April 22, 2004
Dear Everyone:
“Jeannie” has changed her email address again. This is because she has changed her Internet Service Provider (ISP) (again!). She got fed up with how slow dial-up was, and the fact that someone out-bid her on an item on ebay, so she called the local cable company and arranged for someone to come out and install cable in her home office, which is now also her home gym. The treadmill finally arrived.
The Cable Guy, who evidently expected to quickly splice an existing cable, was dismayed to find he would have to start at the junction box in the garage and pull the cable up to the second floor, and was in quite a hurry by the time he finished. Consequently, he didn’t bother to show her how to use it. He just logged in, set up her id and password, handed her a copy of the invoice and took off.
So it was last weekend when I went up to her place to take a look at this new cable setup. The only way “Jeannie” knew to “get to the Internet” was to launch Outlook Express. I told her that wasn’t necessary and wouldn’t help, since it wouldn’t get her to her new email Inbox. Instead, I tried double-clicking on the icon for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (the one that comes with every Windows Operating System and is at the heart of at least one anti-trust lawsuit against the company).
Presto! Up popped the cable company’s web site. We quickly made that a “Favorite” and went to the really important site: “My eBay”. We made this “Jeannie’s” home page, so every time she logs onto the Internet, she automatically goes there. Heaven.
We also traveled to a number of sites that she uses for business. For example: WebMD.com to look up the proper spelling of conditions and medications. Webster.com for the online dictionary. Dogpile.com because it has a nifty search strategy. Google, of course. MapPoint for looking up street addresses. All these we set up as Favorites.
Then we took on the DVD player. “Jeannie” had complained that the DVD always started at the beginning of the disk, instead of where she had left off the day before. Her new rule is, she can only watch the DVD while walking on the treadmill. Lately, she’s been watching a half-hour series from HBO. Each episode lasts about 22 minutes and two are perfect for a good workout. But she always had to start at the beginning and fast forward to where she’d left off previously.
So I showed her how the “next” button works, which take you to the next “chapter” on the disk. Once she had that down pat, we worked forward to where the disk should start for the next exercise session. Then she ejected the disk from the machine and shut it down.
Now I understood why the disk always went back to the beginning. If you leave the disk in the machine and shut the machine down, it will begin again at the point you left off before. But if you take the disk out of the machine and put it back in again, the machine will always start at the beginning because it has no way of knowing the stopping point from before. I think I have her convinced now that it’s OK to leave the disk in the machine. I’ll know more next weekend.
Before doing all this, we had gone to lunch in
The reason I generally stay out of bookstores is that I go wild. Sometimes I’ll pick up a book just based on the title. This time I consider myself fortunate to have gotten out for under $100.00.
In other news…
The electronic document management system business is heating up. There is a team that is working on a way to take six separate indexing systems and shoehorn them all into the one system we have now. Lots of targeted training coming up in the next few months. Training for unhappy campers who already know how to use the old system and don’t want to learn a new way of doing things.
It’s been my experience that the people who complain the loudest about the shortcomings of the old system are the very people who discover how much they loved the old system compared to the new system.
As for my facility drawings project, the team keeps changing directions on me. One week, I proposed using searches to locate specific combinations of drawing disciplines and drawing types. Would that allow us to locate what they consider to be “critical” drawings? Oh, yes, they said. That would work great.
While there are estimated to be less than a thousand “critical” drawings, there are hundreds of thousands of other drawings in the system. It’s like looking for 1000 needles in a haystack of over 200,000 pieces of straw.
The next week, when I repeated the criteria, they reversed and declared that the only way to identify “critical” drawings is for an experience person to open the drawing and look at it. In other words, working with this group is not unlike trying to herd cats.
Love, as always,
Pete
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