Question of the day:

Is the Fraser Institute on crack? More than usual, I mean.

The Fraser Institute also proposes another solution to limiting judicial activism: holding referenda on contentious judgments to allow people to choose between the court ruling, the original law, or some middle ground.

Which is the greater threat to democracy: judicial activism or endless hijacked referenda? You be the judge!

Did they learn nothing from the whole Stockwell/Doris Day fiasco? Oh wait, that would presuppose that they have a sense of humour. Never mind.

(Note to non-Canadians: the Fraser Institute is normally described as "a conservative think tank". Basically, they're highly successful media whores.)

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OK, I'm listening to the CBC's production of Barney's Version and it's really good... that's sort of the problem, in fact, because I'm really hoping that it's going to get less, um, liquid some time soon.

Not paying quite enough attention to tell whether the character is currently drunk, weepy, sick or all three, but the gasping and spitting and sniffling and slurping coming out of my radio right now is just way too realistic. Man, I have to get my CD player fixed.

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So today was a good day.

Not a productive day, but a much better day than yesterday. First, had a meeting with the guy from the company we merged with, telling him all about my projects and clients and frustrations and whatnots... quite often he asked questions and I would feel somewhat silly for not knowing the answer, but they got me thinking in new directions and excited about stuff. It really seems like this merger is going to be good for us and the people from the new company appear to have actual plans, not just vague air-dreams like so much of our own management. (When you consider that last year they made 3 times our revenue on a quarter the number of our projects, they must be doing something right.)

Lunch: brought it in for the first time this week. Yay me!

Meeting on internal project to review outstanding bugs -- we are down to 32 "to be fixed" and a handful of "postponed", which sounds like a lot, but there's a total of something like 360 on the system altogether. And the outstanding ones are getting more and more minor. The testers are having to work really hard to break stuff. In fact I think a good quarter of the outstanding ones are cosmetic. I'm starting to think about frills, like new feature requests and documentation. (Yes, we should have documentation already, but we don't. Well, we sort of do, but it's three years old. You never know what you're going to find if you poke around that server for long enough.) /technobabble

The point is it was a good meeting -- we were all there, we were on the ball, everyone contributed, everyone feels good about the project, we're moving forward. We have come SO far on this project since the start of the year. Yes, we could be fixing and fiddling for ever and ever, but we really are at the stage where every build gets us further ahead rather than breaking a whole bunch of other stuff over in the corner.

I've also been calming down about calling clients. Now, nobody was there when I called, but I called.

Scary project I was whingeing about a week ago is in good shape. I don't think I mentioned, but once we decided we were going forward with Flash 6 and external text files my team got together without me and had a meeting of their own and came out and told me what they planned to do. And now they're doing it. It's fabulous. It seems weird to be so thrilled about something that sounds so small, but it's really not small. Far too often we PMs feel like we have to come up with all the ideas and micromanage everything because people don't think. It's not that we're stifling initiative, it's that everybody's too burned out or bored to show any. So having a mini-mutiny like this was wonderful. I think it's fun for everybody to have something they need to actually think about, too.

Finally, dinner with about 14 of us including the guy from the other company, at a Portuguese place just down from Schwartz's. Much Meat, also red wine and indiscreet conversation. God knows what he thinks of us now. But it was great.

Got to pick up my car tomorrow morning, off to the cottage in the afternoon.

Oh, and! Finished For the Time Being by Annie Dillard, which crankygrrl gave me for my birthday (which is, yes, in October). She'd been raving about Annie Dillard for a month or so beforehand, so naturally in my usual contrary fashion I didn't start the book for ages and ages. It took me a little while to get into because it's disjointed, almost dreamlike, but she was right: it truly is good. In fact I think I'll start it over again next week, because I don't think I got all of it the first time. I've started carrying a book in my bag that I read only on the bus -- they last longer that way, and I can mull them over.