RTFM
I still have people writing to me about not being able to schedule performance in the automated scheduling tool, but with a demo video, it was easy to deal with. I just need to find the timestamp of the video, and reply to them saying, “follow this”.
We were barely able to break even in last year’s concerts. I suspect this year’s concerts will be the same. I’m thinking about downgrading our performance space to the less glamorous one - it has no raised stage, only holds 60 people instead of 70, has no green room - but has a Steinway grand instead of Yamaha and is significantly cheaper. This I hope will deter the professional type who tend not to donate and not bring audiences, and attract more the enthusiastic amateur type that got us so successful in the first place.
It’ll be a reversal from what we have been doing the last few years - of attracting more professional talents and becoming more of like a performance organisation than a community organisation - but I think it’s more suitable to our niche and more sustainable.
- S
Mini vacation
La Professeure had a conference in San Juan Puerto Rico last week, so I joined her there last Friday so we could spend the weekend together there.
I went there the first time in 2016 for a work offsite; the next year I went again for a work offsite but that time La Professeure joined me for a weekend afterwards (basically, reverse of what we did this time). I was there again last year for the cruise to the Caribbeans with La Professeure and her parents. So, we have done a lot of touristy stuff in San Juan already.
This time though, we stayed at Puerta de Tierra (the first two times I was there, New Hip Company put us at Isla Verde), and it was much more convenient to get to places. The conference still had sessions on Saturday morning, so I walked by myself across to Condado, around the lagoon, and ate the chocolate grilled cheese sandwich at Chocobar. In the afternoon we took a sunset cruise on a sailboat - with La Professeure’s boss. It was manned by the same captain that took my group out for a cruise on my first visit there; I think he was touched to have a repeat customer. The next day we went snorkeling at Escambron beach. It was walking distance from our hotel so I wasn’t expecting much, but we did see lots of fish, coral and a couple of turtles there. We spent the rest of the day lounging by the pool.
Originally I was hoping to hike at the El Yunque forest, but glad I didn’t - at our age, this is more our speed.
- D
Moving project
The new quarter is starting at work and I have reassigned to a stand-alone project, and realized I have to be in charge of now. I’m still in the process of scoping it out, based on some complaints and some ideas. I am reminded why I don’t like being a lead.
However, my old project won’t die. We had discovered a bug two weeks ago that would cause change streams to stall (it’s an integration bug - our higher-level code didn’t play well with mine), and I had fixed it, but the fix didn’t get released yet because there’s a release freeze for a trade show. And just as the freeze was starting a customer ran into this bug.
So we wasted a whole week on it trying to work around the bug without releasing new code. Very disappointed.
- N
Loading comments...