So I've got my self a pretty cush part time gig, and I like it a lot. Most of the time it's no stress at all. My boss is cool and laid back and we have really relaxed deadlines. I also can work from home so I work around nursing my baby and talking to my kids and trying to spend time with my husband. Sometimes the hours really suck, but that's life, right?
Every once in a while though things are not the little relaxed pseudo-utopia of my preference. Every once in a while there is a concrete deadline, typically one of my uber-cool bosses has a meeting to beg for money and well they want a stable update to show off. This week is one of those weeks. It's also one of the downsides of working at home, I don't just stumble into my boss in the coffee room.... so I don't always get a lot of heads up.
This week is one of those not a lot of warning weeks. About the middle of last week my boss let me know that there would be a big meeting coming up. No problem I thought I'm in the middle of a bunch of stuff, but I do try to keep an example running, and the code I thought, isn't that far from working. Except, it is that far from working. Going into last weekend I ended up going on a code purge.... it appears some subroutines I thought were good were crap and had to be completely rewritten, must've wrote those while on too many pain killers, hmm. (although after digging through more subroutines they may not have been that bad as I had to make changes for code I forgot about that wasn't working there.)
Then things got worse. Because my server got hacked (and not in a skillful manner either) we locked it down like well, like a server should be. That means I have to have a campus IP to login to it so I have to VPN, which was working, but the SFTP application that I use to transfer files and update the code refused to initialize, it'd connect, but the session would never start. One and a half days of crunch time WASTED trying to get back into my own server... there was actually more than one problem and in part of an attempt to fix it I made a third... points to Murphy.
Now I'm back in, thanks to a little trip to the local coffee shop, my boss's computer, and our tech guy at the other end of the state. Man do I ever miss having my husband as my IT support (he used to be).
Last night Murphy pulled out all the stops! We had a storm that people will be talking about for at least the rest of the year. There may still be parts of town without power! Let me just say, you can't work over the internet without power, regardless of how many UPSes you bring into the equation. Of course with the noise from 80mph wind gusts waking up two of my kids and the house UPSes screeching for over 3 hours, I didn't get to sleep either... more points to Murphy.
Still with a few hours before my presentation and another day before my boss's I finally have a working demo online. It's far from perfect and there are a ton of places I beat my perfectionist tendencies back reminding myself that my time is very limited, and perfection usually breaks. I will go back and photoshop the pictures into graphics later, I'll fix the labels in the output section later, I'll instal buffering, run removal, and the restart scripts later, and eventually if there is time I'll work up some css code to make it all look nice, maybe.
I may just squeak through this one....maybe (as long as we don't get hacked the night before the presentation again.)
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