March Music Madness

This morning Yesterday morning, when I was showing the work I’d done to the folks in the office… I felt pretty crappy. Looking back, it seems like a whole hell of a lot of work for something so trivial. I actually got pretty down, looking at the sort of final product for all my time and energies… it just simply didn’t seem worth it.

This isn’t coming out right. I need to try again.

I’m proud of the work that I did. I learned a lot of things, and this has been one of the more challenging ActionScript projects I’ve had to tackle. I think I laid some good groundwork for future versions of this guy, since I’ve been creating this with an eye for network-wide deployment. The brackets themselves exist in their own .fla/level, and skinning it with a separate Flash overlay (the banner area, the footer) should be simply a matter of creating that overlay.

Hmm. Maybe it’s been the process. Today Yesterday, I just got slower and slower, sloppier and sloppier, trying to make my deadline. Things got to a point where I was too fried to even try to attempt cheap hacks. I think that when all was said and done, I didn’t walk away feeling like I had accomplished a whole hell of a lot (even though time and my gut tell me otherwise). This project was heavy on the coding/functional side, and less so on the glitz/motion.

Click here to see the final version for March Music Madness. I’ve faked some of the elements (there’s no userID check, and the whole database call at the end isn’t real).

I need some time to step back, to figure out if this project really was all that difficult, why it took me so long, or what. I’m not sure if it’s the logic inherent in this setup that requires the planning, or if it’s my lack of coding knowledge that drive the development time so long.

Hell, I also need some time back, period. Away from work. I’ve got lots of thoughts and ideas about my personal life vs work life ratio, and I think my feelings of late have more to do with that than any specific project. I need to implement some serious fucking changes because if I don’t, I’m not going to like who I’ll be in another year’s time.