Monday, February 18, 2008

Attack of the Shuffle

I'm not quite sure what happened. I'll blame college. No, I'm not talking about a tattoo, piercings, marriages I've had to annul, restraining orders for or against me. I'm talking about something much worse and much more regrettable - Bad ipod Songs.

I have no idea where they came from, who gave them to me, who put them on my PC, or what someone slipped me before going on Napster binges in my youth, but it's utterly disgusting what's on there.

Some things I've had to delete because if I heard them again I'd probably hurt some piece of technology or myself (some are songs, artists, or both)

Dionne Warwick
Tired of Toein' the Line
Dennis Deyoung
The Motels
George Benson
Eddie Rabbit (on there twice, I must really hate him)
Cliff Richard
Little River Band
How Bout Us - Champaign

And finally, Christopher Cross (not sailing, that rocks, but Think of Laura).

So yeah, I seriously have no idea why I have those. I hope whoever gave me those songs isn't a friend anymore, in fact, I hope they're balding or something appropriate for their bad taste.

And to make this post not just ramblings with no point (into ramblings with a slight point), I get the opportunity to dig up metrics for a client for the last 6 months. When I went there about 6 months ago I got to sit down and dig up as much as I could in about 5 hours. Naturally you probably miss a thing or two since you don't know what to expect, but I hope this time around I'm a bit more prepared. They're using a software version of WebTrends, 7.5 I think, so I have to try to remember what their particular non-enterprise version is capable of.

That's generally one of the biggest pains with some of these tools. Know WebTrends? Sure I do. Know all the reports that are missing in the Marketing Package vs the Commerce Package off the top of my head? Not really. And if you don't own both of those you can't really figure it out until you look at one and say "Oh, X report isn't there." or "Looks like I can't use Z dimension."

Understand all there is to know about a site in 6 hours.. It really is a good challenge. "But I've run a marathon! That's a challenge!" and I say a bigger challenge is to really want to run one but sit and eat donuts instead. Without guilt. I don't do silly things like marathons and even I have guilt, but I'd sooner be comfortable about that than know everything there is to know with one sit-down. I'll see what I can do though.

If it has any positives, their little kitchen area, if you don't get lost trying to find it (their building was designed to look cool from the air, which means it's a pain in the butt to navigate from within) has some sweet amenities. Since I will only be there for one day I can steal someone's lunch without much recourse. I'm sure there's someone with a history of yogurt theft that will be a much more likely target of suspicion, so I'll skirt by. I'm just kidding, I would never do that. Yogurt? Ok I'm kidding, I would never steal anything, just in case you all are doing your own investigative work in the background. But what's sweet is they have free fountain soda. And coffee, but who cares. Everyone has coffee at work, but does everyone have free coke straight from the pipes? Hell no. As good as the drink options are, though, the food is just the opposite. I can't remember all of what they have, but I do know that I resorted to eating Saltines. This is a food service company too, which makes it more tragic.

So, have any of you had any challenging tasks such as dropping into a client's locked-down system for only a day and having to rip out as much as you could to analyze later? I fully expect my audience of 2 to chime in.

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