Org Charts

Tuesday, July 14, 1998

I am still having a mini-obsession with this Six Degrees website. I collect contacts like they were beanie babies! I've even gone so far as to ask second-degree contacts (friends of friends that I also know) if I may upgrade them! That way, I get their second-degree contacts, too! How this will benefit me is still unknown. I need to get some other folks to post there, as well, to build up a critical mass of interaction. Not easy! But readers know that I am persistent.

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I got a call from my friend Christina, fellow Cacophonista and Seattle Webgrrl. She wanted to drop off some tearsheets (samples of her writing) for a contract job, but needed to make some copies first. Where was she? Right out in the lobby! So I went out to bring her in. She looked stunning in a tailored suit in a wild hot-pink print, with the shortest skirt I've seen in a long time. This outfit suited her coltish legs! It turned out that the job she is applying for is on my team, so I dropped off her materials to my boss later on.

I was totally in the groove this afternoon at work. I stayed late because I'll be leaving early tomorrow afternoon, so I took the opportunity to transform the clunky org charts for our team into a cool, DHTML-based collapsing and expanding tree! It only works in IE 5, but it degrades well; other browsers just see the list expanded from the start. I find this solution much more elegant and appropriate to the web than exporting gifs from Visio or another charting program. The work of constructing this was repetitive, but there's a side of me that doesn't mind that at all. I just keep typing away, rocking out to Count Basie all the while.

Tap. Tap. Tap. The ping pong players were starting! The compromise reached when we moved into this building in March of last year was that there wasn't to be any ping pong till after five o'clock. The purpose of this isn't to keep people working, but to prevent the inhabitants of the CSG bay (Contingent staff group or Contractor Scum Ghetto, you be the judge) from being driven quite mad by the noise. We have no door to the bay, only red velvet curtains. The signs we had about the policy had disappeared recently, so yesterday I printed out some new ones and tacked them on the wall. So I walked out when I heard the noise start at 3:30, and asked the two guys to stop playing, which they did. I noted that someone had torn down the sign and crumpled it up into a ball! Well! So I sent mail not just to my immediate team, but the larger group as well, explaining again the reason for this rule, and asking for cooperation. My subject line: "B*tch of the wing (ping pong)" Plus I tacked the sign up again. We'll see what happens!

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I decided against going to the Clarion West reading at Elliot Bay Books; the Mariners were playing at home tonight, which makes parking around there impossible, and it was really too late to drive to my house and take the bus to Pioneer Square. So I went to the movies instead, catching up on Out of Sight, starring George Clooney's teeth and Jennifer Lopez's behind. Actually, the actors themselves were just fine, and the supporting cast is superb! I think I need to read some Elmore Leonard books.

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I love Gwen's stuff! So funny and direct. In this episode, she goes from the McDonalds drive-thru line to a past scary encounter at the bus stop, with ranting about her HTML editor along the way. I'll let her explain the recent name change of her journal: "After writing this diary for almost a year now, I've learned a lot about myself. Hence, the name change. Gwen's Complaints and Dronings is now Gwen's Petty, Judgemental, Evil Thoughts."

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