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- May 16, 2006
Rick’s Pure CSS Task Order Up! Markup
May 16, 2006Read moreRick Benavidez sent me a link to a pure CSS markup version of the Task Order Up that he put together. It doesn’t do anything, but it’s still cool if anyone wants to make something fancy out of it.
Thanks for sharing, Rick!
UPDATE: added a link to Rick’s post about it.
- May 15, 2006
Storybits #002
May 15, 2006Read more
I am thinking I should make a separate blog for this stuff, but in the meantime here is the next fragment. This is really embarassingly horrible, but in the interest in establishing a baseline of something, I’m posting it anyway.
I guess it’s a couple of ships, badly colored, on a hanger with a glowy planet in the background. Targeted?
This reminds me of an idea I had a long ago about having a planet as the base of a mothballed fleet, and there were these kids growing up on the planet not realizing they lived in a derelict fleet; the town hall was the primary hull of some kind of old ship, built around with brick, the church was an old shell of some colonization module, etc. Some kid then starts asking questions about where things come from, and is told to concentrate on his apprenticeship until he stumbles upon something cool that bring everything into question. The stars are reachable, and his people apparently came original from there. Some of those old ships, some hundreds of years old, are still active. And there are some forces out in the universe, recovering from a galactic war, are rounding up ships of the old line too.
I imagined those ships would be huge and architectural, not these puny things. Hm.
- May 15, 2006
Intermittent Task Tracking
May 15, 2006Read more
I’ve been using the various Task Order Up! variations for the past week, and in general I like the idea and the card format. I’m particularly liking the 4×6 card version 5: they’re small enough to keep handy and fit in my back pocket, yet big enough to be noticed on my desk; the 3×5 cards tend to get a little lost.
What’s interesting: a different kind of job tracking methodology is starting to fall out of this, which is great because I’ve hit a wall with intermittent projects. I have about 5 or 6 client projects of constantly shifting priorities. Sometimes these projects go dormant for a week or two; one has actually entered deep hibernation due to an internal reorganization.
As I’m not particularly adept at juggling, I’ve adapted the Task Order Up into something that retains the check-rail compatible qualities, but is more suitable for tasks that are spread over a longer period of time.
Enter the Intermittent Task Tracker.
The Basic Idea
The basic idea behind all the card-based things I’ve been doing (other than I love cards) is the maintaining of continuity. Compared to tools like the Task Progress Tracker, the Intermittent Task Tracker focuses on maintaining a collection of cards instead of an overall project list. If you like coming at your projects from a top down perspective, you’ll probably like the Task Progress Tracker format. If you like thinking more on the details of a task level, then the Intermittent Task Tracker (and the various forms of Task Order Up!) may appeal to you more.
Another way of looking at it: The Task Progress Tracker is great if you like one piece of paper, and maintain a folder of your projects as your continuity-maintaining device. The Intermittent Task Tracker is great if you like multiple cards, and have a recipe box, thumbtack, or check rail system. That’s my theory, anyway.
Compared to the Task Order Up: The ITT is designed for use over a period spanning more than a week, when you have projects that don’t have hard deadlines. Another project category would be hourly-rate type jobs like maintenance contracts, retained hours, and other “open billed” projects.
Of course, you can use the Intermittent Task Tracker as a regular Task Order Up card…nothing’s stopping ya!
Changes from the Task Order Up!
I’ve dropped the “total hours used” area though because it’s not as necessary; while this is useful if you’re in a timecard environment and need to sum up your project hours on a weekly basis, that’s not the use I need for these.
On the right you can see a scan of an example card; this is pretty much how I’m expecting to use it this week:
- There are triangles on the left side of the 15-min bubbles. These mark a new dated entry, so you can separate what hours go with what day with a bit of counting.
Each card can handle up to 20 hours. If you run out of bubbles, just grab a new card and assign a new CARD# at the bottom. This allows you to keep the cards in sequence, and maintain the history of the project in an index card box.
You’ll note the use of | marks between bubbles. They’re unfortunately a little too close together to easily use (a different color pen would be useful here). These correspond to the / marks in the descriptions; for example, the 5/9 entry shows a “kickoff meeting” and a “first draft”. The | mark in the bubbles for the first entry show the split of time: 1hr 15min for the kickoff, and another 30 min for the design draft.
Each description has a dated entry. This is new; the Task Order Up, by comparison, doesn’t need these because the tasks are supposed to be short and doable within the span of a week. For intermittent tasks spread over weeks, the date is necessary.
The very last entry shows an example of estimated time. I traced empty circles indicating how much time I thought this task might take to complete, and filled them in as I went. As it so happened, it took less time, and noted this.
Since the job is complete, I wrote closed job at the bottom of the card, just so it’s clear it’s terminated. This is also indicated by the “1 / 1” at the bottom of the card; you would add the “/ 1” when you know the job is complete. If you run out of space on the card, file it away and make new cards with an incremented card number.
The jobcode is a system I use internally; I assign every incoming prospect a jobcode number, and create a corresponding folder on my production computer’s
_local_projectsfolder. This folder is periodically backed up to my main fileserver, or whenever I feel nervous. That number is also used for invoicing, naming BaseCamp projects, and for my SVN repository. One of these days I’ll have to automate the whole thing, but I’ve been too lazy to do it.As others have noted, you can always write notes on the back of the card!
<
p>So that’s it! I’ll be using this format this week as I close out some lingering projects.
Download the Intermittent Task Tracker
» Download the Intermittent Task Tracker 4×6 »
PrintableCEO-ITT01-4X6.pdfEnjoy!
I feel I must apologize for the sheer number of Task Order Up variations that are cropping up. I have no idea which ones are the most popular…if you have a favorite format or size, let me know so I can keep it alive.
» This article is part of The Printable CEO Series
- May 14, 2006
Storybits #001
May 14, 2006Read moreBased on yesterday’s post on spaceships, I created a new category called storybits where I’ll file away random sketches of things that pop into my head. Going to try to do more of this, because it’s a different kind of thinking; instead of working toward a specific story or image, I’m just going to see what comes out.
What are these things? They have plugs on the end and screens, and look like dongles. the one of the left has something similar to a coaxial cable-TV connector, and the other has something like a male RCA phono plug. Maybe it’s some kind of spy gear, or a diagnostic. The one on the right also has some kind of blade-like thingy, with contacts carved into it. But WHY?
Feel free to play along…this could be a cool interplay of ideas and imagery.
- May 14, 2006
Spaceships Revisited
May 14, 2006Read moreSomeone recently asked me whether I, as a born-again writer, had plans to write a story someday. The question caught me a bit off-guard…there was a time when I had thought of writing a story, back when I was thinking I was going to be working in the game industry as my life goal.
On the other hand, this morning I recognized that the old yearning is still there. I wanted to write something meaningful. However, I was frustrated when I realized I had nothing meaningful to say; I then directed my efforts into learning more about production techniques. And so, the yearning was surpressed until someone asked me if I ever wanted to write a story. I had waved it off, thinking I was more interested in other things like building a business presence. But after sleeping on it, I’ve come to realize that I do want to tell a story after all, and it’s just a matter of starting to put some marks down on paper.
Let me retrace my steps…
My Space
The earliest story I can remember writing was in the 5th grade, featuring my classmates as various pilots for some kind of space fleet. As a child exposed to Star Wars in the late 70s, I spent quite a bit of time drawing spaceships, like the one above. You might see the “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century” design influence if you paid attention to such things back then.
While I was working on my MSEE, I kept sane by doing graphics for various games. This was before I realized I didn’t want to be an EE anymore. Again, I ended up doing spaceships, like this unused title screen for the game Star Reach, published by Interplay back in 1992 or so. Follow the link to see other graphics from that game.
My MFA Thesis was about space travel in a fictional universe; that’s probably the last time I wrote any kind of story as a “background thoughtpiece” (it’s an appendix of the thesis, if you download it). It’s not great, but it was the first time I’d written anything fictional in years. While I was caught up in the graphics presentation and technology involved, there was a certain feeling I wanted to capture based on several comic books and stories I had read; the basic premise was to transport the feeling of 1930s aviation, as romanticized by various films and novels, into the near future of space exploration. I created a bunch of simple space vehicles in 3D to animate the journey from place to place, in the process creating a kind of world in my head. The project was ambitious, and I wasn’t that happy with the graphics at the time. In hindsight they were OK…just not lucious. I do like the ships though, for their stark appearance.
After graduating, I worked on a 2D game called Crixa with a small team of people. Yes, more spaceships, which incidentally are regarded as a killer of 3D portfolios because they’re “cliched” or something. Personally, I love seeing anything nicely designed and rendered; the bad reputation of spaceships may come from them being the low-hanging fruit of 3D design…it’s easy to make a spaceship, especially a bad one, by glomming 3D primitives together and slapping a bad texturemap on top. But I digress.
This was also the first time I had worked with an actual designer, who had a background in industrial design and was incredible to work with (in hindsight, anyway :-) He designed the ship, and I interpreted it into 3D. And that was the last time I did anything remotely spaceship-y, over ten years ago.
Getting Off The Ground
After all this time, there are some stories I’d like to tell. Now I have 20 more years of life experience to put together, which will help flesh out characters and situations. And, heaven help me, I still like spaceships. There are new 3D packages to learn, and drawing/design skills to improve. I realized today that spaceships have been an “artistic line of inquiry” that goes back a long time, and it’s something I can still draw upon to tie together a number of different interests:
- Writing
- Storytelling
- Industrial Design
- Drawing
- Game Design
- Realtime 3D programming
And thanks to all this thinking I’ve been doing on how to be more productive, I know it’s as easy as making just one mark at a time, not caring how “great” it is, but continuing to make those marks until they arrive someplace interesting.
So here’s my first mark in the new line. I started by just trying to draw a cylinder and putting cool markings on it, but it sort of got “embellished”. Is it a ship? A probe? A gun module? A device? I don’t know…I’m going to continue to sketch things without preconception, post them, and see what happens.
The Starside Alliance will rise again! :-)
