May 13, 2010
Dear Everyone:
I took last Thursday as a vacation day so that I
could take care of something.
It didn’t make much sense to go back to work again on Friday,
particularly since it was an “A” Friday, which meant no one else would
be at work anyway. So
instead I had a meeting with our
Estate Planning lawyer.
He’s the one who set up my
Living Trust about five
years ago. Not much has
changed except that I had sold the
townhouse, which was in the Trust,
and bought the condo, which was not in the Trust.
By yesterday I had received the draft of the transfer document
that would place the condo in the Trust.
I’ll probably meet with him next week to sign the document.
Our sister, “Frankie”, her husband, “Larry”, and
their two older children, plus significant other, are flying out to the
Bay Area this Saturday. This
is because their youngest, our niece, “Liza”, will be graduating from
UC
Berkeley with her
master’s degree on Monday.
“Frankie” has already made a reservation for dinner Monday
evening. So I’m taking
Tuesday as a vacation day so I don’t have to struggle to wake up and go
into work. I’ll probably
arrange to meet with the lawyer that afternoon.
I was planning on taking Monday off as well, but
got an “invite” to a “town hall” meeting taking place that Monday
morning. There’s a “project”
going on which will ultimately result in a reduction of the workforce in
my Operating Company by about 15%.
Don’t want to miss out on any news about who will get the axe.
They will make the decisions concerning the people in my Pay
Scale Grade (PSG) in September.
Till then, fingers crossed and brush up on those transferrable
job skills.
Speaking of which, I’m still working on the
Computer Based Training (CBT) for that
document management system that I
used to be the trainer for some five years ago.
I thought I had all the basic modules completed and had started
practicing the “hands on” Labs.
That’s when I discovered, completely by accident,
that they had made a fundamental change to the generic Document Type
that I was using for the CBT.
That meant I had to drop everything and redo Modules Three and
Six!
But I had already “published” all eight Modules and
copied them to a web server for designated people to test.
So, of course, those Modules are already outdated even before
they’re Ready for Prime Time.
Something else we discovered:
We put hyperlinks in some Modules that take the student to
another location, in a separate window, to show them something
important, like the Company Policy regarding Information Management or
the Retention Schedule. The
links work fine in “Preview”.
But when you “Publish” a Module, suddenly the links no longer
work.
I mentioned it to one of our contractors, who works
a lot with this software and she looked at me like I’d grown a second
head. Then she muttered
something about having to test a lot of her work and, if there was a
problem, it was more likely with the Company setup on the computers and
network than the software.
Now we’re having another co-worker, who knows someone outside of work
who has the exact same software, try the
hyperlink-not-working-in-Published issue outside of the Company.
That may help in finding the real culprit.
In the meantime, I’m having fun creating
“interactive Labs” to replace the hands on exercises that we used to use
in classes. There’s all
kinds of cool stuff you can use, providing it does what you want it to
do, when you want it to do it.
Remember: Computers
do what you tell them to do,
rather than what you want
them to do.
Love, as always,
Pete
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