Notes on juggling...

How good a juggler you might be, external events may still cause you to drop a ball or two...

Ok, so now that the biggest deadline is behind me (well, maybe it was just a local maximum, i.e. downhill until it's uphill again and the next one will be even bigger), I think it's time to reflect on some issues and recap the learned lessons. I think the most important thing to note is that as competent a person (*cough*, that's still being debated), some things might not always work out. And then there are the other people, the other systems, the external stuff that you typically depend on. And they can fail too.

So, some concrete examples, then. I pulled off a small miracle by actually getting a working piece of software done and packaged by the deadline for the Computer Network assignment. Out of the two protocols, I implemented both, but there was some sporadic glitch occuring in the link-state routing protocol - I'll venture a guess that it's caused in a situation where the network contains more than one optimal route to a given node. The implementation of Dijkstra's algorithm that I based my solution on - as a typical Dijkstra implementation should do - only creates a spanning tree with single routes and only picks one of the optimal routes. I didn't think of this until it was too late, and didn't have any more time to start changing anything. But I guess I'll at least get a 3 from the exercise, a 5 if the assistant who's grading the exercise got laid the nigth before... And with some clever planning, I got my marketing exercises done too, though I must say that the essay on business-to-business customer relationship management was complete and utter bullshit. I think I only had about three or four actual points in the entire essay and the rest was just filler words and lacked all actual meaning.

The next deadline is on Thursday, and that'll be the 5th phase of the Software Development Methods project. Needless to say, that's looking somewhat problematic right now, especially since the SoberIT site is down right now and instead of using the 90 minutes on the train to work on the project, I ended up blogging this entry. So much for automatically assuming that the machines at the uni would be reliable enough to stay up. This isn't the first time that I've had to postpone work due to the SoberIT site blowing up.

Anyway, today there's a Christmas/recruiting party at Accenture, so that'll hopefully be fun. Hopefully this'll shine some more light on the actual future views on the consulting business and what sort of things would be available for a person of some technical competence and understanding of business. And tomorrow we'll be having a Christmas party with some of the guys, who were also trainees last summer at N, at my flat. Still have to go get a bunch of wine and stuff. And a cool Christmas hat. But alas, I guess I'll need to dedicate the entire Finnish independence day (6th of December) to doing the SDM project, so that'll cut back on the partying quota for Tuesday...