February 16, 2006
Dear Everyone:
My Wednesdays suddenly got busier.
I am now part of a data migration team that has a
global conference call the third Wednesday of every month.
Yes, that’s global conference call.
I’m in “Pleasanton” at 5:00 in the evening.
Another person is in
El Segundo,
where it’s also 5:00. Two
are in
My Homeowners’ Association Board of Directors meets the third Wednesday of every other month. Fortunately, last night’s conference call ended early and I was able to make the Board meeting at 6:00. Even more fortunately, that meeting ended early and I even got to go to bed early.
ARMA is the fourth Wednesday of each month. So for the foreseeable future, the weekly Letters will vacillate back and forth between those two days. Except for when I’m out of town on business, which is starting to look likely.
It’s more than Wednesdays that are getting busy. Where I used to have two or three meetings each week, now I’m in two or more meetings each day. In fact, after this morning’s first meeting at 7:30, my supervisor commented to me that I am currently deployed at 130%.
Lots to do.
There’s the
The aforementioned data migration team comes from the recent merger with “Yet Another Company”. That company used their intranet a lot to store information. That information has to go somewhere. The data migration team has the task of contacting the information’s owner who will decide (with advice from the team) where the information should go in Company. Once that decision is made the migration team figures out how to move the data.
My job is to keep reminding people that all this information belongs to the company and you can’t just delete a bunch of web pages, rather than move the stuff.
Speaking of “stuff”, I’m on a completely different migration team who is getting ready to start moving “Boring & Really Expensive Services” (BRES) files into the shiny new “Super Cabinet” that we’ve built for them in the document management system. Most people have no idea that this is going to start happening, so we’ve been having lots of meetings to figure out how we’re going to tell the BRES folks that “Your stuff is moving!”
Well, enough about that. “Jeannie” and I were going to meet up to see a movie last Sunday. But when I called her that morning, she didn’t sound too keen on the idea. She had a lot of work to do. So I went and saw Capote by myself.
This movie stars Philip Seymour Hoffman as Truman Capote at the time in his life that he was working on the book, In Cold Blood. The movie is up for a Best Picture Oscar and Hoffman is up for Best Actor. Now I’ve seen Hoffman before.
In Twister, he played one of a merry band of techno geeks chasing after tornadoes with Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton. In The Talented Mr. Ripley, he played the Doubting Thomas who didn’t buy Tom Ripley’s act. In Capote, of course, he plays a completely different character, one based on a well-known celebrity.
He adopts the high-pitched voice (but not the annoying lisp that some people feared). And he wears the dark-rimmed eyeglasses and severe haircut. But what gets me is that I’d swear he was at least 3-4 inches shorter than in his other films.
The movie begins with the discovery of a gruesome
multiple murder in a farmhouse in
Nelle, it turns out, is Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird. While she’s getting published, Capote is obsessed with Perry Edward Smith and Richard Hickock. He alternates between being their friend, getting them an appeals attorney after they’re sentenced to death, and taking advantage of them (the reason for the lawyer is so they’ll stay alive long enough for him to finish his book.) At times he comes across as completely self-absorbed and manipulative. At others, he’s warm, funny and charming. Needless to say, a complex personality.
For Hoffman, it’s a tour de force. And, since I haven’t as yet seen any of the other nominated performances, he gets my vote.
Love, as always,
Pete
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