Meeting with the Boss-man. More Senate blather. Easier to ask forgivness than ask permission. Today was a busy and relatively productive day. Given the recent budget crush (complete witrh talks of pay cuts, layoffs, and furloughs, oh my) I had been feeling quite pessimistic regarding the prospects of the hardware purchase being funded for the project I am working on.
We currently have a test system up, but have no hardware for a production system, making it quite difficult to go live. I along with others came up with two plans, aptly named “Plan A” and “Plan B” which cost around $111,000 and $66,000, respectively. When we first made the plans, I knew that “Plan A” was aggressive, but I felt good about “Plan B.” But as news got worse on the budget front, I was feeling more negative about our chances for even “Plan B.”
This morning we met with the Boss-man (aka The Associate Vice Provost for Information Technology) and after starting with “Plan A,” talking for an hour, returning to “Plan A” he approved it. I was quite shocked. I don’t know what orifice he is finding the money, but hey, I don’t care.
Today I mostly listened to the Senate proceedings. I have come to the conclusion that , althought senators are more eloquent, they aren’t much better than their counterpoints in the House. With one exception. Listening to Robert C. Byrd (D from W. Va) is a hoot. He seems to be the last of a generation of truely great orators. Aside from his politics except on this issue I am not familiar with his views, so I won’t judge him in a more general way.
But listening to him counter the arguments for the resolution authorizing force in Iraq is great; he regularly quotes long passages from the Federalist Papers, the Bible, and other text that he finds relavent to the discussion. It may seem trite that he caries a copy of the Constitution in his poket at all times, but I don’t think it is.
And he obviously has a sense of humor. His off the cuff comments after reading the 69th Federalist paper regarding the powers of the Commander in Chief was to wonder if anyone in the White House has read them. He then muses out loud to send the President a copy for free. I was cracking up; it was beautiful
Back to work stuff. Kelly and I made further progress in preparation for our meeting with the SIT team. (I’m not going to go into what the SIT team is. I just wish we had a BURP team like one other College we work with.) I ran a program our DBA was telling Kelly we shouldn’t run, but it all worked out in the end. I went back to my further experiment to give Kelly (who likes things all organized) plausible deniability with respect to my “unauthorized” activities.
So hopefully the demo works tomorrow, but of course it will break at the most inoportune time as demos always have a tendancy to do. More news later.