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Saturday, November 25, 2006

Things happening; today at ADB

Some days I can't think of anything to blog, or (like today) I am just too busy. So, a few lines about what's happening.

We are supposed to ship Captain's Log #34 on Monday and it's going to be a tough fight to make it happen. Lots to do. When I finished Strategic Operations two weeks ago, I had two weeks to "coast" through CL34, but the first week was spent on non-CL34 items, mostly to do with the website and marketing. That left two easy weeks of work packed into one crazy week, a week with a national holiday. I've been at the office from 9am to midnight or later every day this week.

I am almost done. We have 80 pages finished and 40 to go, and of those 40, over 30 are "written" just not formatted and edited. I lack the end of the fiction story (which is a great story, just a very complex plot), the new ship cards, and one scenario.

Every time we do a Captain's Log (May and Nov) we promise ourselves we won't try to do it all in the last two weeks. If you do the math, we just have to do five pages a week to get it done. But a week is lost to a trade show and another to a family crisis and another to a vacation and ten more to other projects that had to be done by a deadline, expanded to take more work than scheduled, and ate the day of each week we set aside for Captain's Log. Make no mistake, we do work on the issue all year. Some pages (like the compilations of six months of Q&A and the product schedules) cannot be done until the last month, but many can be done any old time. When we started the final two week drive we had about 80 pages in some form from complete drafts to a few finished pages. Most of those are done by Steve Petrick. I end up being the only guy who can write certain pages and the only guy who can get any of this stuff into Pagemaker, so today I need to be doing the missing pages but I also need to be putting the last draft pages into pagemaker so others can proof them.

Anyway, we'll get it done, and it's going to be really fun and special issue.