Wiring: DONE!

Ok ok, I'll crawl out from under my rock to fill you all in on what I've been up to lately. You know, I've taken some criticism in the past few days about not updating my site much recently. My answer to that? Tough. I've just got too much to do to bother writing much here. Sure, I have some time right before bed some nights, but I'm usually so brain-dead by that point that I can't remember what I did that day! Just for kicks, I checked my FTP list in GoLive tonight to see how many websites I've been sticking my hands on lately. Seven. Seven sites, with some sites taking a lot more of my time than others. But, I'll stop complaining about how busy I am and get on with it.

We finally got to get into the house last night and run my ethernet cable. We had our pre-drywall meeting yesterday afternoon where we marked the cable and telephone jacks on the wall. The good news is that the electrical inspector has already come and approved everything. The bad news is that the insulation guy had just started putting up big, pink, itchy insulation upstairs. We went home after the pre-drywall meeting and then came back around 6:00PM to begin running our cable. Finding power was a bit of a problem (as Eric and I expected), but we managed to pull power from the next building over using two very long extension cords. Mike showed up and (using some of his monkey-man) skills was able to climb up into the rafters of the house to help us pull cable. Olivia was extremely helpfulas well. She pulled cable, tacked down cables, and showed us how Go-Go dancers would shake their booty in an unfinished closet. Most of all, thanks to Eric for his guidence and knowledge of all things electrical-related. I'm really glad to finally have this done. I had really been looking forward to it, but the waiting part was killing me. Drywall should go up either today or tomorrow. The Ryan guy said that we should be getting our sidewalks next week sometime. He says that we're still on schedule to be closing on the 30th of September.

Work has been going well. It's been pretty busy the past few days. I've been trying to find (and make) more work for myself to do on the Intranet. For example, I took a (proverbial) step back and looked at our Help Desk section of our Intranet the other day and almost lost my lunch. It's hideous! And half of the stuff is either outdated or not relevant anymore. So, I made up my mind that I was going to begin re-designing the Help Desk portion of the Intranet and make it really great and useful. I did what I always do: think of ideas that push the limits of what our department thinks we should do...and then I try to think of things just outside that area. For example, I think it would be great to have a page where Martin folks can submit a Help Desk call ticket via a web form. The idea has been brought up before and shot down. However, when I suggested it to our project manager yesterday, she seemed to think it was a pretty cool idea. It's simple to create, easy to use, and it just creates yet another method of communication between our customers and us. In other words, it's just another medium for them to inform us of their problems. I can't see how it could go wrong. I really love brainstorming for new ideas. I really miss our late night Whim brainstomring sessions we used to have back in school.

Ok, back to work.