And happy long weekend, to those of us getting a mini-vacation from work in the middle of the summer!
I'm sliding out early today, in about an hour or so. I need to make my escape before I get cajoled into doing phone coverage again. The (part-time) receptionist wants to leave early (again) because it's a holiday weekend (again) and she and another person have already asked me, oh-so casually, what time I'm planning to leave. And I'm thinking--I have a distinct memory of her 'undying gratitude' when I stayed until 5:00 on Memorial Day weekend, and an equally distinct memory of how fervently she swore she wouldn't ask again for the rest of the summer.
That's the problem with gratitude. It only lasts until the next time something someone wants is more important to them than the thing they got a month ago.
That's a bit convoluted, but I know what I mean.
Anyhow.
Have a great 4th of July, whether you're celebrating Independence or not!
Posted by AnneZook at 02:11 PM | Comments (0)It's Tuesday, and I'm already luxuriating in the idea that I only have to work two more days this week! It didn't take long, once I got full-time employment again, for me to start relishing my time off.
I'm stressing today. Not because I have such a rush of work on that I can't handle it or anything although, more about that later. No, I realized this morning that I ran out of meds a few days ago and have not yet remembered to get a refill. These thyroid meds are tricky. If I take them, I never think twice about it, but three or four days off of them and the random panic attacks start again. It's stupid to let myself run out. They're cheap and convenient since I get my refills in 90-day quantities. Sometimes I sabotage myself through sheer procrastination.
And, speaking of! Ashlyn! I saw your email just two minutes ago! Picture me prostrated with shame, ravaged by grief, and just generally all-over mortified. I sweartogod I am not stealing your DVDs. They've been boxed up for three months, waiting for me to slap an address label on and drop them off at the post office. I will bring them to the office tomorrow and go out on my lunch hour and mail them. Really! I will! (The R.C. says it's a good thing most of my friends are themselves procrastinators, or I wouldn't have any friends left.)
And, referring back to my earlier comment about my workload, let me edit that to point out that it's 'NutNews week again, so fairly busy. I've been editing text, fixing punctuation, rewriting gibberish, and cursing my poor html coding skills for the last two days. And I'm frowning at one member of TeamChaos at the moment. The one thing I asked them was not to get all carried away with changing the order of the articles, once the newsletter is coded. Minor text edits are okay, but having to change 15 links and bookmarks is just asking for trouble. Naturally, someone decided, at the 11th hour, that the article currently in eighth place needed to be first. Grrr.
Yawn. I thought about working up a head of steam over it, but before I could make up my mind, I'd finished making the edits.
Dum-dee-dum-dum.
I'm not the world's most interesting blogger, am I?
I was poking around the other day, trying to find that pile o'files with all of my novel research, but I couldn't find them. I'm beginning to fear that those papers hit the dumpster along with all the other debris I got rid of in the Great Clear-out of '07. I hate when I do that.
I did run across a story outline that the R.C. swears I wrote and sent to her in the 70s. When I read it, it rings no bells but she swears it's mine. If I run across it again, I'll try to keep track of it so I can share it with you. (I'm sure you'd be no more bored by that than anything else I blog about.) Or I could post some of the research I did for the 18th C. detective series I pretended I was going to write? I wonder if I kept any of that? I think I had more fun with the genealogy of that than anything else. (Like Bertie Wooster, my detective was cursed with a multiplicity of aunts.)
Dum-dee-dum-dum.
I had a very nice weekend last week, but it wasn't anything earth-shattering enough to go on and on about. Just, you know, peacefully nice. I saw Megan on Saturday. We watched The Baker, an odd and interesting little movie loaned to me courtesy of my own, personal Odd & Interesting Media Pusher, and I admired her expensive but entirely fabulous new fence.
I don't have massive plans for the upcoming holiday weekend. At some point, the R.C. and I are going to hit the outlet mall. Now that the never-ending project of shoveling out my closet is actually reaching the point where there are, in fact, only clothes hanging in there that I actually wear, I'm shocked to discover that I own only five "work" blouses and four shirts in decent enough condition (and close enough to my size) to wear out of the house on the weekends. If I get lazy one weekend and don't do my ironing, I could wind up going to work nekkid by the end of the week.
Yes! Four years of closet cleaning proved that I need new clothes!
If I'd known that a consequence of going on the diet was that I'd never again be able to find an abundance of decent clothes to wear, I might not have bothered. (I talk about "the diet" a lot for someone who only needed to lose 40 lbs and actually lost 30 lbs, don't I?)
And, speaking of the holiday weekend, Gidget is trying to make me leave early on Thursday. She's holding a grudge about me having to work until 5:00 before the Memorial Day weekend. Life isn't quite as tough here at the Argonut Café as I sometimes pretend it is. My boss takes care of me.
Although, I doubt if I do. Leave early on Thursday, I mean. Once I get the 'NutNews for this week launched, I'll have the usual two days of follow-up tasks. But it's nice of her to think about it, you know?
Dum-dee-dum-dum.
Least interesting blog on the internet!
Work-work-work! After being late--not just late, but OHMIGOD I'm SO late!!!--this morning, I'm making up for it with a furious stretch of productivity. Uploading, downloading, creating, editing, reading, and even thinking.
At the moment, my thoughts are wandering around the question of how Dynamic Keyword Insertion can help us target low-traffic, high-profit niche and vertical markets, but that's probably not of general interest to my exclusive and intelligent readership, so I won't bore you.
I've been browsing my way through a couple of the certification programs I'm planning to qualify for and, quite surprisingly, learning a lot in the process. For instance, I discovered that the dedicated Webnetter "rep" who introduced us to the concept of DKI explained it quite incorrectly. At least, I'm choosing to decide it was her. My other option is to assume that Gidget listened and got it wrong. Experience suggests a 50/50 probability between those options. Anyhow, I have to edit 2000 ads between now and the end of the month. To make my life easy, I'm thinking I'll edit them in bulk, offline, and then do a mass "delete the old, upload the new" change the afternoon of the last day of this month. That will give me clean data on both sets of ads.
Last night, the diet sailed not just out the window, but down the river, out to sea, and over the horizon. Regrettable since it was a business dinner, not a private pig-out with friends, but there you go. It's fortunate I'm not ambitious in business since given a choice between goodie-starved taste-buds and a chance to impress new colleagues with my professionalism and restraint, my taste-buds will win every time. You know how it goes--I can resist everything but temptation.
An hour before bedtime I took not one, but two sleeping pills. I turned in early, was out like a light less than 30 minutes later, and still overslept this morning. I don't know how often I hit the snooze button, but I know that the first time I raised my head to squint at the clock, it said, 7:59. *Sigh.* I need to find a sleeping aid that doesn't contain pain relievers so I dare to take it more than once or twice a week when the weather is so hot and muggy.
We did get a storm last night. Finally, after a week of clouds massing up every afternoon and the humidity climbing rapidly, only to dissipate without result. Rain pouring! Wind whooshing! Temperature dropping! It didn't last long but I was grateful for every lost degree of heat. That might have contributed to my unusual 9-hour stretch of somnia. (Insomnia is a word, so "somnia" should be intelligible to all of you.)
I really am feeling perky today. Not just perky--positively enthusiastic!
I had a whole, whiny entry written about last week's 'NutNews issue, but I didn't get it posted on Friday and I'm over it.
I'm Social Girl this week. There's a rumor I'm slated to lunch with the training class for new 'nuts today. Meeting friends for coffee, snacks, knitting, and gossip tonight. Tomorrow evening is dinner with the department. Apparently* one of the four** of us lives and works remotely and isn't in town often. Since he's here this week, there's a command performance for dinner-and-bonding. Two events! Both on school nights! (How old do you have to get before you stop thinking of weekday evenings as "school" nights?)
The diet, for anyone remotely interested, is not going well. I lost focus a couple of weeks ago and on Saturday I declared myself officially "off" the diet. I've had enough junk food in the last three days to make me sick for a year, so as soon as I get back to the grocery store (Thursday), I'm buying more expensive, ready-to-eat turkey (ick) and starting again. Still 4 lbs down, still 6 lbs to go.
With the arrival of summer, I've stopped sleeping at all well. Back to 1-2 hours of laying awake before I drop off and back to waking up several times a week. If getting old means never getting another good night's sleep, I don't want to play.
I should be working, shouldn't I? But I'm not.
Later that same decade....
I'm offended. Human nature being what it is, while I didn't want to have to sit and eat cold sandwiches and make nice to this week's crop of 'Nut trainees, I'm grossly offended by the discovery that 70% of the office is lunching with them today, but I'm not included. The entire sales department is at lunch and no one seems to care that their phones are ringing off the hook.
Bunny update
Baby bunnies are swarming. I see at least one every time I leave the building. I think their parents are about to kick them out of the Bunny Home, though. On this last trip out, I saw one older bunny laying in the shade of a bush. She was sprawled out on her back, little bunny paws waving in the cool breeze. A little Me Time for mom.
/Bunny Update
And, speaking of sleep problems (we were, some time ago, remember?), I think I'm starting to pay the price in nonfunctioning brain cells. This morning, my alarm went off and I sprang out of bed--for the first time in over a week. I puttered around--brushing the teeth, washing the face, combing the hair, daubing the contents of various pots and bottles here and there, and discovered, with some satisfaction, that I had 35 minutes left to make the 10-minute commute to my office. I was about to be on time for a change!
As I gathered up my purse and my little lunch bag, vague thought of some task left undone nagged at me. I ran back over the list. Teeth? Brushed. Make-up? Daubed. Deodorant? Applied. Hair? Combed.
But...wait! Hair? Combed? What happened to drying and styling it?
Yes, dear readers, I did everything I needed to do to get ready for the day except take a shower.
Sigh. In the end, I was only ten minutes late to the office. Thank goodness for the new, shorter 'do that only takes 5 minutes to style.
I swear, if I hadn't had plans for after work today, I'd have just come in as I was--all grungy and grimy with the dirt of the last 24 hours all over me.
Yes, I should be working. But I pounded out so much work last Friday and yesterday, to make up for being distracted by the 'NutNews for three days last week, that I'm once again at the point where I have to let all of the accounts 'rest' for a couple of days so I can evaluate the results of my most recent changes. I guess there's such a thing as being too efficient on the job.
Yrgshrfm!
I smushed my finger in a drawer. Waitaminnit-I have to go deal with the bloodshed....
___________________________
* Okay, well, not so much 'apparently' because I know he's not a local employee. It's just that even though I've met him before, no one ever said what his job was, so I didn't realize he was a member of our little department. I knew Penelope was, but not this guy, although I didn't know Penelope was until she was leaving and they asked me to take on half her job.
** Yes, still four. The last I heard, they're now hoping to have a new person hired and on board before the end of the summer. It's a good thing I'm experienced in Management-Speak and didn't take their "can you take of half of Penelope's job but it's only for three weeks" statement that seriously.
Do you know you can customize Google?
I did. I have iGoogle. I chose a theme and added gadgets and tabs.
When I bring up my iGoogle, I see Astro Boy (I just love him) and I get the date, time, and weather (currently 94 degrees and, at 11% humidity, everyone's complaining about how sticky it is) in Denver.
I also have a sticky note gadget, so I can write myself online post-it note reminders. It usually says, "Send chocolate."
I have a news tab with a handful of international news sites. I can skim the titles of the opinion columns on the NYTimes in WaPo every morning, so see if anyone is complaining about anything I'm interested in.
I have a humor tab for when I'm feeling in need of a lift. I can click through to see what Calvin and Hobbes are up to, read the latest Doonesbury, or see what Chimp-o-Matic has to offer.* I have a virtual panda bear pet to feed.
In fact, it's so much fun that finally, after 15 years of surfing the 'net, finally I've found something I like well enough to use it as my "home page." No longer does my browser window show blank when I open it! I have stuff to look at!**
In short, there are no limits to the ways I've found to not work on company time.
Sigh. I don't want to start anything time-consuming or major. Vela's supposed to be sending me the data files for the 'NutNews. In fact, she was supposed to have them ready for me first thing on Monday morning. It's Tuesday afternoon, after 3:00 now.
Problem is, I've been dinking around with small tasks for most of the day in the expectation that she was going to show up with an armload of newsletter content any moment. By now, I'm bored. Bored out of my gourd. Bored and being ignored. (Ed. Pull yourself together.)
______________________
* At the moment?
Redefining the role of the United States from enablers to keep the peace to enablers to keep the peace from peacekeepers is going to be an assignment. --George W. Bush (01/14/2001)
And there are people who think this man is not an idiot?
** The R.C. mocks me frequently because I don't change my wallpaper or have a "home page" on my browser. I figure, when I sit down at a computer, I have a lot more to do than to admire whatever background picture might be there. And when I go online, I could be in any kind of mood. I don't want to have to wait for some page I don't care about today to load up.
Why am I getting comments on my occasional posts on the politiblog? The thing's been dormant for years. No one should be checking it.
Why, when an office looks around at their staff to choose people to handle lunchtime relief for the receptionist, why are none of the people ever chosen male?
Why is that man out in the atrium whacking great chunks out of the trees with giant pruning shears? What did the trees ever do to him?
Why is there an invisible person somewhere close by, using a drill or electric screwdriver? I can hear it plainly from my desk but can't find it when I walk around and look for it.
Why are people ridiculously superstitious? Grace, over in the National 'Nuts department, was telling someone last Friday how she'd ridden her bike to work. She didn't drive her car because she was afraid of having bad luck on Friday the 13th. To the best of my knowledge, you're a heckuva lot more likely to get run over on DTC Boulevard if you're on a bicycle than if you're in a car, so, superstition around random dates: stupid; and riding a bike to avoid an accident: asking for trouble.
Why don't writers know when to quit? When the mood is gone, when inspiration is failing you, and when you don't really have anything left to say in your fictional universe--why don't you just quit? Why beat the tattered dregs of your good idea into a pulp until even the original, inspired stories begin to suffer by proximity? (Of, if you must write dreck, why can't you keep it to yourself? Do you know that you've ruined my enthusiasm for your first stories and that I'll probably never again be able to read them?)
Why does it take people two days to do a two-minute project? This week, I told Vela to let me do the 'NutNews editing. I edited every article for this issue in less than 30 minutes. The last couple of times, I've had to wait two days for everyone to get around to doing their editing, and most of them are only editing one or two articles per issue.
Why do I spend so much time complaining about the additional projects I've been given here at the Argonut Café when clearly I continue to have lots of free time on my hands for blogging?
Why does the human body crave massive injections of fatty food when the stuff isn't good for it? For the last week, I haven't been able to think about anything but Mexican food.* Why does the body crave what's not good for it? I know that refined sugar does something chemical in the brain and I'm assuming fat does something similar, but why? It's hardly survival-oriented.** (I guess it's possible that nature has decided that our species is so stupid and so destructive that the sooner we do ourselves in, the better.**)
I made a humongous credit card payment today. Can take the money left in my checking account and indulge myself in an armload of new books as a reward?
______________________
* Well, okay, I was obsessing about pancakes but I got those Saturday morning. So it's Mexican food now.
** I have moods.
I'm getting better known here at the Argonut café. I'm not sure that's a good thing. I rather object to people interrupting my work day with requests to do time-wasting things like emailing someone 60 files because she's working at home and forgot to take a CD with her. Or getting IMs asking me to walk over and ask someone something, when the person could just as easily have IMd the person they wanted to talk to. Or getting more IMs asking if Gidget is in the office, from people too lazy to walk the 30 steps to her desk to see for themselves or, even simpler, pick up the phone and dial her extension.
On the good news (or at least "fun things") side of the equation, I've now been here for long enough that I'm moving past the daily tasks (i.e., "work") and onto more strategic (i.e., "dinking around") thinking.
This morning I wrote a 4 page document describing the three major online marketing programs we work with, identifying features unique to each of them and describing what we use them for. No one asked me for it and no one will ever care, but I always write documents because they organize my thoughts.
Mind you, I don't use all of those features. Some of them are new, some of them I haven't had time to experiment with yet, and some of them I didn’t know existed before I went poking around today. But I will be using them. One of the advantages of sitting down and writing up things you don't know about is that you're forced to learn about them. There are some fairly cool (if time-consuming) tools that I plan to play with work on over the next month. And there are other things, things I did because Gidget said to do them and to do them that way--now I'm thinking some of them might not be getting the results we want.
Certifications are available for some of the programs we use and I'm rapidly qualifying.
(Yes! I'm almost certifiable!)
Before I get sidetracked, I need to figure out how to document what I'm doing. I'm big on documentation, of course. I mean, first, sitting around and writing about stuff aimlessly, and, second, colored charts! (Also I gotta track what I do so if I break it I can fix it.)
I've been holding off on some tools previously available because I wanted to wait until the Next Level Plan was approved and we were getting things underway. Some of what I've found has the potential to significantly improve our marketing tracking and our traffic. I wanted implementation of those things to be something we could brag about in the NLP Results So Far reports.
That's not some kind of spitefulness. I've already made a lot of changes and improvements in the last four months and then, in the last month, I've had to carve out 25% of my time to do the ArgonutNews and all of the associated whatnot around it.
It's a mistake to be too productive, especially when you've been piled with extra work that's supposedly temporary. Do too good at coping and management will immediately decide to make the temporary assignment permanent.
Speaking of the 'NutNews, though, I've convinced Vela, my own personal ChaosManager, that paying a modest fee to use an email design-and-bulk-send service is a good idea. I did some research the other day (I love this job) and picked out the one I liked. They offer a free trial, so I'll have to spend some time messing around with it (so sad) over the next week.
Wow, that was boring and All About Me.
As a reward for reading through all of that (or at least skimming down the entire entry), I offer Google Trends. Who cares about what interests you today? What is everyone talking about? What's hot, what's spicy, and what's cold and empty? And when does "Whitewater Investigation" not come with the name "Clinton" attached? Check out what's trending.
If that's too complicated, take yourself over to Ask 500 People and respond to a few polls.
If you're just hard up for something to read, anything, well, I usually visit bharatbhasha when I feel that way.
I know you're not all fans of media fandom. :) Some of you have little or no sympathy for those of us who have some hobbies that center around television and movies.
I've had discussions with people who feel, for instance, that there's a major difference between gathering around the water cooler and discussing what kind of planned-and-canned shenanigans characters got up to on a pretends-to-be-reality show last night, but infinitely loser-like to discuss the character development on an unashamedly fictional program that went off the air two years ago.
At this moment I'm torn between going off on a digression about ephemeral culture, something I mentioned briefly a couple of posts ago, and the desire to stay on track (for once).*
Anyhow.
One of the battles that media fandom faces is the possibility of lawsuits over copyright infringement.
All fandoms face copyright issues, but the matter is much more clear-cut in scrapbooking fandom (someone made the image, so they own it) or plagiarism cases (you published those 5,000 words last year, then the identical words appeared on her website last month). Issues are not so clear in knitting fandom (someone created the pattern, but you could easily recreate the identical pattern on your own, so there are gray areas), or amateur chef fandom (ditto for recipes--prove I didn't make up that recipe for chicken cordon bleu all on my own!).
But people who play fantasy sports are immune from copyright infringement. After all, it's just a game of a game and nothing they're using belongs to anyone else, if you lay aside the frequent bandying of team names, league names, and/or player names. That's the law.
A kind of triumph for free speech for all of us, don't you think?
I mean, I'm not all that sure about the citation that fantasy leagues are okay because discussing sports is of "substantial public interest" or whatever they said. Sounds to me like there might have been a flaw in the wording of the lawsuit or something.
On the other hand, for every million people who want to talk about how the Yankees are doing this year, only twelve losers want to talk about them in terms of fantasy baseball team performance so fantasy leagues aren't precisely interesting to a "substantial" number of people, but that's all to the good for those of us involved in media fandom, because if a million people are talking about what happened on Supernatural's season-ender but only twelve people are 'talking' about it in terms of mix-and-matching events (fantasy media viewing!) to suit themselves, then they'd be covered under the same ruling.
In recent years, corporations have been aggressively pushing the bounds of intellectual property — extending the length of copyrights to unreasonable lengths, for example, and patenting seeds. In the case of fantasy baseball, the courts have rightly cried foul.
And genes. They're patenting our genes, don't forget. I have never understood how someone could legally lay claim to a gene, something in wide public use that's in the public interest to leave in the public domain. What's next? Levying tribute on all newborns for daring to use patented material?
The biggest fantasy in this case was Major League Baseball’s claim that its fans should pay to talk about the game.
Non-media fans are agreeing with that sentence. How insane, to think you can charge people for what they say?*
Drat. After all that, I forgot where I was going with this. Except to say that I'm sure the fantasy football nuts would be freaked out to realize how much they have in common with the media geeks who talk tv.
________________________
* I'll confine myself to saying that discussing drama--what rings true and what doesn't in popular entertainment and what it says about us as human beings and about the society that produces the entertainment--discussing drama and human nature seems to me to be a much more intelligent use of time than debating whether or not some would-be actor could have swung on a rope over a pit if he hadn't been blindfolded or whatever idiotic shenanigans they get up to on those not-at-all-reality programs none of which, I'm proud to say, I've even seen as much as five minutes of. (stops to breathe)
**Another digression successfully avoided--words can be copyrighted, so why can't you charge someone for saying "New York Yankees" or "Boston Red Sox"?
The Argonut newsletter, end of month reporting, a major addition to all 35 advertising campaigns that Gidget requested 2 weeks ago and that I haven't been able to complete yet, various meetings, and, oh, yes, my real job.
Mentally, I'm sitting here whining about how hard I had to work this week. I should be ashamed--in the past I've had much more stressful jobs with many more ridiculous tasks to be completed than what I've been doing this week.
Still.
As Gidget and I were just saying to each other, it's a good thing we got paid today. This was a very good week for them to remind us that they give us money for putting up with them.
Other than that, it's Friday, so I'm fairly cheerful. I've gotten 8 of the 35 updates loaded this morning and have hopes of getting the others completed by the end of the day.
No particular attitude today. I haven't had the leisure to develop one this week, so a handful of random links.
From a local news site:
"The right lane of westbound I-70 near Siverthorne[sic] is closed due to a sinkhole measuring six feet wide by four feet deep. Crews are working to assess the damage and make repairs."
That's not Colorado's first sinkhole in recent years. "Aging infrastructure" is right. It's not just aging, it's all crumbling to dust.
As is our democracy.
US to tighten visa restrictions Which is bad enough, but if you don't need a visa to come to the USofA, you have to "register" only now they want you to do it in advance, instead of upon arrival, so they can put you in their database of potential terrorists check you out before you get here.
But that's not the best of it. The best part is, the disclosure request:
A Homeland Security spokesman said the new registrations would require the same information as the I-94 card, which is currently filled out by visitors to the US and turned in to customs on arrival in the country.That information includes passport number, country of residence, and any involvement in terror activities.
Wasn't there something about not requiring people to self-incriminate in that Constitution thingy we used to have?
But, now that I think about it, we sort of decided that "all men are created equal" wasn't to be taken too seriously, didn't we?
More a greeting-card democracy than an actual gift.
Egypt uncovers 'missing' pyramid of a pharaoh So cool.
Best writing/grammar site I've found in ages: DailyWritingTips. Work checking out for this verb post alone.
Or maybe it's supposed to be tweets? I've been playing with this thing called Twitter for the last few days. More or less legitimately, since I'm "investigating" social networking as part of my job.
It's a bit schizophrenic. I'm restricted to 140 characters or less per "tweet," which lends itself to silly remarks posted frequently. But I'm uncomfortably aware that if someone "follows" me, they might be receiving my messages as txt on their cell phones--meaning, they might be paying to read my babble. So I shouldn't post unless I'm actually saying something. As we all know, I don't often have Something to say.
I'm "following" (that's what it's called when you subscribe to someone's posts) two people. A stranger I added when I was experimenting with the interface originally and one familiar name who somehow found and "followed" me.
I'm also LinkedIn (under my Other Real Name), but that's less entertaining. As a "professional networking" site, it just sort of sits there. I guess I should look at it as "low maintenance."
I don't know. I already have this blog to keep up and then there's the other journal, not to mention all of the writing I'm doing at work (right now: a manual for putting out the ArgonutNews, the stupid newsletter itself, although more editing than writing, and web pages for Gidget*). Not that all of that added together makes a significant amount of writing, but the diversity in subject matter is keeping my brain spinning. I'm habitually behind on my email any more. I'm finally getting back to reading Bloglines on a regular basis, but haven't yet gotten back into the habit of commenting on posts.
I don't know that I should be taking on anything else at the moment. I mean, I'm pretty much failing at everything I already have underway, you know?
Gidget is working with a friend to write a book. On marketing or something, I'm not sure. (No doubt I'll wind up doing some gratis editing, so I'll know eventually.) For a second, as I typed that first sentence, the urge came over me to write a book but having produced near-book length stories already, I am firmly remembering that Real Writing would be even more work than that.
Also, if you're going to write a book you should have Something to say. Sigh.
I could write a gimmick book, like that person who wrote the one about the "secret." That was, what, twenty pages long? Or less? But it caught the public imagination and I'd guess he made a pretty penny on it.
I like pretty pennies.
OTOH I'm not really that interested in making money writing. I'd rather (assuming I ever get back to writing again) have fun (inasmuch as it's possible to have "fun" when writing, which is a singularly painful and consuming pastime) than work. I miss the days when all it took was putting my fingers on a keyboard to trigger a massive outpouring of text. It may not have been good, but it sure was easy.
I'm boring you on the subject of working today because The Novel is back in my mind. Not in a "write this down" kind of way or anything, but I occasionally ponder the Alternate Universe I created when I first conceived of the idea and then I want to go back to my files and hand-drawn maps and flesh out the world. I still have a ton of climate research to do, to make sure I've structured the ecologies of the various parts of the world correctly. I need to know more about what climates to choose for what kinds of plants, I need to know more about kinds of wood, and to read up on wind patterns and how they're formed. Heh. A ton of useless research. What fun!
I finally remembered to bring in a fan for my cubicle today and it's gray and rainy and very cool inside.
Lunch break over.
______________________________
* This is why I don't like writing for other people. I rewrote five pages, just in draft form, but enough to give her a feel for the punchier, more sales-oriented approach I thought she might want to take. Now she's going to go ahead and put them up as her first website, under the theory that she can "massage" the content later and it's more important to have the website up immediately.
She's a marketing professional! How can she think, "fast but not that good" is good enough? Why, when with a few days of thought, planning, and rewriting, she could have a good website, is she so determined to go ahead with a now website? And I have no control--it's her project and I was just doing her a favor, so it's out of my hands.
No one wants to do it right any more. It's a cultural failing in this country. We'll take whatever we can get, as long as we can get it now. Instant gratification is more important than gratifying gratification or something.
I wrote a sample page for Gidget, showing her what I thought would be a better direction for her personal website/resume.
She liked it. In fact, she handed over the writing of the entire project to me. Sounds like a good Sunday afternoon project.
You see? She's a friend of mine. She can bum cigarettes or ask me to donate 5 hours of my personal time writing web pages for her and I'm happy to be useful.*
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* Also, of course, she's the person who got me several of my last jobs. So I owe her. But I'd have helped her even if I didn't.
Posted by AnneZook at 02:25 PM | Comments (0)Much as I like the Extreme Peacefulness of my new position, I have to admit that there are days when it pretty much crosses the line into mind-numbing tedium.
Wednesday I spent a large chunk of the day entering email leads into a spreadsheet for end-of-month reporting and analysis. It's a necessary task, but I'd give twice my own hourly rate to someone else to do it for me. Type the date. Type the Argonut ID code. Type the lead source. Repeat ad nauseam, 700+ times a month.
I'm still enjoying the new job, though, in spite of the extra duty penalties I'm suffering for having volunteered to help them out when they were in a bind.*
Much of what I'm doing is still like a game. Like last week, when I was running reports and looking to see how some of our advertising campaigns are doing. I was feeling a bit guilty about wasting company time dinking around that way when I was abruptly shocked to remember that that kind of "dinking around" is part of my job. I mean, wow. Not only work I don't mind doing, but tasks that feel more like play than work!
The boringness factor, though. Contrary to what Gidget says and Vela believes, this is not rocket science. It's fun, but not taxing. It's even a bit--I won't say demeaning, but I will say it's rather less intellectually challenging than the kind of work I'm capable of.
Still, for the money they're paying me, and I'm very grateful for the regular paycheck but it's not that big, so for the money they're paying me, they're getting about as much of my brain as they're entitled to.
I fell off the diet wagon directly into a vending machine accident yesterday. Sigh. Even if it was only half a package of salted peanuts, it's a demonstration of self-indulgence that is just disgraceful. Shakes head regretfully.**
I gave in and printed out a list of the country names I feel I should be able to remember. Of the entire list of 235 (I think), there were 163 that I thought I should be able to name at the drop of a hat. I'm going to study the list before I try the game again. It may be cheating, but I prefer to think of it as "studying." (If nothing else, I may learn to spell Liechtenstein, right?) (It's the first e. I can never seem to remember the first e.
There will be a pause while I slurp coffee and sift through my brain for something interesting to say....
Not interestingly, but aggravatingly, while I was off doing phone relief, Skylla crept to my desk and dropped a fiver onto it. I refused point-blank to take money from her for cigarettes before and advised her to buy her own if she planned to smoke regularly. But, she explained today, it works better for her if she just borrows from me.
It's a significant difference to her, you see, that she's not "buying" cigarettes. (I don't think she realizes that she's not less of a smoker just because she doesn't go into a store and pay for her own.)
Previously I also refused point-blank to be responsible for showing up every day with enough cigarettes for both of us. She feels that giving me money will take care of that potential problem.
Gidget advises me to buy an extra pack with Skylla's money and just leave it here for her, but that's basically just me buying her cigarettes for Skylla, which puts me where I don't want to be.
I haven't been able to find the words to explain to anyone how badly I don't want to be part of this situation. If you're my friend? Bum a cigarette. Snag a pack. Borrow a carton, I don't mind. But Skylla is not a friend of mine. She makes nice at me because she wants cigarettes.
Also? Now, today, before she falls off the non-smoking wagon she's clearly been on, it's time for her to face the fact that you either smoke or you don't. If she's fought the battle this far, she needs to not smoke and she's not "not smoking" just because she's not carrying the fiver into a store on her own.
I wish I could find the words to say that to her.
I'm noticing that I'm not as serene as I was when I started this post.
"Time flies like an arrow," goes the old joke. "But fruit flies like bananas." If you have some interest in speculations in cosmology, you might enjoy reading about this. I did.
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* As I stop to think about it, I'm not sure why I complain about it so much. I mean, yeah, it means an additional 8-10 hours of work every couple of weeks, but it's not like it's hard work. And some MSFP experience will look good on my resume. But still I complain.
** Except that I'm doing a little better than that, having dropped 4 lbs so far.
That's about all I can say for today. It's Tuesday. The long weekend has passed and I expect that this "short" week will, like most 4-day workweeks, drag on forever. It was gray and rainy yesterday, it's gray and rainy today, and it's supposed to be gray and rainy tomorrow.*
I don't think I've mentioned them to you before, but a small outside company handles the Argonaut's behind-the-scenes website functionality. There's a pair of software programmers assigned to our account--Tootles and Smee. Tootles is the boss and he's got one of those good ol' boy faces you wouldn't be surprised to see in company with a tractor. It was a bit of a surprise to me to discover that he's a very talented programmer. I'm frequently guilty of being appearancist. (Made-up words are the best.)
The other one is my old buddy Smee. I worked with him for seven or eight years, back in the technology heyday of the 90s. he's another of the same kind--got a face you'd expect to see on a guy living on a street corner, and a brain the size of Jupiter. (Remember when "computer nerd" automatically generated an image of a weedy, bespectacled little runt?) He's going on vacation. Six days in the desert outside Moab to contemplate his ommm or something but before he left, he wanted to make sure we actually wanted what Gidget asked him for.
And now I'm wondering if I understand this company at all because it turns out that of all the Next Level Plan ideas that Gidget and I put forth to Jason and the rest of TeamChaos, one item has floated to the top. The blog. Jason wants us to move on the idea quick-quick-quick.
I don't know why. My original idea for a CEO blog (they're all the rage these days) limped to the nearest drain and swirled out of sight ten seconds later, but the overall blog concept seems to have inspired a wave of enthusiasm that, quite frankly, astonishes me.
I mean, I don't understand why they're excited about it, or why they want to move ahead with it instantly. In a company where three years of strenuous and deliberate effort finally produced a company newsletter as devoid of personality as a faded beige rock, they're all hot-to-trot for a blog?
Doesn't make sense to me. I only made Gidget include it in the Next Level Plan because I knew it was the kind of thing that's light-years ahead of the normal thinking around here and she'd been challenged to be "cutting edge."
I'm not sure, to this moment, whether or not any of the Argonauts actually understands what a blog is or that it's supposed to be, you know, entertaining and informative. (Shaddup. I mean a company blog should be.)
Looks like while Smee's off contemplating the whichness of what, I'm going to have to lay out some ideas and guidelines, so I'm ready to launch whenever he gets back and gets the sw (a .net drop-in of some kind) up and running.
When they finally hire a communications person, rules, regulations, and content will be his/her problem, but it doesn't look like we're all wanting to wait for that.
Anyhow, since I'm a big believer in "start as you mean to go on" I'm happy to start with some rules. (I love rules that other people have to follow.) If I have to manage this fool thing, there need to be some guidelines. (I wish, oh how I wish, "don't be terminally boring" could be Rule #1.)
I have to edit it, too. That's a scary thought.
I'm sitting here, shaking my head, and wondering what kind of world it is when I'm not only the go-to person for technology, but the Supreme Grammar Guru and Punctuation Princess? As you all know, my interest in good grammar is intermittent at most and what I think works best for punctuation is if I just throw a bunch in and you mentally put it wherever you'd most like to see it. I proofread only under pressure.
I wouldn't put me in charge of anything that requires attention to detail or timely follow-up is all I'm saying.
And also, while I'm still producing the Newsletter O'Faded Beige and working with Gidget to help her write her own resume-website**, I don't really have the time to take on another huge project.
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* I think my blood sugar must be down. I actually had a fabulous long weekend with much going and doing and frolicking.
** It's sad to say that I remember her as a great writer of marketing material but I'm not seeing that reflected in what she's writing these days. I don't know if she's selfconscious about this resume-website or just couldn't find the right angle to pull all of the info together, but the pages I've looked at for her have been a mess.
It's hard to find a polite way to say to a friend, "It's a mess," you know? Especially when what you really want to say is, "delete the entire file and start over.
Looks like I'm being "adopted" by no-doubt well-meaning coworkers who are concerned that I'm so quiet during the day. They keep coming by to say howdy and to ask if I want to go for out for a smoke (but that's just Skylla, who'd better start buying her own) and whatnot. (Either they're being friendly, or they were assigned to check on me at random points during the day to see if I'm working or not.)
I don't come to the office to make friends. I have plenty of friends. I come to the office because if I show up and look really busy, they give me money every two weeks.
I'm working, people! I was hired to do a full-time job even before they added on an armload of other stuff, and now I'm doing a significant percentage of Penelope's full-time job while they interview for her replacement.
Also, I'm on a diet and that makes me cranky. Down 3 lbs, 7 to go. Grrr.
So, I'm knee-deep in the first newsletter and being grateful that Penelope had it almost done before she abandoned ship to take a better job for more money. (I think it's important for you to understand that while she sent it to me 95% "done," around here, "done" means I've gotten 40 emails about it so far today. I shudder to think what producing one of these from scratch must be like.)
It's not the coding--even though Penelope forgot to send me the "template" and I'm using an old copy of the newsletter and learning Front Page at the same time--it's the content. Two hours into this and I'm already seeing why a bi-weekly newsletter and a handful of other "communications" documents are a full-time job. This thing is supposed to go out tomorrow, it was supposed to go to TeamChaos yesterday for approval, and I'm still waiting on content from--wait for it--TeamChaos! Thank goodness Vela is as good as her word. She's taking point as much as she can on forcing content out of people. I'm staring at my draft and mentally double-checking everything I do so I don't commit some ghastly faux pas.
But right now, I'm eating lunch, so I don't have to worry.
Under the heading of "does a body good," I can't believe I missed this jewel from Keith Olbermann last week.
President Bush has resorted anew to the sleaziest fear-mongering and mass manipulation of an administration and public life dedicated to realizing the lowest of our expectations.
Heh. Sometimes I honestly think I stopped politiblogging because I was running out of non-profane words to use to describe my bone-deep fury with not only the willful stupidity of the Bush Administration but the determined blindness of most of the "mass" media and the American public.
Mr. Bush, at long last, has it not dawned on you that the America you have now created, includes "cold-blooded killers who will kill people to achieve their political objectives?" They are those in — or formerly in — your employ, who may yet be charged some day with war crimes.
Such a satisfying thought, but it will never happen.
Four hours later....
For ten minutes there, I thought I'd run into the brick wall of my own limitations, but it turned out to be a lack of information. I'm going to need an ftp client to upload these newsletter files to the right place is all. Whew!
Well, that was 'way boring. How am I supposed to write up notes of a conference call where, to the extent that I understood the conversation, no one said anything?
I was going to ask the ChaosManager leading the call for a copy of the previous call's notes, so I'd know what kind of thing to try and extract from my own scribbles, but I don't know who she is. I suspect she doesn't work out of this office. At least, when I walked around and looked at doors, none of them had her name on it.
It's a pickle, that's for sure.
Mmmm. Pickles. Potato chips. Port wine cheese spread. Sour cream. Sausages!
Sigh. 2 lbs down, 8 to go.
Doesn't it seem that I should be entitled to a reward for having lost 2 lbs? That's the problem with food. If you reward yourself for depriving yourself of food by giving yourself food (because if you haven't had food, what you pretty much want for a reward is food), pretty soon you weigh 200 lbs. This is a dangerous cycle, which is why I'm not allowed any food that tastes good. (Ed.You had Chinese food twice this week, you big fibber.)
Got an email from Her earlier today. Today was her last day with Bernie. From what she says, he hasn't hired anyone yet, although he's interviewing.
I wish I could think of something interesting to say. I'm very happy, in a peaceful, uneventful kind of way, if that matters.
I guess I could make up lies. If I start posting stories of improbable adventures and narrow escapes, will you still respect me in the morning?
Some days, I could just smack Microsoft. Also, corporate executives and network gurus.
I just spent 20 minutes Googling around to find out what some of those blasted programs are that sit there sucking up my computer's processing power all day.
I've identified four or five that I can just routinely go in and shut down in the morning. Since this is the fourth time I've had to do this to stop my computer working on it's own projects instead of on mine, I made a Naughty list and posted it up. So annoying. Of course, the really annoying ones, like svchost.exe, the ones that run eight copies of themselves, can't be shut down because they're "critical" processes.
I tell you what. It's critical to me that I work on a computer that can move at least as fast as I can.
So, this week has been interesting. (No. Really.) I've barely had time to get bored with my Real Job, which is pretty cool.
I've had a couple of hour-long training sessions about taking over the bi-weekly Argonaut Newsletter. Because I hate being trained and can't be taught, I told everyone I already knew Front Page (I don't) and that I'd used it before (I haven't) and that I didn't need much information in that area. Penelope spent 15 minutes on it in one of the training sessions and I'm sure I have all the information I need to do what needs to be done.
Seriously--even considering Microsoft's annoyingly code-heavy approach to html, how hard can it be? It's just software.
I've already started the training manual (for producing the newsletter, not for using FP, although I'll include the necessary information w/screen captures for that portion of the project) so I can hand it over to whoever they hire who's job this will be in the long term. I'm the world's worst trainer but, even if I do say so myself, I write a good manual. Anyone with an IQ that goes into triple digits should find them clear and comprehensive.*
I've also spent a fair amount of time helping Gidget tweak the navigation for the new website. Turns out that the basic layout I submitted passed muster. If only I'd had any understanding of this place's actual products and services! But I didn't, so my drafts of the drop-down menus were much mocked and now I have to go back in and change all of the menu items around, add the things I forgot or didn't know about, and remove the things that are sidelines and not "core" businesses.
I tell you. It's a battle. Every day I have to fend off some TeamChaos member who wants to move the non-marketing content to a sitemap ghetto (SEO, dammit!) and once even Gidget lost track of what we're doing and suggesting sticking all of the new content in some back corner. No one's got my back on this one, but I'm sticking by my guns anyhow.
And then there's the Argonut who wants what he does, regardless of the fact that it's against the rules and no one else does it, featured prominently on the corporate home page.
I have to argue with people who want to use industry jargon--explaining again and again that you have to use the words your customers use.
No one wants to be the one who writes the blog. I'm so glad they're hiring the Penelope-replacement quickly. Whoever it is (scheduled to start 6/1), may wind up writing the entire thing.
This morning I lost a battle to get two items, add-on services, not core services, merged into their appropriate categories instead of featured on Page One.
No one asked me to, but I'm going to start writing content today. Even if I can't write "marketing" material, I can make sure that the draft everyone else starts with includes the critical words and phrases that we want repeated frequently across all the pages.
Anyhow. It's all interesting in its own way. Better than combing through the Webnetter software eight hours a day, looking for things to tweak, anyhow.
And now, it's time for me to log onto a phone call with a group of people I don't know, who plan to discuss an initiative I've never heard of. I'm taking notes, in lieu of Gidget, who got called away after she volunteered to take over for a member of TeamChaos who is unexpectedly absent today.
Excitement!
P.S. My Name the Countries score is up to 60 today! I'm learning them!
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* Yes, I know, we all know, that She found herself unable to do my job with the manuals She had, but you have to remember that I didn't write most of those, they were in place when I arrived on the scene. And the ones I did write, She always claimed not to be able to find--neither the hard copies in the binder marked, "Manuals" nor the electronic files on the computer's hard drive.
Also? Any software program so easy to use that I can sit down to it cold, learn it, and writer a user manual for? Anyone else should be able to sit down with and figure out too. At least, enough to do the basic tasks with it. Hmph.
Today I got up to 55 countries in the how many countries can you name in five minutes game. Shamefully, that's my personal best. Part of my problem is spelling--I can never remember how to spell Luxembourg. Or Belarus, which looks easy but I persist in believing it's spelled Belarusse. Even if I remembered Kyrgyzstan, I wouldn't be able to spell it.
And I forget weird things. I don't know why I can remember Qatar but not Chile. Nigeria is easy, but Ethiopia always escapes me. I usually waste several valuable seconds trying to spell Czechoslovakia, instead of remembering that it's called the Czech Republic nowadays. Morocco I can get, but Liechtenstein lives in my memory only as, "the country with the castle." The odds of me remembering Djibouti are pretty slim, but I should be able to get Cuba.
Too many dinky countries, that's the problem. And they change their names. Like in recent news coverage. For a week, all you read about was coverage of the Myanmar flood. Suddenly, yesterday, all the news outlets were talking about Burma. What was that all about? (By the way, did you read that "officials" in the country are being accused of selling, not giving away, the relief supplies they seized?) (Maybe because they are in denial about the scope of the tragedy in their own country?)
Even Haiti. I watch for news about Haiti. I talk about Haiti. Why can I never remember Haiti when I'm playing this game?
I've thought of cheating, of course. Printing out the list of the top 150 or so countries that I should be able to remember and studying, but I can't bring myself to do it.
It's wrong to cheat.
Except, now that I've typed that, I wonder if I shouldn't focus on the "studying" part of the concept?
How many times have you played the states game? You know the one--the one where you have to write down the names of all 50 states. It's surprisingly difficult to do. It's embarrassing, in fact. Why does my brain not retain Mississippi? Why does Indiana hold no place in my heart? Why is Kentucky so often forgotten?
Embarrassing.
As you can probably tell by today's entry, my resolution to Blog Interesting didn't last long. Never does, does it?
For the past couple of weeks, I've been watching and being utterly enthralled by Masterpiece Theater's latest offering, Cranford. I turned it on for Judi Dench, of course, but I've been so glad I did!
I've never sampled any of Elizabeth Gaskell's novels. I wonder if I should--or if I should be warned off by the idea that three of her works were merged to produce this one marvelous production?
Posted by AnneZook at 03:25 PM | Comments (0)I've been out terrorizing the bunnies. They like a warm day and you can usually find two or three of them sunning themselves on the grass beside the building whenever possible. And they're not too skittish--they don't head for the hills the minute you come into view or anything, but they don't want you closer than ten feet or so. Unless you keep an eye out, you can find yourself in the middle of a panic of running bunnies.
Most days I give them a wide berth. Some days I play the opposable thumb card and stride arrogantly through a pile of them, scattering bunnies far and wide.
The Argonauts across the cubicle wall are cooing and gooing. At least, the male portion of them are. Someone just booked a job for a movie maker (initials FFC) who did some of those glorified crime family/cop drama movies that men inexplicably find so riveting. (Pop culture is not my strong suit.)
I am, as are most of you, one assumes, watching the news about the China quake. I found an interesting table on the BBC site. It didn't show today's quake, but I've added it in:
May 2008: 7.9 quake in Sichuan - at least 8,500 dead, an unknown number hurt
March, 2008: 7.2 quake in Xinjiang - damage limited
February 2003: 6.8 quake in Xinjiang - at least 94 dead, 200 hurt
January 1998: 6.2 quake in rural Hebei - at least 47 dead, 2,000 hurt
April 1997: 6.6 quake hits Xinjiang - 9 dead, 60 hurt
January 1997: 6.4 quake in Xinjiang - 50 dead, 40 hurt
Domestically, I'm watching the news about the weekend's twister toll. Something I've been noticing in the past few years is that they're starting to talk about the ecological consequences of these storms. You never used to hear about that.
Locally, I'm remembering that when I was out Saturday, it was alternately sunny, raining, hailing, and snowing. It's gorgeous today, but we're supposed to get more rain or rain mixed with snow tomorrow. This is unusual for us. While it can snow in the mountains during any month of the year, mid-May usually signals the end of any danger of snow for the Denver metro area.
Weather worries me.
Closer to home, maybe you're wondering about Gidget's get-together with Jason and the fate of the Next Level Plan?
Remember that, after asking her for a comprehensive plan, fully footnoted and with web references, and then not bothering to read it before they met to discuss it, Jason agreed to read it and give her his actual feedback on Friday?
Well, that didn't happen. But rumor has it that he did actually read it this weekend and they were scheduled to meet today to finally discuss it all because, as Gidget was told, he had "a lot of questions and comments."
Now we're told that that's not going to happen, because now Jason's telling her she gave too much detail. He wants her to prepare another document, a spreadsheet, that just lays out the steps, the timeline, and the costs at each stage.
What. A. Tool.*
In the meantime, Vela is acting like the plan got a 100 percent go-ahead and, from what OpieGirl told me, is using it in interviews to explain what the position she's filling entails.
It's all very weird and schizophrenic. It's almost like Gidget gave Jason exactly what he wanted, but he just can't bring himself to say so.
Anyhow. Speaking of get-togethers, I had one myself this weekend. Brunch Saturday morning, then an afternoon of good and bad videos. The cream of the crop was Corner Gas, a little Canadian sitcom that charmed me and made me laugh right out loud.
In closing, let me encourage you all to try something for a week. Reset your browser's home page to Google news but make your default some other country than the UsofA. (Go to news.google.com and check the bottom of the screen. There are a variety of countries to choose from.) Because we all need a non-UsofA perspective on life sometimes.
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* As I have admitted before, I'm a passive-aggressive type with lousy people skills myself, but at least I'm fairly careful not to put myself into jobs where these character flaws can actually bring a company down or drive some coworker to drinking straight from the bottle, okay? So I figure I'm entitled to throw the occasional stone.
But she did. The R.C., I mean. Told me on the phone a little while ago that, had I not already had plans with friends tomorrow, I could have been with her--at the Colorado Chocolate Festival!
Willie Wonka is going to be there! And there will be TONS OF CHOCOLATE to sample, buy, and wallow in! Life can be so unfair.
I mean, yeah, sure, I'm really happy to see my friends. Just--you know. Really, really happy.
Sigh.
