Dear Diary, musical, friends, school, tv

• Saw and enjoyed Sweet! The Musical. I am aware this partly stems from being tone deaf and unable to perceive things that irritate my more musically talented companions. I wonder what not being tone deaf is like sometimes, music is fun, I love music but I have very little ability to detect things like tone, pitch or key which are obviously deeply important to other people. I loved the fight choreography and felt many of the characters were well cast – particularly Sweet, Anya and Xander.
• Had goodbye coffee with RM before he takes flight and thoroughly demonstrated how good planning goes out the window when you’re in the same general physical vicinity and have mobile telephones.
• Went to a PhD seminar called ’When Communities Collide: The Convergence of Physical and Electronic Communities’ – it was about how people, systems and processes interact in geographical communities and there is now someone I wish to hunt down and buy coffee as a result = win.
• Caught up with cupidsbow  and a mojito which are a darn fine combination
• Leverage S02E09 was fun and I totally picked the reveal and the job which makes me happy
• Supernatural S05E01 was depressing for me, hopefully not for others
• Had quite possibly the worst period ever and spent almost the entire weekend huddled against heat sources and taking painkillers.
• Talked to my Mama a lot which makes me happy *waves to Mama* (she is one of my tact consultants)
• Listened to some podcast interviews of Buddhist teachers I have respect for; I find it settling and it gave me some perspective on some issues I’ve been fulminating on
• Read some books (it’s been a while since I had the space to do that but being tucked in bed with cramps helped)
• Collected some 35 articles on team building and communication in virtual teams which I now need to skim for meaningful information

AD&T Weekly Meeting

Too stuffed up to chair the meeting, bingeling jumped in and did a noble job *worships* Herein lies the update based on my reading the meeting transcript, the last week’s emails and, you know, ‘stuff’

• Colocation: Severs are racked, powered up and in the hands of our Systems team, we’re waiting for handover to AD&T so we can confirm the AO3 code works the same way on the Coloc servers as it does on the Beta server (we expect it to but we care enough to check) plus we want to do some performance testing
• AD&T News Post about Colocation: almost ready for posting – we’ve been holding off while Translations convert it into many languages and also so we can adjust the proposed dates if necessary - the server ordering has been interesting and not always in the good way
• Deploy Schedule: moved one week later, still counts as early October though :p
  
  • Accessibility: we’ll be making an actual project of Accessibility in Jan 2010, it’s something we’ve been trying to work on ad hoc and it really needs focussed attention and a serious review
  • Admin ability to post FAQ / Updates: coming along, I am really keen on this, I want to be able to make these posts on the AO3 itself so people can find them more easily. Go rustler! I also note happily that the Site Map is being rolled into this piece of work – yay! We need one :)
  • Admin: Abuse interface is progressing, OMG cal you are amazing
  • Bookmarks: most of the new code on Test now. I’m so happy to see the changes – it’s going to be a big change when you see it on Beta! Please remember it’s the first version and we’re expecting people to tell us what works for them and what doesn’t
  • Collections & Challenges: first draft for design of Collections is almost completed by our lovely bingeling. Having a full-time designer has been incredible and I'm going to cry when bing goes back to full-time study
  • Front Page: OMG so many opinions, so many designs. We could do this forever but we have settled on a final design so we have something we can use for Open Beta. I am freakin’ proud of the teamwork here, it’s hard when we all have different, strong opinions and I’m impressed at how well people have worked together to come to a final decision
  • Hoovering: also coming along; I see regular triumphant exclamations coming from astolat in the Coders chatroom. There were some long talks about how we’re going to coordinate importing archives that want to use the AO3 for hosting/backup/rescue. I’ve asked for a list from Open Doors so AD&T can make sure we can meet their needs (if there any special needs I’d like the design team aware of it now, rather than later). I’m keen to know who has what and how much, so we can work out how long our (currently ginormous) storage space is going to last and I’m hoping knowing what fandoms are represented can also help guide future outreach
  • Internet Explorer 7: Issues are up for grabs to coders. I’m really hoping we can get these in for Open Beta. IE6 is awful (and old and buggy), and IE8 doesn’t seem to need tweaking so much so we’re concentrating on IE7 right now
  • Testing: I have to wave a flag for our Testing team right now, they are chewing through the new code we've been dumping on Test at an incredible rate and their work is amazing :)
• Open Beta: Now looking at late Oct/Early Nov. We’re moving everything out by another week so we have time to get a) lots of time to test Coloc, b) lots of time to test the new Invitations code and c) some stability time on coloc+new code pre-Open Beta. On the loosely related subject of whether we should say "earlier" and "later" instead of "forward" and "back" when we’re talking about time I have to share this link from boingboing on The surprising links between anger and time perception

Finally, if you're looking at this and thinking there are things you want to do/say - feel free to share either in comments, or volunteering, or by messaging or whatever medium you're comfortable with. You are invited to this party