07.13.07
Friday Random Ten: Shoot Me in the Head Edition
Last week was one of the laziest of my life, due to the General’s fairly generous 4th of July policy. This week has been one of the busiest as a form of compensation, I think.
From the iPod:
- Royksopp - 40 Year BackCome
- Aimee Mann - It’s Not Safe
- Gustav Mahler - Symphony No 5, Movement V (SF Symphony)
- Hank Williams - Lost Highway
- Metric - Handshakes
- Radiohead - There There. (The Boney King of Nowhere.)
- Stephane Grapelli - The Folks Who Live on the Hill
- Lester Young w/ the Oscar Peterson Trio - Just You, Just Me
- Jens Lekman - A Man Walks Into a Bar
- The Cure - Plainsong
Corporate Documentation is a strange rabbithole of redundancy, cross-referencing, and CYA nonsense. It’s like doing a design twice - every thing, no matter how obvious must be addressed, must be there. This would be easier if it were my design, but a lot of people - especially interns - wind up writing up other people’s designs. It’s frustrating for everyone involved; building the understanding necessary to do this right takes time, but employers want results now and employees feel unproductive and frustrated.
My technical work here is all but over. I may get the chance to do a few bench tests next week on a circuit board, but it’s fairly minimal stuff. I’m basically a technical writer for the rest of my term. I don’t know who the people are that do this tech writing professionally, but they must have some serious fortitude.
I do have a super-awesome personal project/job right now, building a website for a record label. It’s hard work, because it needs to launch before they hit the festivals this August, so we’re doing a tiered design, with a static page for now. I’m building a dynamic one to follow it later - it’ll be the first complete web app I’ve ever built.
I hand-coded the previous version of this blog, which actually worked surprisingly well. Wordpress has me totally out-classed, naturally, but it was a good exercise in learning databases and PHP. I want to try doing this site with Python, but my host isn’t terribly familiar with the language, so I may just stick to PHP for now.