Well i havent written in a while so i thought i'll put something interesting about my work i just found out...

(a letter from my supervisor to me "boss")

Valerie and Sherry, (Please forward to Sherri if I guessed wrong at her e-mail address)

I was writing to let you know of Shawn's excellent job performance in the past several months. He has completed several large projects with tight schedules and has done a superior job with them.

He completed SciTracker, a database that tracks all science projects and products, and administrative approvals. The management staff who has been using it are very pleased with its design and ease of use (unlike other such programs we use). This will be a valuable contribution to our admin staff in tracking projects, money and products.

He completed the Pacific Basin Alien Snake database - despite the many changes called for by the users along the way. The system is now up and has been used to track snake sightings in Saipan but will be soon used for many other Pacific Islands, including Hawaii.

He has designed two taylored views of our information. One for Hawaii (for our partners at NBII) and one for the Great Lakes (for our partners at NOAA). We were able to show these partners that we could fulfill their need rather than having them build a whole new database from scratch - as both had intended to do.

Recognizing the need for better tracking of software problems, he took the inititive to find software that allows us to track problems through to resolution. This has been much more efficient than our previous mode of using e-mails.

He is just completing an Alert System that allows users to register for a state (or states) and specific species or groups of animals and recieve e-mail alerts when a species record is added to our database from a new area. This is something the invasives community has wanted for several years. They are very excited that we have completed one. The internal portion is also helpful to us because we know if a record requires a fact sheet to be updated.

He designed and built a database and entry forms for a project here that is cataloging field sampling protocols for invasive species. The user is very pleased with the result. This product will be highlighted nationally on the Aquatic Nuisance Species Task Force web site. He has also been very helpful in suggesting additional components to many of these systems. For example, this one will allow reviewers to log in and comment on the protocols; hopefully saving us the cost of actually holding a face to face workshop.

He has done rather complicated programming in order to allow our users to access more sophisticated queries of our data on the web site. This cuts down on the number of custom queries we have to do.

While we were in Hawaii, Shawn trained one of the workers out there on ASP and SQL. This has substantially benefited her job performance and helped the project.

Shawn has done some creative programming to allow our species distribution maps to be generated dynamically, saving us countless hours of manually updating them ourselves. He was also able to figure out how to connect our database to ArcGIS, something we hadn't been able to figure out ourselves for several months which resulted in much frustration for us and many wasted hours making maps the tedious, long way.

Shawn has programmed our fact sheets to be translated into 7 different languages, a capability that has been strongly recommended by the invasives community since our information is used world-wide.

Recently, Shawn helped me design a project for a coral reef site. While several of us struggled with the best way to present different interactive data sets, Shawn came up with several excellent ideas that the rest of us never thought of. As a result, the project was funded.

I would like to reward his good work, but am limited to $25 = two USGS t-shirts. I would like to see him get a substantial bonus, or a raise. I don't know how this is done within the contract, but I think he deserves some type of reward.

boo ya.

but i doubt anything will come of it.

but we'll see.

oh, and becca comes back on the 10th. I think i can hold out another week.