dianaschnuth

For the longest time, I used a simple blue square next to my name (in Avant Garde font) as a logo of sorts for myself. It was easy to recreate in various applications, like Word, but it still gave me some identity.

I’m jumping on the Photoshop bandwagon now, updating my cute little blue square into something a little fancier:

(The tagline may or may not change. I decided to go with the painfully truthful schtick for now.)

That was fun. Now to come up with some more thumbnails for the actual site.

I think that the current incarnation of my portfolio website must hold the record for the longest-running web design I’ve ever created without redesigning.

That streak may be broken soon.

I’ve got the itch to redesign my site — especially since I’ve learned SO much more about stylesheets since I first designed my current portfolio site. I need to fix my freelance (aka “services”) section to reflect what I’m truly comfortable freelancing, punch up the design a bit, and update the examples of my wares. Maybe remove the stuff from back in 1998 that doesn’t look so hot compared to today’s standards. I also need to make sure everything works in IE, Netscape (I guess), and Firefox. Everything doesn’t right now.

I don’t think I’ll redo it in Flash, although I really should put some of that pricey (for me) Flash workshop to use. I get so much stupid blog traffic from Google, though, that I’d rather my portfolio site be indexable.

Sooo… I may be embarking on yet another project. Hopefully I’ll actually finish this one, or at least have the decency to quit it before I get in too deep.

Update, 10:40pm: I hate it when I get the design bug. For inspiration, I go and look at sites like Cameron’s, and then I wonder if I’ve really ever discovered my own design style at all. I never think my shit looks slick enough, no matter how much my husband assures me that it kicks ass. Damn.

Update, 10:45pm: I should totally make my own “blogroll” database. I could easily make one of those little popup windows and populate the current URL and add it to my own SQL database and even make little icons for my links later, if I wanted. And maybe even a “shoutbox” of my own, too, although I’d have to make sure I didn’t leave any security issues out there. …But I was talking about redesigning my *portfolio*, not tweaking my blog. Right…?

Tomorrow’s going to be a mighty early morning. James and I are getting to work at 7:30am — half an hour early for me, a whole hour early for him — to put the finishing touches on the Loan Corrections database.

It’s been nearly three months that we’ve been working on this database, and it’s finally reached completion. For now. The next step is developing databases for other departments within the Loan Servicing umbrella. We have meetings scheduled with two out of three supervisors: one on Friday, one on Monday. After our preliminary meetings, we write synopses/proposals for each department’s potential database and submit them to our supervisor, who will then submit them to his supervisor, who will then decide which department gets first dibs on us.

We haven’t been promoted, per se, and we haven’t gotten a change in pay or job description. We have been removed from the main brunt of Loan Corrections duties indefinitely, though, and are getting beaucoup experience. If they don’t change our MRs (Major Responsibilities), we can just leave. By the time these other databases are complete (and after I’ve safely taken maternity leave sometime next year), we will have amassed enough experience to get a better job elsewhere. Then Loan Servicing will have a bunch of databases with no administrator, and Application Services will have to support even more products made by “rogue programmers” (their words).

That said… I probably shouldn’t have indulged in that 90-minute nap today. It’s going to be a challenge to go to bed early enough to wake up at the buttcrack of dawn tomorrow.

During the past couple of months, I’ve alluded to a new job function I’ve managed to acquire at work, but I haven’t gone into detail. Now that I’ve been doing it for nine weeks, though, I think I’m good to let the cat out of the bag. It’s really not much of a bag, to tell the truth, but I’ve been hesitant to jinx myself. 🙂

It all started when our boss, Eric, was looking for someone to “volunteer” to do 1098 duty for tax season. See, people get statements of how much interest they’ve paid on their qualifying loans (usually mortgages), so they can claim it as a deduction. The job of sending duplicates and making corrections to these tax forms is big enough that two people need to be taken out of the normal job rotation to handle it.

I almost got volunteered (by my boss) to do 1098s, but he decided to sleep on it, and ended up choosing someone else for the job. (*whew*) While my boss was giving me the news, Scott (our trainer and my cubemate at the time) mentioned that, if Eric wanted to put me on something different, I knew how to program databases.

Flashback to a couple weeks prior. Some people from Application Services (the people who do most of the techie programming stuff) came to check out our workflow, and were absolutely aghast that we were logging in all of our requests for loan changes (our department’s main function) in Excel. We were getting probably 200-300 requests a day, by email, fax, interoffice mail, and postal mail, and every one of them got logged into Excel, as proof that we received the request. Application Services suggested to our boss that we should be using a real database, like Access — a suggestion that a few team members had repeatedly made in the past, but one that now seemed like a really good idea, since bonafide codeheads suggested it.

Back to me and my boss in my cube, and Scott “outing” me as a geek. It didn’t take Eric long to ask if I wanted to work on the Access database, and it took even less time for me to agree to it. My co-worker buddy, James, had already started on a database a few months before, on his own, and with Eric’s permission. I told him what was up, and asked if I could use the basic database as a jumping-off point. He agreed, and I agreed that this was *our* project, especially since he’d started on it first, and since he knew Access much better than I.

(Funny story: Scott later said that he was in Eric’s office after our cube meeting, and Eric said to him in a scandalous whisper, “I didn’t know Diana was a geek!” Neither of them were sure whether it was something I was comfortable with, apparently. Being called a geek, I mean. I assured them both later that I’m quite secure in my geekiness.)

So, for two weeks, I did my normal job and worked on the database. Luckily, my spot in the rotation for those two weeks was boring and simple and I got done with it by Tuesday or Wednesday both weeks. By the end of those two weeks, James and I had laid out the structure of the database, gotten most of the forms working, and started thinking about what kinds of reporting we’d need to do. We weren’t comfortable with it “going live” yet, though. Not nearly. I told Eric so when he popped his head into my cubicle and asked if it would be ready for April.

Of course, when he told us that we could both get off the rotation to work on the database only, we compromised and agreed to have the data entry portion ready to go in one week, by Monday, April 3rd. We’ve been off the rotation ever since.

I’ve gone from never having used Access in a real database situation (CS 100 doesn’t count) to learning how to build union queries and establish relationships and implement multiple tables with foreign keys and enable referential integrity and all sorts of geekery that I had no idea how to do two months ago. (Actually, some of it I could have done in FileMaker Pro for Macintosh about six or seven years ago.)

As soon as we get our department’s log stable and “finished” (as much as we’ll ever believe it to be), we’re going to be pressed into service for other departments who could use similar tracking databases. James and I have been agonizing over this, because neither of us get paid enough to be a Database Administrator, or even a programmer. This project we’re doing because we enjoy using our brains and skills and getting paid for it. Any other projects would be moving into the realm of potentially being taken advantage of by management.

We talked to Eric today, and laid it out for him (nicely). We basically let him know that, if we’re going to be creating databases for other departments, it wouldn’t be fair for us to still be taking up space in his department, but not doing any actual loan corrections work. We told him that we want to have our job descriptions changed before we do work for any other departments, and that a change in pay grade would be mighty nice, too. We didn’t have to be total dicks for him to get the point, which is good. He says he’s going to go to his boss and see what her thoughts are regarding our positions.

It’s really hard to stick to our guns when it comes to compensation, especially when we’re both still stoked to be off the job rotation. We’re waiting for someone to pinch us and wake us up, or for the other shoe to fall, or for some other dramatic cliche to happen.

At any rate, that’s what I’ve been doing for the past two months. And it makes going back to PHP/MySQL both easier and harder in different ways. (Not IsNull() doesn’t work so well in PHP, but leaving out the Then in my VB If-Then statements doesn’t work so well, either. For the geeks out there.)

For once, I’m sated.