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Work Report - Mike Crowl focuses on jobs and work and anything connected to the two.
Mike blogs in two places on Orble, and two on Blogger. His wife thinks he writes too much.
Next time your sending out baby shower invitations, just consider what you’ve become part of. What used to be a pleasant tradition, which aimed at helping parents-to-be, in particular, to cope with the cost of a baby arriving in the house, has become, in typical US fashion, an over-the-top retail opportunity. And of course US retailers have found all sorts of ways to go mad about it.
Many shops offer to keep lists of what you’d like for the baby. No longer ‘gifts’, which you choose without prompting, this situation is like the wedding list, which, while it might have been helpful to avoid getting three toasters, has now become a means of the young couple suggesting very expensive items without qualm.
I found on a Wikipedia article that the shower idea has extended further, until it’s now becoming absurd
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I’ve just been on a Retreat at a place called Karitane. We were only away from Friday evening till four this afternoon; long enough, and well worth doing.
Karitane, but on a rather dull-looking day
Karitane is the birthplace of the Plunket movement. Before Sir Truby King, the founder of the Plunket movement, opened his first hospital, here in Dunedin, in December 1907, he cared for 13 sick, emaciated babies at his own home, a cottage in Karitane. (The Plunket movement is a New Zealand institution: babies have been well cared for, monitored and generally kept in good health as a result of it for around a hundred years.)
I don’t know whether the place we’ve just stayed in was the ‘cottage’ but it was certainly another home that was used for mothers and their unwell babies. I certainly wouldn’t call it a cottage: it’s a long building with some nine or ten rooms all in a row. Originally some of these rooms were actually two rooms – they’ve been opened up to cater for visitors like us. Parallel with the rooms is an equally long closed-in verandah, full of large windows so that heaps of light gets in. Through these windows you get a view of the bay at Karitane – it’s like a second beach next to the main one
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The day held more than just fun playing with the printer.
I learned how to copy a graph from a PDF file, and plunk it into Word.
I wrote more pages of the piece I’m doing on the ethnic makeup of New Zealand, now and in the future. My boss brought back the last similar effort I did, on youth in New Zealand, and with great enthusiasm, showed me where it could be considerably improved. And she was right. And I will improve it. I have started to learn not to treat my first whacks at a topic as masterpieces that cannot be altered. In this office they’ll get altered
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Been an interesting day at work.
Yesterday our printer died. We could almost have cared less, since it’s been a pain every since I’ve been there, and apparently was from the time it was bought. The IT guy thinks it’s cheese and deserves to be grated into little pieces. I tend to agree.
However, when I say it died, I really mean it kept telling me that it had to be rebooted. I presumed this meant turning it on and off, but nope, it wanted to be rebooted. Who knows the mind of a printer when it’s malfunctioning
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I haven't been writing much on Orble just over the last week or so: too much else on my plate, so blogging has had to take a bit of a back seat. Still variety is good for us, eh?
Just came across a site called Treehugger. I don't know whether it has anything to with blokes as such, but it certainly has some interesting stuff on it. It's green-focused, of course, and in the post I picked up on the writer is talking about a house designed by Mihai "Nova" Popa, who may be an artist before he's an architect. Nevertheless he's built a most intriguing house near Bridgehampton, Long Island. It's made out of a demolished church, so the wood is wonderfully stained and glossy
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While I was clearing out a couple of large drawers today, drawers full of old magazines and various other paraphernalia, I came across a copy of The New Scientist, that self-important British magazine which is always proclaiming itself on the cusp of new information. At least that’s how it comes across to me.
I’ve pretty much given up reading it. I don’t think it’s reporting is half as good as it’s claimed to be, because even though it presents its material in scientific-speak, a lot of what it reports isn’t factual, and hasn’t been verified in any sense
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When I was involved in the production of the play, The Diary of Anne Frank, a couple of years ago, at least two of the actors had recently had small parts in a movie that was made locally. The film eventually came out with the rather innocuous title, Out of the Blue, because the makers weren’t allowed to use the word, Aramoana, in the title, Aramoana being the name of the coastal village near our city where more than a dozen people were gunned down in one day by a man who lost the plot and shot at everything that moved.
One of these actors was telling me at the time that he’d signed up with an agent, because he was interested in getting more film work, and I’ve just come across his photo, and that of two other people who in the play, on a site called Otago Actors and Talent Agency. I’m not sure if this is the ‘agent’ he was referring to. I rather think it’s more likely to be yet another way of getting his face seen
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With this new job I’m having to learn to be less ‘precious’ about the stuff I write. Because I’ve pretty much always written for myself, in the sense that at the end of the day I still own the stuff, it’s a bit difficult making the transition to writing for some ‘entity’ other than myself and thus not being worried about what happens to it.
For instance, I spent a lot of time a couple of weeks ago rewriting material that had previously been used as part of a proposal. What I had to do was make it more user-friendly. It took me two or three days to find a way into doing this, between other things, and I was pretty satisfied with the result. However, it didn’t get used, and the new version of the proposal was sent away without it. In fact, the new version had a rush job done on that part of it, with me culling together bits and pieces that had originally belonged in other places
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Worked overtime this last weekend. I was required to be at the Presbyterian Synod’s AGM. (A Synod, in this case, is a group of presbyteries, which each cover a group of parishes.)
Because both my bosses were involved in presentations and such, and because I play the piano and they sing, I was roped in to play some music at a few points during the gathering. It gave me a chance to play three new piano pieces I’ve
written since the beginning of the year, which was good, and besides that I was involved in playing with the music group who played for the congregation during the various services we had over the day and a half
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230 Posts dating from December 2006
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