I normally don’t mind Mondays – a fresh start to the week (unless I was unlucky enough to have been called out over the weekend!!), other people have yet to discover nasty problems they need help with, the TFS server is under minimal load as people are only slowly getting back into work, etc, etc.
But TODAY!!!! Damn! 
I had a presentation scheduled at work. Every so often we have a lunchtime presentation (EDS call them Brown Bag presentations, apparently in the US they all bring their lunch to work in a brown paper bag!!) and today I presented an overview of Team Foundation Server, including how it fits in with our other tools at work.
This raised a bit of last minute interest with our Process Improvement people as they have heard we want to (er….have already started to) use TFS for .net projects, and they need to understand what it can do/why we want to use it instead of VSS, ClearCase or most importantly Borland Starteam. SO, I didn’t finish writing the powerpoint slides on friday (last-day-of-the-week-itis hit me BAD on Friday), and I wanted to set up a local TFS VM for running demos during the presentation (again, that became a friday afternoon casualty). I figured I had the weekend to do this in, but forgot about a BBQ for my daughter’s netball team (which wife also coached) on Friday night, and a birthday dinner for my mum on Sunday. Also, with the netball season finally over, we have our “family day” back again (saturday), so I didn’t get round to progressing this over the weekend at all.
Anyway, one thing led to another and I ended up working from 6am this morning doing ppt slides with one hand and installing TFS into a VM with the other (no, not literally – jeez!!!).
I finally got everything ready with 20 minutes to spare before I was due to head up to the presentation room to set up. I get there and the network for the TFS VM I had set up, decided to go mental. My laptop siezed up, and I had to reboot – somewhere along the way Virtual Server decided it was going to refuse to network properly.
So I was forced to do my demos on our production TFS box (we have a sandbox project on it that I was able to use)…using NetMeeting to link up with our boys and girls in Hamilton and Auckland, plus a stray Upper Huttian or 2, I shared my desktop and got through about half a dozen slides before someone told me I had the slidshow underneath something else on my desktop, so everyone who was remotely watching with NetMeeting missed the first part of the powerpoint!!
With this, and the network screwup making everything slow down, I ended up running over time and having to skip one of my demos, which made the whole thing seem a bit rushed. Finally, to top that off, I got stuck afterwards in a discussion (which was a bit one-sided) with one of our Process Improvement people about what she wants to see in a decent SCM tool, for another 10 minutes.
AND THEN, to make matters worse, I get back to my desk only to be called into a meeting where we all get told that the project (a BIG one – actually a multi-year programme of work, rather than just a project) that has been just around the corner for the past 12 months or so, will not be starting up in the beginning of next month - instead, it’s not likely to be ready to work on till probably the end of Q1 next year now, and theres no guarantee we’ll get to do the work either!!
Anyone else have a crappy monday? :/
