bits of older documentation, and who have never even heard of the concept of proof-reading.

...Not that I'm bitter, or anything.

Anyway, that one's scheduled for... late June? Early July, maybe? ...and it's guaranteed to be a horrible ordeal.

Somewhere in there, we have at least one other website that we're trying to migrate over to a Content Management System, so that department can actually keep their own information up to date. That means we have to finish building out their new site, which for some reason requires me to assemble all the links for the needlessly-antiquated scheduling system they insist on using. There's also another set of departmental web-pages which we've almost finished re-designing and re-organizing, and which are almost ready to replace the existing pages. That's probably no more than a couple of hours of work, if we can just find a couple of hours in here somewhere.

TL;DR: At any given point between now and the beginning of August, I'm very likely to be completely out of my mind with stress, exhaustion, and/or workload. I have no idea what effect that will have on the Blog o' Doom, here. But if I suddenly drop off the face of the Internet, it's almost certainly because my job is trying to kill me. Feel free to send help. Or cookies. Or rum. Rum would be good.