Executive Meddling Because Viewers Are Morons
Life goes on. Good? Sorta'... it's what, the second week of school now? Yeah, very nearly the end of the second week of school too, and so far nothing much of note has happened. I've been eating laoporbing and mooncakes and still haven't finished either of 'em... of course I'm sure I could finish 'em faster if I took 'em to school, except nobody quite likes to eat a whole mooncake on their own and one can't very well produce a knife in the middle of class to share out the thing, can one? And the laoporbing are too fragile to be brought around so easily--maybe I'll try, afterwards, and hope the gelatinous centre is enough to hold the little flaky crust together. I'll probably also try to walk really gently and hope it works--or, of course, I could catch the bus.
Ten days since the last update! Well, like I said... nothing much has happened really, except that I've been having very little sleep for the past day or two and so am a bit tired--even if it's 12pm to me at the moment--and I can feel the beginnings of a headache to boot. I don't think it's the school lectures so far, though the tutorials are quite decidedly hell to do and it's starting to look like they won't be getting any easier along the year. Still, at least it's a way of forcing the students to actually read the material, even if a certain small number of them still insist on being rather noisy in the lecture halls--they try to whisper, I suppose, but the sheer number of them whispering at the same time produces a sort of rumbling sound that works very well as white noise and totally blocks out some of our softer-voiced lecturers while also preventing anybody from listening to their conversations. I also skipped a tutorial today because I hadn't had time to do it... but more on that in the next paragraph.
Well, I'm in the Publications Subcommittee of my school club (basically a small buncha' people that're supposed to look out for the wellbeing of everybody else in the course or two encompassed by us), and so far none of my duties have quite fallen into the Publications directive--first there was that inane survey-taking last semester, and then earlier this semester was a car-washing fundraiser thing that effectively ate up 3 hours of my weekend in travelling time and forced me to wake up at 6 on a Saturday morning (!) and didn't get me so much as a thank-you SMS... so when I was told to create a website for an upcoming Pageant and Bash (don't ask me who plans these things, I just do what I have to), I said something along the lines of "oh well it's a darn sight better than asking people to give me highly sensitive information" and landed myself with this job.
I'm supposed to have a couple of assistants, but so far I'm in this on my own, apart from the small contribution from somebody in a totally unrelated subcommittee who knows my subcommittee head and so they decided to send me a certain template and go "we want it to look like this but MORE AWESOME". So that's what's been eating at my time for the past few nights--my classes tend to end late this semester and I do have other activities--the Crusade, for example--and did I mention before I hate HTML? Well, I do hate it--reading it and coding it, because I never seem to quite get the effects I want, and sometimes it looks as if the same piece of code produces several different effects at various times, which means extensive use of the Refresh key to keep track of every change and then to switch back when the changes are less than optimal, which is most of the time.
Also, I've started to think that committees (sub or otherwise) aren't quite the best way to make decisions: while you do get the benefit of everybody's opinion or insight or whatever to an issue, you also get a lot of conflicting changes and sudden ideas and stuff when the issue is a minor thing--at best. They've changed the theme several times, asked for changes to the schedules, wanted minor differences in the background images, and suchlike... usually the day before it would be needed. You should try being in school and various things all day, coming back to your room to rest, and then having a little MSN conversation box pop up and ask if you're tired and (when you say yes) completely ignoring your reply because a Very Urgent Change is needed from the main committee and you must get it done right away and hopefully before tomorrow (which is about 45 minutes away), and when you protest that the kind of changes they want will take quite awhile (usually with regards to images) or that the code for that region is tricky, they say they understand and are very sorry but it absolutely has to be there by morning or heads will roll, and they hope you understand as well... And then, of course, after they ask you to exercise your creativity and type up a friendly welcoming post (as best as I can do friendly and welcoming at any rate), they turn right around and say it's too wordy, people have no time to plough through walls of happy text, could you please reduce it to a basic list of information and make the relevant little bits extra extra large and bold and in splashy coloured font? Basically, please make it simple so people don't need to use their brains very much?
Not to mention that I'm going to need to keep daily track of that thing for the next two months or so while people submit information, votes, etc... This is hardly my idea of Publications, where you basically turn out articles every now and then and they get published... but I suppose it's closer to the job description than "wash cars".
Ten days since the last update! Well, like I said... nothing much has happened really, except that I've been having very little sleep for the past day or two and so am a bit tired--even if it's 12pm to me at the moment--and I can feel the beginnings of a headache to boot. I don't think it's the school lectures so far, though the tutorials are quite decidedly hell to do and it's starting to look like they won't be getting any easier along the year. Still, at least it's a way of forcing the students to actually read the material, even if a certain small number of them still insist on being rather noisy in the lecture halls--they try to whisper, I suppose, but the sheer number of them whispering at the same time produces a sort of rumbling sound that works very well as white noise and totally blocks out some of our softer-voiced lecturers while also preventing anybody from listening to their conversations. I also skipped a tutorial today because I hadn't had time to do it... but more on that in the next paragraph.
Well, I'm in the Publications Subcommittee of my school club (basically a small buncha' people that're supposed to look out for the wellbeing of everybody else in the course or two encompassed by us), and so far none of my duties have quite fallen into the Publications directive--first there was that inane survey-taking last semester, and then earlier this semester was a car-washing fundraiser thing that effectively ate up 3 hours of my weekend in travelling time and forced me to wake up at 6 on a Saturday morning (!) and didn't get me so much as a thank-you SMS... so when I was told to create a website for an upcoming Pageant and Bash (don't ask me who plans these things, I just do what I have to), I said something along the lines of "oh well it's a darn sight better than asking people to give me highly sensitive information" and landed myself with this job.
I'm supposed to have a couple of assistants, but so far I'm in this on my own, apart from the small contribution from somebody in a totally unrelated subcommittee who knows my subcommittee head and so they decided to send me a certain template and go "we want it to look like this but MORE AWESOME". So that's what's been eating at my time for the past few nights--my classes tend to end late this semester and I do have other activities--the Crusade, for example--and did I mention before I hate HTML? Well, I do hate it--reading it and coding it, because I never seem to quite get the effects I want, and sometimes it looks as if the same piece of code produces several different effects at various times, which means extensive use of the Refresh key to keep track of every change and then to switch back when the changes are less than optimal, which is most of the time.
Also, I've started to think that committees (sub or otherwise) aren't quite the best way to make decisions: while you do get the benefit of everybody's opinion or insight or whatever to an issue, you also get a lot of conflicting changes and sudden ideas and stuff when the issue is a minor thing--at best. They've changed the theme several times, asked for changes to the schedules, wanted minor differences in the background images, and suchlike... usually the day before it would be needed. You should try being in school and various things all day, coming back to your room to rest, and then having a little MSN conversation box pop up and ask if you're tired and (when you say yes) completely ignoring your reply because a Very Urgent Change is needed from the main committee and you must get it done right away and hopefully before tomorrow (which is about 45 minutes away), and when you protest that the kind of changes they want will take quite awhile (usually with regards to images) or that the code for that region is tricky, they say they understand and are very sorry but it absolutely has to be there by morning or heads will roll, and they hope you understand as well... And then, of course, after they ask you to exercise your creativity and type up a friendly welcoming post (as best as I can do friendly and welcoming at any rate), they turn right around and say it's too wordy, people have no time to plough through walls of happy text, could you please reduce it to a basic list of information and make the relevant little bits extra extra large and bold and in splashy coloured font? Basically, please make it simple so people don't need to use their brains very much?
Not to mention that I'm going to need to keep daily track of that thing for the next two months or so while people submit information, votes, etc... This is hardly my idea of Publications, where you basically turn out articles every now and then and they get published... but I suppose it's closer to the job description than "wash cars".
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