We had a meeting earlier this week explaining how it is that when we in our department underreport our billable hours, things suffer. Like our budget. If it looks like we’re so very efficient that we’re completing a project which should normally take about 450 hours in just under 15, then we’re going to be asked why it is, exactly, that we have 2.7 full time employees dedicated to that development. So it’s fallen to me to build a tool for our department that will allow each and every one of us to track all of our billable hours by 15 minute increments, and integrate it with our existing task tracking application. Given that the application we’re using to track tasks is full of cumbersome database structures and far too much "oh look at me aren’t I clever!" type code, reverse engineering it to make my new project work with it hasn’t been that easy. But today I got a prototype done, more or less, and I will definitely have an early version ready to roll out on Tuesday.
The development I do, by the way, is not recharged to any department. I’m just the infrastructure guy. So I produce no billable hours, so it’s far less important for me to track my time so minutely. I suspect that I will end up doing so, though. It’s just fair. Besides, it will be useful to have some metrics on hand for when I need to scope out how long it will take to produce yet another major hack in Moodle (hacking Moodle is about 90% of my job — and judging by what my boss has told me about the reaction to our software from other universities, I’m very good at it).
This evening we went and saw The Pirates of Penzance, which is one of the musicals that I really do enjoy. When I was a kid, my grandfather had a recording of the D’oyly Carte Opera Company’s production of that play, and I used to listen to it all the time: apparently enough so that I memorized it back then. I found myself mouthing along with almost all of the music and the dialog. The production we saw tonight was the Carl Rosa Opera Company’s production, and it was very well done. I’ve seen some productions that were more blatantly comical, and some that went far out of their way to bring in come contemporary and topical humor to the script. That can be okay, if done expertly, but my preference is to see the script unadorned, since hardly anyone does it expertly; and that’s what the Carl Rosa Opera Company did. After the show I remarked to the fellow who’d given us our tickets that the finale was different from what I had remembered, and he told me that the producers had actually gone back to an 1879 draft of the script, rather than the 1881 draft that is usually produced. An interesting exercise in literary excavation; I wonder why they chose to do it.