Work Journal for Monday, June 12th 2013

I left the house early because I was feeling crowded and stressed. It wasn't anyone's fault in the house, so I thought it best to just simply go. I didn't expect to spend the entire working day here. Actually, apart from seating being painful, it was a rather productive day. Most of the day was spent working on a new interaction I thought of before finishing work last night. Most of my previous entry was about how utterly dull "supported technology" slides are. Usually they're big tables, or methodical slide decks that can suck the life out of a 1980s horror movie corpse. I decided to do something else. I created a "world map" of technologies, then put similar classifications of tech on the same continent. You can hover over and see the tech's name. Click it, and learn more. And best of all? Skip everything else entirely. It took all day to create, but the result was some of the best course development I've done in what feels like months. It also effectively collapses most of the third module of the course into just a couple of slides. With that, I can focus on the most important bit -- how to use the WebSphere MQ extension. Bit of this are already written as well. I have an interaction that introduces the extension, and three demos that show how to use it. One of the biggest gaps, however, is how to deploy the bloody thing. While I did cover extension deployment in general, I can't escape the feeling that it'd be best to cover the entire process for MQ. There are lots of weird little processes with getting it running, and it feels like simply showing how it's done would be the most direct. This means I would have to write another demo tomorrow. Oh, how terrible. A generally mindless thing that would cut the procedural and conceptual BS and get to the bloody point? Sounds like a perfect way to spend a Thursday.