The Search Continued

Now that I've had a chance to rant a bit about my own personal woes, I'm going to take a little time and apply a similar theme to the professional scope.

One of the things I love most about my job is that we're always pushing for new and innovative ways to solve problems. Sometimes we don't do it with the express purpose of solving problems in mind, but rather just to see if there's a better, cooler, or more fun way to accomplish what's already been done. We re-invent the wheel; it's what we do, we're good at it, and we have fun doing it.

The downside to this is that it becomes increasingly more difficult to keep things standardized. This applies to many facets of the work we do. The user interface for one application may look nothing at all like the UI for another, regardless of the relationship between the two. Code changes become difficult because there is no defined standard set between the developers. An application written in one language may have a helper app written in another.

Among the many challenges of my job is the ability to unify all these separate components into one similar look and feel, and somehow tie all the other distinctions together in an easily manageable way. The importance of this task ranges from those of us who engineer the code to the end user, who may not have the slightest idea as to the inner workings (or perhaps even functionality) of the code we write.

Since the overwhelming majority of the code we produce falls into the realm of web-based applications, I've concluded that it would be a good thing to roll out our code using a single library of functions that handle data interchange, reporting, and analysis, graphical user interface(s), and collaborative tools (i.e. "groupware" style functionality).

And thus presents the quandary. One pre-fabricated library doesn't include all the functionality we desire, merging two or more is a daunting task, and simply building such a beast is well beyond what we have the time (or even inclination) to construct. The bread and butter of our operation is in manufacturing, so our primary role is to maintain (and improve, when possible) the systems we use to assist in the production process.

The answer to this problem is elusive indeed.

The Search for Unity

Over the course of the past few months -- as my schedule has become increasingly stressed -- I've found myself on a great search to unify all my ... well ... everything.

I have about a dozen e-mail accounts. Of those, I check 6 of them multiple times a day. I have 4 schedule managers: one at work, one at home, one on the web, and one on my phone. Speaking of which, I have 3 phone lines: one home, one work, and one cell. On my cell, I make regular use of SMS, and also access various instant messenger services. And don't even get me started on the news, blogs and social networking sites that I try to stay on top of. My iGoogle portal page has more links than an eBay search for "new."

I'm one of the most connected and accessible people on the planet. The problem lies in the fact that it takes me an entire day just to check my own status. By the time I figure out who contacted me for what, I don't have the motivation left to return a call.

My ultimate goal is to have everything at my fingertips, and preferably through my cell phone. I bought it for this very reason, yet I seem to lack the time to get it configured to do the things I bought it to do. And to add to that fact, nothing natively wants to talk to anything else. My phone won't natively sync to Lotus Notes (which, I must say, is one of the all-time crappiest groupware solutions known to man -- so of course, it's corporate mandated), so I need a third-party app to act as a conduit. In order to check all my mail from one location, I need to forward mail to a central account, which means configuring mail filters so that spam doesn't get forwarded as well. Ah... Spam. Between 500-2,000 per day. You think I'm joking. I'm not. And people wonder why I tell them not to bother e-mailing me.

I'm hoping it storms something fierce this weekend. I need a good excuse to stay indoors and sort this mess out.

While I'm at it, I should probably add that the only reason I'm blogging this on blogger.com is because I can get to it from one quick click of the mouse from the iGoogle main page -- without conifiguring another link to another service for which I'll have to remember yet another password.