23 May 2001
Last year: Not that I'm irritated about it or anything.
Hey, I got five and a half hours of sleep last night! I'm on the comeback trail!
Actually, although I was very sleepy yesterday as I wrote my journal entry, I perked right up after having two cups of coffee in lieu of breakfast.
Yeah, I know - huge surprise. But then I managed to stay perfectly awake and even bouncy for the rest of the day. Which I don't think was the coffee. I doubt the coffee got me much further than lunchtime. So that was nice.
Kris called me yesterday to find out if I wanted to meet her for lunch today, since she's seeing a patient in Williamsburg in the late morning. (She's a hospice nurse, which means - among other things - that she visits patients at their homes.) She wanted to go to the Tequila Rose, which is a new Mexican restaurant in town that Matt and I had introduced to her and Braz over the weekend.
"I've been on a Mexican kick lately," she confided.
"I guessed," I answered, laughing.
"Braz was surprised I didn't want to go to the Tequila Rose or La Tolteca for dinner tonight, but..." She dropped her voice. "...I had Taco Bell for lunch."
I was, in fact, extremely productive yesterday morning. (After I'd had that coffee, anyway.) I finished making changes to a document that defines entirely the user interaction (i.e., screens), inputs, and outputs of my project. This is something of a "C.Y.A." document - if I can get my customers to sign off on it, then I can come back to the document if they complain I didn't add something. Not in the document, not getting done.
Or, at least, if it's not in the document, I'm not promising to have it done by the deadline. I'm C'ing my A.
So yesterday I made some requested changes, added some fancy stuff like page numbers and a table of contents, gave it a document version history so I could see what had been changed in the past... That kind of thing. Then I sent it off to my manager and asked him to look it over before I sent it to the customer.
That was at about 10:30 or so. My manager didn't get back to me until mid-afternoon. So I spent about five hours on my Mac, doctoring a picture I'd downloaded from Elfwood. (I had to add two hands to the picture to get it to do what I wanted it to do. Hands are hard even for most artists, and I'm no artist. Thus the five hours.)
Then - finally satisfied with the way it looked - I went to get the link to the original picture so I could e-mail the artist and ask for permission to use it. (When I download pictures, I copy a link to them in a text file.) Except I seemed to have forgotten to copy that link. I looked everywhere. I found lots of other links, but not the one to the picture I'd just spent five hours on.
Elfwood is enormous. I despaired of ever finding it. But after two and a half hours of text searches, I finally found it! Hurrah! And then I loaded up the artist's main page.
The bio on the artist's main page said, "Please ask my permission before using my pictures" (that's what I was trying to do!) and "Do not make any alterations!" B-But... Five hours!
I wrote and asked her anyway. It can't hurt. She might say yes. Or maybe not. But the doctored picture is on my hard drive, and I'm not giving it up if she says no! I just can't post it anywhere. But I hope she says yes. I'm sortof proud of those hands. (Karen said they were too small, but I was using the one hand the artist had already put into the picture for scale, so I refuse to take the blame for it. It's not like the rest of it is life-quality.) And I even got the thumbs on the correct sides!
I anticipate not having much to work on today, either. Our weekly trip to Fort Lee is scheduled for Friday, so unless the customer actually e-mails me answers on the document (which isn't likely - he likes to talk face-to-face) I'm going to have some prime thumb-twiddling time today.
How did I ever survive slow days at work without my Mac?
I expect I'll be spending today writing a lot. I've run out of pictures to doctor, after all. And there are some stories that are beating on the back of my skull. I hope I can get them to come out a little more smoothly today.
Word of the Day:
myopic - affected by nearsightedness; limited in outlook, lacking discernment or foresight
Currently Reading:
- nothing
Current Projects:
- writing
- garden