Real Work

I'd love to say that today went swimmingly well; but alas, it has not.

I got my "promotion" today and got to move into my own office. Paul and I have been sharing one small office since Thursday last week. OM Canada graciously gave us each a  huge 24" monitor to work with. We brought two of our own monitors as well so that we would have double monitors. (Once you have two, it's impossible to go back). Because of the way the desktop I was given was set up, I was planning on attaching the new monitor to my laptop and my own monitor to the desktop provided thus giving me....3 screens! I was pretty excited until my laptop failed to boot. Several times.

*menacing music*

This wasn't all bad, as they did give me a desktop to use and it's pretty quick for running Windows XP, but obviously they're not going to let me take it home. So, with a few hours of troubleshooting and some prayer we found out that the Boot folder on my laptop was corrupted and that my hard drive is possibly failing. That's bad news for sure, but Paul knows where to go from here to get my laptop back in working order. (Win for having a tech fiancée!)  I'm confident that by Wednesday or Thursday it'll be back in working order.

Someone joked to me during lunch that, "I hear you're running into some spiritual warfare on your computer!" I laughed; but as I've been thinking about it, I'm not so sure that it's far from the truth. My laptop has been running without any problems for awhile now and then out of the blue, several major files are corrupted. That kind of thing doesn't happen all at once. Spiritual warfare or not, God's got it under control.

So what have we actually done for OM Canada thus far? I know from experience that it's far better to start a project from an organized standpoint than to just launch into working, so we've been trying to get a schedule together of 1 week "sprints" and a way to track our sprints. We spent most of last Friday researching different free collaborative programs and have found an awesome project manager web application called EPM Live that has been working well for us. We have also been doing some analysis on the old site to see where we can make improvements. While a definite overhaul of the homepage and footer is needed, the rest of the old site isn't actually that bad. Tomorrow we meet with Greg, the graphic designer, and Raymond, our "boss", to go over look and feels. Hopefully by the end of the week we will have several wireframes drawn up, a navigational structure, and have a better idea of how to start building the new site!