Greetings.
Under no circumstances should I skip a weekly update, so skipping two is...almost a terminal offense. Sorry.
In my absence, I accomplished quite few non-Project Omega tasks. I moved to Minnesota for my summer internship; I finished re-tagging my stock of video game original soundtracks; and I upgraded my server to the lastest version of Ubuntu, myriad customizations and all. This has some relevance to Project Omega, insomuch as it took my attention off the Project for three weeks and change of unscheduled tasks. As such, I have a few...changes to make regarding the Project's execution, as well as a decent amount of catching up to do.
If, three weeks ago, I had virtually murdered myself to keep up with the scheduled Project Omega tasks, this week would mark Week VIII of Phase IV; the same point, had I resumed the week following said narrowly avoided murder (as I fully intended, at the time). As it stands, according to current Project Omega protocol, since Week VI was never really started, it must be finished before proceeding further.
However, Phase IV is a bit...different than the other Phases (I vaguely remember mentioning that before). Notwithstanding that Project Omega is the first undertaking of its kind - or more accurately, _my_ first undertaking of its kind - Phase IV is a natural breaking point from the previous Phases.
Problems are not without solutions. Rather than give up the Project entirely, as would be my typical reaction not too long ago, I've decided to re-tool the development Phases. Instead of designating one Phase for each major component of Zero Hour Productions, each Phase will now consist of a cycle of development on all major components. The current plan dictates 12 weeks per Phase, and with five development Phases, that puts the total time at 60 weeks, give or take a few for inter-Phase off-time.
Soooo...using three (3) as the handy-dandy magic number it is, I will implement three development cycles: one for basic development, one for intermediate development, and one for advanced development. Under these preliminary workings, basic math places each new development Phase at 20 weeks long. And conveniently enough, each major component (five in total) would occupy four weeks in a cycle.
From my initial planning of this new method, this leaves out the miscellaneous development undoubtedly necessary to integrate the components together, as well as any development outside the big five, and debugging of all of the above. Experience from the portion of Phase IV that was completed as scheduled dictates that building in integration, debuggingw and miscellaneous development is possible, so that's the route to be taken.
Where does this leave Phase IV? As the first development Phase, it was an unavoidable experiment, at best. I will complete the overall Phase payloads as originally planned (and more or less on time), although I may skip the intermediate weekly payloads and documents, as well as mix up the order a bit. I believe now that assigning 12 consecutive weeks to a single task may have contributed to the slowdown when I encountered a severe time sink (a la three weeks ago).
It's starting to sound familiar, this tone. Strikingly resembles the tone I use for covertly berating myself while simultaneously explaining the situation. No matter...the origins of Project Omega were last year around this time (during my summer internship then), and I can't help but feel a steady (relevant!) job will work the magic once again.
Mr. Bond, signing off.