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Greetings from Middle Earth
Jan. 11th, 2004 11:15 pmI feel a little guilty because I'm writing this instead of working. I took a little time tonight to do some luxurious stuff like paying bills and folding laundry. ;) That's a bit of an exxaggeration, but I have actually been quite busy lately, and I apologize profusely for my seeming inability to reply to comments. We've been really enjoying this time together, and we're also spending more time than normal with my family. When M was gone for eleven hours a day, it was pretty hard to motivate spending an evening anywhere but at home, but now we have a social life to catch up on.
In other news, we got a Christmas card from Middle Earth today. ;) (Yes, well, yesterday, but we didn't check the mail then.) I thought that was pretty neat. It's from Kina, M's sister, and was postmarked December 7th.. she was out travelling then. (She's home now, by the way, after like four months or so.) It has a stamp that says "New Zealand / home of / Middle-earth" in the LotR font. I feel kind of bad because we didn't send her a Christmas card at all. We tried to but we didn't have her address.
I just burnt a low-tech, low-overhead version of the pictures CD that we made in 2001. We spent outrageous amounts of time in the fall/winter of 2001 making this pictures CD to send off to M's family. I did the coding by hand, M did most of the captions. Each picture was resized and had a thumbnail. We could have done it quicker, but we couldn't have made it work any better, I don't think. We printed labels and cases and sent them out into the world and.. everyone said.. "oh. that's nice." We were underwhelmed with all the enthusiasm. His parents, our main target audience, couldn't figure out how to use it, so they were wondering why all the folders had little bitty pictures of the same things? :) Anyway, his dad mentioned that they had some sort of auto slideshow program the other day, which led to this little project. We spent last Monday afternoon fiddling with the very much simplified repeat project for 2002 and 2003. Magnus weeded through pictures, getting rid of the boring or repeated pictures and wrote captions in a document and printed them. I made sure all the pictures in each directory were named in alphabetical order (we leave them named stuff like P003822 to keep them organized, but there will always be a few that slip through with the wrong name) and created 24 generic graphics with the month and year and gave them all the appropriate names so that it will sort in the right place. So now, they can hold the paper and read along as the pictures flash by, with dividers for each month right there on the screen. No folders, no text on the cd at all. It doesn't look nearly as nice but maybe it'll work better for them! Now watch, their files will be sorted the wrong way or something and it still won't work for them. :)
In other news, we got a Christmas card from Middle Earth today. ;) (Yes, well, yesterday, but we didn't check the mail then.) I thought that was pretty neat. It's from Kina, M's sister, and was postmarked December 7th.. she was out travelling then. (She's home now, by the way, after like four months or so.) It has a stamp that says "New Zealand / home of / Middle-earth" in the LotR font. I feel kind of bad because we didn't send her a Christmas card at all. We tried to but we didn't have her address.
I just burnt a low-tech, low-overhead version of the pictures CD that we made in 2001. We spent outrageous amounts of time in the fall/winter of 2001 making this pictures CD to send off to M's family. I did the coding by hand, M did most of the captions. Each picture was resized and had a thumbnail. We could have done it quicker, but we couldn't have made it work any better, I don't think. We printed labels and cases and sent them out into the world and.. everyone said.. "oh. that's nice." We were underwhelmed with all the enthusiasm. His parents, our main target audience, couldn't figure out how to use it, so they were wondering why all the folders had little bitty pictures of the same things? :) Anyway, his dad mentioned that they had some sort of auto slideshow program the other day, which led to this little project. We spent last Monday afternoon fiddling with the very much simplified repeat project for 2002 and 2003. Magnus weeded through pictures, getting rid of the boring or repeated pictures and wrote captions in a document and printed them. I made sure all the pictures in each directory were named in alphabetical order (we leave them named stuff like P003822 to keep them organized, but there will always be a few that slip through with the wrong name) and created 24 generic graphics with the month and year and gave them all the appropriate names so that it will sort in the right place. So now, they can hold the paper and read along as the pictures flash by, with dividers for each month right there on the screen. No folders, no text on the cd at all. It doesn't look nearly as nice but maybe it'll work better for them! Now watch, their files will be sorted the wrong way or something and it still won't work for them. :)
