Day 53 (128 days to go…)

Well today was a fun day. It was the day of the meeting I mentioned previously. I knew we were leaving at around 9am so I woke up around 7:30 so I would have enough time to take a shower and get ready. Well it turns up things got moved ahead an hour. So just as I am getting up, Byrd comes banging on my door asking for me. I was just getting up so I was fine, but it scared my roommate to death. Byrd notified me of the time change and said to be ready by 8. Unfortunately that meant there was no time for a shower. I quickly got changed and got all geared up in my body armor. That stuff is heavy! We packed into our vehicle, all five of us, and got going. The trip was to serve several purposes – two separate meetings as well as dropping Amanda off at the airport. She is going on leave for about a month.

This is my first time out of the protected area since I arrived and was driven from the airport. I must comment again, the traffic situation is crazy. No rules. We also drove past one of the garbage piles. See we Americans (and other countries) are considered to throw away too much good stuff. So what they do is they take all of our garbage and dump it on the side of the road. People pillage through it for anything valuable. They also lead their livestock like goats to it to feed. After about a week they scoop it all up and dispose of it. It’s really kind of crazy. Below are a few pictures someone took of that and some other things while driving.

Once we got to where we were going, we all got straight to work. I went with Ryan to go talk about search. It was very informative as for the first time I saw exactly how people use the current search and how they want to use the new search. I saw what they needed, what was important and just general workflow of their jobs. I am going to have to dissect this information over the coming days, but unfortunately I think there are some issues with how certain things in the new search are currently. Certain things could be fixed easily with a database fix or training but other things will probably involve a code change. Any code change would mean things would have to go back to square one in terms of the testing and approval process. We are supposed to roll this new version in a couple weeks so I will have to make my report to the Theater Lead pretty quickly, and I doubt it will be good news. Unfortunately it just seems there was a miscommunication somewhere, and some very important features were missed in the requirements given to us. The meeting was good though, and I look forward to breaking everything down to see what path we need to move forward on.



~David