March 2, 2000
Dear Everyone:
Finally finished extracting data and got it all
sent off to the vendor last Friday afternoon.
Whew!!!
I also spent a few hours on Saturday putting the
finishing touches on a “Transition
Database” that will
allow the people in “Livermore” and “Hobby” to continue receiving new
boxes (as they come flooding in) and capturing the most important data
during the transition phase when we can’t really use the old software
and can’t begin using the new software.
With that off my plate, I can start to concentrate
on writing instructions for using the new software.
Which basically means:
I have two weeks in which to write a complete User Guide.
Training for Records Center personnel is scheduled to take place
on March 15th and 16th, with additional training
for End Users in “Pleasant Hill” the first week in April.
Our plan is to make the User Guide and some
training as Web-based as possible.
People should be able to go onto the
Intranet and find
what they need to know with a few mouse clicks on hot links.
How to Add a Box… How
to Request a Box… How to
Check a Box In / Out… People
can print what they need and ignore the rest.
We’ll start out very simple and add more as we go along.
But it probably still means some late nights and
long weekends at the office.
Nevertheless, I need to go up to “Jeannie’s” this weekend because her
email isn’t working
again. Her copy of
AOL, which is about the
fourth one I’ve installed, seems to have gotten corrupted again.
I suspect she’s trying to download things that are too much for a
poor, old 486 to
handle. She really needs to
upgrade.
And, with that in mind, “Jeannie” spent last
weekend at a conference in
Sacramento,
where she got to talk with vendors and look at the latest in
computer-assisted transcribing products.
She’s interested in what’s called real-time
transcribing, in
which the translation takes place at the same time that she would be
taking down the dictation.
Then the client receives the document on diskette instead of waiting for
a paper copy.
There are some obvious advantages and disadvantages
to this. Little or no time
spent editing, but you have to be sure and get things right the first
time. Less editing time
means more time for taking jobs, which is good; except when you’re
taking too many jobs and getting worn out, which is bad.
Half of one, six dozen of the other.
Hopefully, we’ll get a chance to talk about it this
weekend. We didn’t see each
other last weekend because of her trip to Sacramento and my being (you
guessed it!) in the office most of the time.
But we must get our priorities in order.
Having a User Guide in place for training is
important. But “Jeannie”
needs her email and there’s a Freebie at the
Lancôme cosmetics
counter beginning this week.
When in doubt, I usually set priorities in alphabetical order, so that
would be:
1.
Email
2.
Freebie
3.
User Guide
Love, as always,
Pete
PS.
Rave review in the
Chronicle
this week for
The
Man Who Came to Dinner in
Ashland,
which we will be attending next August.
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