jimsjournal
Another grain of sand -- 02/17/04


There was a soap opera (was? probably still is? Yes, google tells me it sitll exists!) that began with an announcer saying something about "As sands through an hour glass, these are the days of our lives..." I can remember hearing that when I was a kid and the image stayed with me.

This was my day...

Woke up around 5:30 a.m., ten minutes prior to the time my alarm was set for. Headache. Sinus headache. Not a good start for the day. Down the stairs. Vicks Sinex nasal spray. Two aspirin tablets. A cup of black coffee. Bring in the newspaper, taking a deep breath of crisply cold February air. Head begins to clear.

Connect laptop (stealing ethernet connection from my desktop machine in the den) and download work e-mail. Take ten minutes for a dish of cereal. Back to work. Finish packaging some files and upload to our team repository. Look at some table-of-contents problems I'd been having with the books for a course I've been editing. Look through a new book that had arrived with my amazon.com order yesterday -- FrameMaker 6: beyond the basics -- to see if I could get some insight into the problem.

8:45 -- daily telephone conference call with two co-workers. Discuss some problems, outline who is going to do what. After the call I set to work on doing a quality assurance review of what we call a Distance Learning course -- a computer based course, a collection of HTML, XML and graphics files, designed to be taken over the Internet or downloaded to a PC. I spend most of the morning editing a Word file that contains a copy of all of the text that would be displayed on a student's screen.

Break for lunch a little past noon. Since I am working from home and since Nancy has the week off, we take this opportunity to have lunch together. At this point I have worked around six hours.

At one o'clock I have a three hour training session -- done via telephone and Internet -- explaining to me (and to some co-workers also attending electronically) the process of setting up CDs to be delivered to the instructors worldwide who will be teaching various courses developed by our departments. This is really terribly detailed and terribly boring stuff -- assigning the part number for the CD for a given course, setting up the licensing agreement to be loaded into InstallShield, etc. We finish at four. I then do some more editing work and have a telephone conversation with a colleague who has some questions about how to set up directory structures in our on-line repository for storing course materials.

About five-thirty I log off the company network and change into shorts and t-shirt to go down in the basement and ride the exercise bike for about forty minutes (the equivalent of a twelve mile ride according to the electronic readout). I was at the computer for about ten and a half hours -- but I also spent some time reading a few online journals and checking personal e-mail, so call it between nine and a half and ten hours of work.

Fix dinner. Eat dinner -- Nancy and me and Jill and a friend of hers who is working on a role-playing game with her -- Jeremy had already fixed dinner for himself and a couple of his buddies (cooked up some frozen fish sticks and a frozen pizza). Take a shower. Come downstairs and work for an hour or so and then write this entry. (Nancy was using my desktop machine, so we were together in the den.) Write this entry... but I am really sleepy so I think I am going to bed now and will actually post this Wednesday morning.




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