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Keep On Working
The really efficient laborer will be found not to crowd his day with work, but will saunter to his task surrounded by a wide halo of ease and leisure.
-- Henry David Thoreau
Tuesday, December 02, 1997
I'm so pleased! I found out today that I have been extended on my current contract, for six months. I was a bit concerned because my "real" manager has been on leave, and I wasn't sure if the person managing me in her place had been able to get everything arranged before he went on vacation, and before my assignment expired.
Late in the afternoon I got a Powerpoint presentation (transformed to HTML by me) put up on our team website. This was a talk given by the group program manager several weeks ago, some vision stuff about what our team will be doing. I asked him (now that he is back from vacation) to fill it out somewhat, to try and reconstruct the actual words he said. A PPT is just an outline, and can be rather impenetrable when divorced from the explanations of the person giving the talk.
I didn't want to just "publish as HTML" from Powerpoint, because that generates a gif image for each slide, and html pages with hyperlinked buttons to go from one page to the next. That can be suitable for some talks that have diagrams or images, but this presentation really needed to be an outline. So I saved as RTF, opened in Word, saved as HTML, then cleaned up the HTML file that Word generated.
I really shouldn't have started the project so late in the day, but I got into the zone and stayed an extra hour to finish it. Earlier in the afternoon we had been at a "brown bag" presentation where marketing folks and usability people filled us in on the feedback they get from ICPs (Internet Content Providers) and corporate types. I reminded Gayna, the usability expert I did some site visits with, to tell how our customer's favorite IE4 feature was the new History pane. Customers may find a feature useful for reasons that surprise us!
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Yesterday we had our bookclub meeting, at a local pizza place called Coyote Creek. I didn't finish the book, darn it! But I think I will, because it is very good so far. Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively is one of those books that ranges back and forth in time, as a woman reviews her life as she is dying. But it isn't grim at all! The prose is witty, with lots of sly quotations. The same scene is presented from several characters' point of view, in a cinematic sort of way.
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About this month's design: I used an image of ice-encrusted winter twigs from a large CD-ROM archive as a basis, along with a font based on the Shakespeare Folio for my name, and Britannic Bold for the rest. Image Composer 1.5 (available at a great price if you get the FrontPage upgrade disk, and you needn't install FP!) helped me with the buttons.
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