Busy
Waugh! It’s been ages since I’ve posted anything here… Sorry about that! I’ve had so much things to do that I hardly had the time to document it. Last week I went to Switzerland for the FY08 planning meeting. It’s something terribly boring, but it’s one of the most necessarry things to do. Basically you sit down with the team to think about how much money you’ll need in the next fiscal year, and then you have to support that funding request with all the campaigns and actions you’re going to launch. Long meetings… very very long meetings, with a lot of words and abbreviations I never heard before. But like I said, it’s something that needs to be done, you can’t avoid it because otherwise there’s no cash to get anything done.
Then this week, I also had some issues with the Vaio project for influential bloggers from across Europe. I’m pretty convinced now that putting an image on a laptop isn’t the best idea ever. I had never done it before, but apparently it causes a lot of weird things to happen that normally shouldn’t happen. It could be that the Vaio’s hardware config is too weak, but normally it’s not. Maybe I should’ve formatted all of the Vaios manually and install them one by one instead of doing it with an image. Damn, I feel like a helpdesk. I want to help out everyone as good as I can, but I’m depending on a lot of factors I can’t control myself, and that makes it a rather stressy project.
Also, I can advise anyone never to send a laptop to Israel. The device was seized by customs and we’d had to pay a lot of money to get it released, then you need to pay import taxes, which I didn’t want to do. So I asked DHL to send it back to me, and that seemed to take aaaaaages. When it finally arrived in Belgium again, Belgian customs seized it too and held it, probably because it came from Israel. The amount of paperwork you need to fill in to send it out is pretty decouraging as well, and despite all the pro forma documents… it still gets seized. Bureaucracy is such a bummer. By the time you get the laptop back, there’s probably going to be a new Windows or so.
So, now I’m figuring out what can possibly be wrong with the Vaio config, I’m working on 3 other projects as well, but I can’t say much about it yet until it has a decent structure and a green light to go ahead with it. I’ll talk about it as soon as possible.
Tuesday morning at 7 the flight to Switzerland leaves again, this time for final budget discussions. Kind of looking forward to that, because it means the end of a stressful period for a lot of people. I have to lock down my commitments this weekend and set my goals for the next fiscal year, define my audience and the metrics to measure effects of campaigns and events. Still quite a few things to do… Stay tuned, this ain’t over yet :)
April 6th, 2007 at 5:28 pm
Wow Miel, what a life! He man let’s have a pint of beer someday. One has to relax. And ah the vaio project, I am one of those with these problems.
But I must say: pretty cool machine, nice to be able to test Vista. So no worry. Sun is shining. Let me know a date to have a pint.
April 6th, 2007 at 9:14 pm
I’ll take that extra laptop. ;)
April 7th, 2007 at 3:08 pm
I also had some issues with the Vaio project for influential bloggers from across Europe. !?!?
Miel, I’m always surprised and impressed with word Europe. It’s more only EU-Countries.
Did I tell already the story about the laptop and somebody that came not from EU Countries (but come from Europe) and make Studies in EU.
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Problem with Vaio: I would like to help, I need to know more details, send me one laptop and I can make all tests for you.
Budget, money isssue and others relating issues are always like pain in a neck.