Clearout Week continued, finishing Day 3 today. Team leads have set a goal of closing 100 tasks by the end of the week. Fortunately, closing an obsolete task as “no action” or merging a duplicate in to another task also counts as closing a task. I may have been pressured to close a task that probably deserved more attention than it received.

But there will be prizes if we close enough tasks! One of the prizes is virtual badges to adorn our avatars on the task management system. As I am an administrator of the system (and the person who is in charge of the care and feeding of the system), I could give myself a badge whenever I want. In fact, I have enough power over the system that I could shift the permissions domain for badge-creation that people could only create and edit badges during certain phases of the moon. Have I mentioned this before? One of the built-in permissions modules has a moon-phase option. This is delightful. This is more delightful than some sort of bug badge.

Due to poor planning on my part, some of my Clearout Week tasks may not get done by the end of the week. I’m rewriting a cron that mangles the database in such a way that every time you want to test it, you need to restore a few tables on your test server to their previous state. It might also set some values in a cache somewhere to stop it from running again if it tries to run too soon; I might also need to fuss with my computer’s clock.

One of my other tasks might not get done because if it goes badly, the live server may have a little bit of downtime. And it seems polite to let the users know with more than a day or two in advance of that the live server might go down during business hours (when these users typically expect it to be working flawlessly). Assuming that things go well, they wouldn’t notice anything. But can you really count on everything going well? It might make sense to schedule this outside of business hours, but I want to be sure that there are helpful people around because “phone a friend” is not the best situation to be in when the server is broken and your colleauges are not really your friends and they don’t use the phone. Oh, and we have an external deadline to complete this task in the next 30 days.

And then there is the task to move some files from one directory to another and change the values that are checked for by one particular function. This is either going to be delightfully trivial or a massing heckin’ nightmare.

Since it is always hiring season, I helped interview someone today.

Speaking of seasons, we are having a season today here in San Diego! It is called “winter,” and it is not even ironic winter. I wore my winter coat! It has been so long since I have worn my winter coat that it still had a drycleaning tag from back when I lived in Knoxville. It was 39 Fahrenheit degrees this morning.

If this weather keeps up, it will be too cold to go out in a t-shirt. Which is a shame, as if we reach our 100 task goal for the week, we get to design an exclusive t-shirt for the team.