Travels with Charley

The cool camping blog. Trying to find gear, supplies, adventure and activities for the 21st century camper.

Saturday, February 28, 2004

I've Added Links!

Well, if the project is about knowledge management, here's a little knowledge for you. I've added some links. I was interested in some earth science things one time and came across the Nine Planets website. A really fantastic site for learning just about anything about the Solar System. And the Web Time Machine will tell you what era Trilobites lived in and how long ago Pangea existed (really good background material for that prehistoric barbarian novel you've been wanting to write, eh?). With these two websites, I bet you could teach a whole semester of earth science to a ninth grader. These are the kind of websites that give the Internet a good name.

How We Got Into Knowledge Management

So, we began researching knowledge management topics. I think that I, and I am certain that several of my teammates, thought that we would find some easily or even not so easily, implementable Access database type of thing that we could populate with bogus data, get some opinions on and then show it off to the professors, get our grades and be done. Ha ha. (I suspect that one or two of the professors thought so too.) Topics like "An implementation of knowledge management systems" or "Lessons Learned systems" began to be tossed around. This knowledge management thing would be kind of easy to make into a project. I found out how wrong we all were.

A Hiatus

Of sorts. After cranking out the introductary section and chapters 1 and 2 (as we are calling them right now) I have taken a break. Unless it's a deadline I never work on Friday, and I never have studied on Friday night, just won't do it and pretty soon it won't matter ever again. As for Thursday, we had a pile of movies from Netflix collecting and so we watched one and then went to bed. I could fool myself and say that it's good to get your mind off of school for a couple of nights, but the small breaks like this don't really make me all fired up come Saturday morning. It's still a slow hesitant process to begin writing on the project no matter when I tackle it.

Thursday, February 26, 2004

Apologies to Lit Buffs

Sorry if you thought this was a blog about Steinbeck. My wife and I do happen to like all things Steinbeck, and her much more than me, but I just chose the title cause I like it and this is a journey, maybe not as cool as his was, and there's no dog.

Here, I'll channel him for those of you that came here expecting Steinbeck: Woke up this morning late. I fear this project will never get finished. I doubt at times I have it in me. As I was telling Shelly, I have the beginning and I have the end. But that middle part bedevils me, like a hobo on a freight train, and I'm the railroad dick pursuing him. People just are no damn good, and my teammates don't seem to be even people. I don't know what they are. At least if they were dogs, I could sell them to a Korean butcher. But I can't and am therefore chained, like a gang member in for petty crime, to them for 9 more weeks. Ok, was that good enough for ya?

The Project

At first it started as a review of a Lessons Learned database. One of the teammate's firm has a database that co-workers put lessons learned in for engineering problems. He identified that it problems because it wasn't being used by engineers for advice, and it was not being populated dilligently. Furthermore, there was no apparent vetting process for the info that was in there, and so people were unsure of the veracity. The team decided to pursue improving this database. And that's the very moment trouble started.

Final Drafts Go Out

I sent out the sections of the report tonite, according to the latest schedule. I wrote the schedule, at the behest of my team mates. No one commmented on it, or made changes to it. I doubt they will really pay attention to it.

No one has read the whole project thru, from beginning to what's completed. They couldn't have, for they would know that the latter parts make no sense, not in context of the beginning sections, nor when taken by themselves. What are they thinking??? That what they've done is graduate quality? That I'll fix it??

I have a sickening feeling that it won't matter when the profs grade the project, like they won't notice that the english language was rescinded for whole paragraphs, or that section 3 doesn't look like it is part of the same body of work as section 4. I hope, on one hand, not. These guys deserve a shitty grade. But I get the same grade, and I'd rather at least get a good one for my effort.

Wednesday, February 25, 2004

Intro to the Project

The project is a two semester long activity that is supposed to use all of what we have learned in the program. The program was originally built around a particular company's desire to train engineers to be corporate executives. The program was then transferred to an on-campus version. I am in the on-campus version. Previous projects have all been focused on particular problems at that company, but I and my team members were not able to find a specific real world problem at our work places that we could tackle. We took a more conceptual problem and turned it into a project: Knowledge Management.