Tuesday,
November 27, 2001

And a great light dawns

Daily word count: 1,670

Word count for the month: 28,065

Ever have an epiphany? This has been a day of them -- I'm finally starting to understand the whole point behind this suite of tools I'm documenting, which is a massive relief. I didn't realize until I got into it with the lads how scared I'd been about having to write help text for the tools -- they just seemed so damn incomprehensible from the engineering documents I had. Now, they're only slightly incomprehensible!

*badaBUM*. Yeah, yeah, I know -- I'm just shocky from relief. I had this horrible visions of spending a week here and going home just as clueless as I was at the start of the week. But no -- Len and Mahesh have been quite kind and helpful about explaining the tools to me, in between a buttload of meetings (we have guerrilla training sessions -- I'll dash into Mahesh's office, he'll explain a function to me, then he runs off to a meeting while Len explains another function, then it's Len's turn to go to a meeting while Mahesh has to fix some programming, so I go back to my temporary desk and play around with the tool a bit until they have another free block of time. In a weird sort of way, I kinda prefer this sort of training -- it works better for me than sitting in an office for eight straight hours and trying to learn the whole tool in one huge gulp).

When I'm not working with them, I'm hacking away at the documentation plan I'm going to present at our weekly meeting or cleaning up some tasks on some of my other projects. All in all, this is shaping up to be a very good week, and I get to drag Lisa Beard out for dinner and a Poe concert tomorrow, too.

Damn, but I love San Francisco!