Damn you, Angry Birds.

But, uh… I love you.

Damn you!

Technorati Tags: Angry birds, evil, iPad

It’s been an interesting last couple of days, actually. Friday night I went to a fantastic live music show at Jammin Java in Vienna, VA. My friend Rich’s band, the Chris Collat Band, was competing in the finals of JJ’s “Battle of the Bands”. There were three other bands competing with them, and while CCB didn’t win (an NC band called “Delta Rae” won – who were pretty good as well) they had a fantastic sound and great energy. I’ll be posting some videos of them playing a little later today or tomorrow on my Youtube account.

Saturday evening was my now-regular World of Warcraft raid with some of my great old friends from <Order of the Raven> (Aggramar-US). This week we hit the Bastion of Twilight again and downed the first two bosses with relative ease. We got a couple of pulls in on the Twilight Council but got locked out because of a bug after four pulls or so. Next weekend we’ll get them down, I’m sure.

Yesterday, President’s Day, was a work from home day and I actually got a lot accomplished. I had an idea back in August or September of 2010 to create an iPhone app for the federal agency that I contract with, and after a few months of planning we got approved to purchase the necessary equipment to begin active development in late January. I’m enjoying the process of designing my first iPhone app (although I’ve helped my friend Brian with a lot of the UI work for his soon-to-be-announced app, which I’ll post about here when it’s live in the App Store), and I’ll post some screen captures in a few weeks to preview what’s coming.

At the moment, my only real concern is about the congressional budget which, if not passed by March 4th (or another continuing resolution is passed…) will leave me without a paycheck for days/weeks/months. I’m hoping that congress does the right thing and approves a budget or CR quickly, but given how politics have played out in recent months, well, let’s just say my expectations are pretty low.

Technorati Tags: App, Bastion of Twilight, Chris Collat Band, Delta Rae, Order of the Raven

Basically, I’m looking for a software package that offers the following features:

• The ability to create “tickets” which can be used to assign individual work tasks to individual developers or groups of developers. The tickets must also be able to handle multiple iterations of changes and hold onto conversations between the developer and the requester.
• Should have the ability to support 10+ “projects”, as well as have hierarchical categorization for projects and tasks.
• Must be able to handle over 250 users.
• Must have a built-in, modifiable workflow.
• The ability to generate metrics based on input/output, open/close rate, iterations, length of ticket life, etc.
• Web-based interface.
• Must be enterprise level and hosted on-site (NOT off-site like Basecamp).

I know it seems like a lot of stuff but it’s really not. I’ve evaluated large and small packages like Jira, RightNow Web, MS Project, PVCS Tracker. We’re currently using an old version of PVCS Tracker and it’s just not cutting it. My developers didn’t like Jira, nor did my clients. RightNow Web was the closest I’ve found to what we’re looking for but our clients balked at the $40k+ price tag.

Anyone out there have some ideas?  Please post a comment if you’ve got some ideas.  Thanks!

Technorati Tags: bug tracker, Jira, MS Project, Project Management, PVCS, RightNow, Software