March 13, 2008
Dear Everyone:
Spring arrived here in the
Bay Area last weekend.
The sky was a brilliant blue, the air warm and inviting.
The hills were emerald green with patches of bright yellow (wild
mustard) and warm orange (California Golden Poppies.)
So how did I choose to spend this first day of lovely warm
weather?
In the basement of an office building, naturally.
A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I would be
working on a glossary of terms in a web site called a “wiki”.
(By the way, a correction from that Letter:
It’s not “wikipedia.com”, it’s “wikipedia.org”.
A .com is a commercial site; a .org is an organizational site.)
Well, I was out of the office for a few days, attending a
Workshop and the technical contractor went wild.
She had copied the entire contents of two Company glossaries and
was well on her way through a third before we realized what was
happening and stopped her.
By then there were nearly 700 entries in the
glossary. So I had a lot of
work to do clearing out the unnecessary ones and reformatting the
remaining 450 or so. Trouble
was, I could only (theoretically) spend two hours per day on it.
I have two GIL 3 sub-teams (25% each) and the “Winks” Project
(50%) to account for my time.
Last Saturday, I first confirmed that my personal
laptop really can play DVDs (you have to “initialize” it first.)
Then I took six hours worth of movies with me into the office and
listened to them while I worked on the Glossary.
I actually only worked for five hours.
And the Glossary was ready to greet the world.
Of course, the world immediately complained that
they couldn’t search the Glossary, but that’s a different issue.
As for those five hours of “overtime”, I couldn’t “declare” them
(i.e., charge the Project) because overtime can only be approved in
advance by the Project Feature Team Leader.
But that’s OK because I now have five hours of time
“in the bank”. I can use it
to make up for other time that can’t be charged to anyone.
Like if I have to leave work early to get to the
ARMA Chapter
meeting, I just subtract that time from the “bank” and apply it to the
Project. Likewise, when I
spent an hour and a half this afternoon fussing with an
Excel
spreadsheet (just couldn’t remember how to turn a bunch of numbers into
a pie chart), that wasn’t done to support any of the projects.
But I can subtract 1.5 hours from the “bank” and use it to make
up the time. It all comes
out in the wash.
On Sunday, I drove up to “Jeannie’s” place to reset
her clocks (Daylight Saving Time had struck again.)
She was expecting our niece, “Liza”, who was coming out for the
weekend and to take a look at “Jeannie’s”
arbor, which needs repainting.
As soon as “Liza” arrived, we all but threw her into the car and
rushed off to see Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day.
Francis McDormand, who won the
Academy Award for
her pregnant sheriff in
If necessity is the mother of invention,
desperation is the mother of ingenuity.
Guinevere leaps at an opportunity and finds herself the “social
secretary” to Delysia Lafosse, played by
Amy Adams, a nightclub singer
looking to star in a
And she gets to play “dress up” by paying for a
makeover for Guinevere. Now
it becomes a “buddy movie” for the two women.
Amy Adams (Enchanted)
manages not to be blown off the screen by her co-star, which says
something about her own talent.
There are, of course, lots of “beautiful people”
who are vaguely aware that a war is coming, but as Guinevere and a
lingerie designer named Joe discuss, “they don’t remember the last one.”
Joe likes Guinevere and McDormand shows how she’s not really
prepared to deal with it.
It’s a lovely romantic comedy that runs under two
hours and when you reach the end, it’s hard to believe that it all
happened in just one day.
Try it, you’ll like it.
Love, as always,
Pete
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