Enjablog

Yesterday was a food-packed day.  It started out with omelettes at work.  My company just renewed our lease with our current building and, as a thank you, our realtor brought in an omelette chef for the morning.  My boss was craving chips and queso, so he went around on Thursday handing out Chipotle fax forms.  Friday lunch, he ran over to pick up office burritos and made queso to go with the chips he brought in.  Mmm!  So cheesey!

For date night last week, Ian and I went out for dinner without a plan.  We headed down to Old Town and wandered around until we found a nice little Irish pub for dinner: Pat Troy’s.  On our way there, though, we saw a sign for Dancing Peppers Cantina and decided to try it some other time (there’s a pepper wearing a Mexican hat and it looks like he’s *dancing*).  That other time was last night and it was excellent.  We got quesadillas, tacos, and enchiladas.  All good and the raspberry margarita was fantastic.  :)

At the end of dinner, I tried out something I learned from WaiterRant.  In the past, I have been peeved when the waiter/tress automatically puts the check next to the guy.  But he makes a good point that the check should be brought to the person who asked for it.  Granted, in the past I have asked for it and it still gets put next to Ian.  Last night was worse than usual.  Started out well;  I asked for the check and she brought it to the table, placing it close to the center.  I put my credit card in, handed her the booklet thingy, and asked if they took Discover.  She said yes and would be right back after running it through the computer.  Then she returned and placed the booklet right in front of Ian.

<Rant>
I am a member of a professional society relating to my job.  I volunteer as their webmaster and do things like update the meeting schedule, post related papers, events, announcements, etc., and just generally keep people up-to-date on the goings-on.  I took this position mostly because they didn’t have anyone to do it and I didn’t want to be meetings chair anymore.  But I also thought this would be a good opportunity for me since I wanted to learn more about web design and this would give me a good excuse to learn/implement new things.

The site that was handed over to me was essentially a relic from the mid-90s with tables for everything, broken links, inconsistent fonts/colors, and  a menu that changed width depending on what page you were on.  That one, I still can’t explain; I never could fix it.  I have since organized *folders*, started using index files instead of naming everything home.html or home2.html, and converted their old look into pretty css.  These were relatively benign changes, since the look of the site didn’t change much.  It was just cleaner; the content was the same.

The first comment I got on it was from the Chairman, asking me how I learned to do that and informing me that it’s ok that I made those changes, but the website no longer printed out correctly.  Well, that’s because it’s a website and most people don’t have reason to print out entire websites.  Anyway, I addressed that issue and all was well.

And then Google Calendars came out.  I thought it was awesome!  (Still think it’s awesome too.)  I’m sure you all knew that already.  But I thought it would be incredibly cool if people could subscribe to our society calendar and be able to add it to their personal calendar.  It would keep people posted on when our technical sessions were, they could set up personal reminders, and they could conveniently find out what the presentations were about without needing to check our website regularly.  It would be us going to them without spamming their email the week before each meeting.

I will include you on the agenda (Wednesday) to explain what is meant by xml button you have now placed on the web pages.

Even I don’t know what these are - which is a bit embarrassing for me as the EMC chair, as well as the chair of this Section.

Henceforth you will consult me on these kinds of revisions to the web pages, please.

EMC = Electronics Media Committee.  They do like using the word electronics to sound cool.  Anyway, that was an email referring to the new XML and ICAL buttons I had posted up on the site.  I really should have known that our self-proclaimed techno guru didn’t know about RSS feeds and should have gotten his permission to post a link to information that is already available on the website.  I am to assume the section chairman has less knowledge of the internet than a 12-year-old blogger and not make any changes to the website.  He’s right.  That is embarrassing.

He, however, can post whatever he wants, whenever he wants, without letting me know.  This is awesome because, for some reason, I don’t download the entire website every time I make updates.  This means that when he goes in and re-orders the list of executive members the way he likes it and posts captioned pictures, it’s my fault that I over-wrote his files with content updates and he has no copy on his harddrive.

 Enter: yesterday’s nasty-gram.

These pages in my view are far nicer than pages created with your software, especially since I add captions and think hard about the layout and order of the photos.  In the last year I have installed by photos page as index.html,
so a member can easily clink to the nice page from the gallery page.  Therefore, where in the past I had created nice pages I want them on the website. If neither of us can find my old pages above I will recreate the html - as best I can recall the text I used - using the files in original, of course.

Essentially, “Your work sucks.  My work is superior, even though it has never been linked to and no one has ever seen it.”  He later called me to explain in “as small words” as he could, “in english.”  Yeah, it’s hard work.  He actually referred to the pages I put up as crap. He has essentially peed all over our photo gallery claiming that as his area of the website that will not follow the same menu/look as the rest of the site. He does not want it to have anything next to or above the pictures and i am to pass any new changes by him and the entire executive committee because that is the way any webmaster for an organization would do it. This is a society site and, just as the treasurer can not just go off and do whatever he wants, I can not just make changes to the site.

So, he’s turning this into a power struggle when it’s just a website.  And, yes, I know I’m just playing into it by even caring about the quality of work I produce.  But let’s get down to it.  His real problem?  I started using something he did not understand.  I posted meeting pictures without his  permission.  He thought that was a great idea.  I started linking presentations, abstracts, and bios for technical sessions without permission.  He was excited that all this information was getting posted!  I changed the front page to show links to all our events, with a second page detailing each event, also with relevent links.  This, also, is great!

I realize now that he was showing apprehensions toward changes when we switched to CSS and made things look more consistent overall.  He did not understand this.  That means it is inherently bad.  Technology is bad.  Adding links to yet another thing he did not understand.  That is crossing the line.  I should not only get permission from him, but also from the entire executive committee.  Which means wasting 10 people’s time in an already lengthy meeting, but also waiting 1-2 months on any updates.

 Yeah, so I’m incredibly riled up about this.  This pisses me off.  A lot.  I volunteered for this position.  I did it to learn and have fun.  He would like me to do neither.  That is ok with me.  I have plenty of other things to spend my time doing.

</Rant> 

I bought new dress shoes for work a few weeks ago and they are working out splendidly!  They were Aerosoles and are incredibly comfortable walking to and from Ian’s office parking garage or the metro.  Depending on my mood I can either wear these shoes or sneakers and change into my backup shoes at work.  I never thought I’d get excited about shoes, but just thought I’d share the info.

Update on my illness.  I was sick for about 18 hours Monday-Tuesday.  I think it might have been due to eating too much candy, but I eat too much candy and too many cookies all the time.  I don’t know why this time was so different.  I bought some reduced price Easter candy on Monday morning and was eating it throughout the day.  Now, when I say “throughout the day” I really mean that I had like 5 or 6 mini-chocolate eggs spaced out during the day.  I have had way more chocolate than that before.  Another factor that may have played a role is that I hadn’t had anything else to eat during the day.

Around 4pm, I started feeling funny.  Then, over the next 30-60 minutes, I started feeling very warm and nauseated.  I asked Ian if he could head out early, he said yes, and off we went.  I made it about 3/4 of the way home before my streak was broken.  Then, again after a 2-hour nap.  I felt a little better after that, so I had some dinner and sat around until I felt unwell again.  And slept for 11 hours.  I got up, sent a couple emails and IMed for about half an hour.  This was enough work for one day, so I decided to take a 6-hour nap.  And when I woke up, I was perfectly healthy again.  The End.