Grrr...

I'm in a very bad mood today.

More precisely, I feel extremely anxious, pressured and annoyed at the moment. All it would take is someone to bug the wrong way and I might explode; needless to say, I'm doing my best to keep this under control and to avoid contact with known idiots.

My best guess at the moment is that this is the cumulative effect of a long series of minor annoyances and disappointments at work and elsewhere, combined with a lack of sleep over the past few weeks.

I have a relatively hefty load of commitments, but I think the burden would be easily managed if it wasn't for the numerous delays and interruptions caused by others who forget deadlines, fail to follow through on agreements, fail to read the information given them and generally act like incompetent dolts. Somehow, most of the people I've been working with the past two weeks have collectively lost their clues and are sharing but a single one among the lot.

This wouldn't be a bad thing --hell, it could be humourous in the right circumstances-- but my lack of sleep is translating into a lack of patience. I'd take a day off of work to recover except that all of yesterday's deadlines were rescheduled to today because of --yeah, you guessed it-- a bunch of colleagues didn't follow through as promised. Now I have five projects all on hold, waiting for a number of people to get their collective asses in gear.

I need a day off. And a massage. And ice cream. With chocolate cake.

Grrr...

I'm in a very bad mood today.

More precisely, I feel extremely anxious, pressured and annoyed at the moment. All it would take is someone to bug the wrong way and I might explode; needless to say, I'm doing my best to keep this under control and to avoid contact with known idiots.

My best guess at the moment is that this is the cumulative effect of a long series of minor annoyances and disappointments at work and elsewhere, combined with a lack of sleep over the past few weeks.

I have a relatively hefty load of commitments, but I think the burden would be easily managed if it wasn't for the numerous delays and interruptions caused by others who forget deadlines, fail to follow through on agreements, fail to read the information given them and generally act like incompetent dolts. Somehow, most of the people I've been working with the past two weeks have collectively lost their clues and are sharing but a single one among the lot.

This wouldn't be a bad thing --hell, it could be humourous in the right circumstances-- but my lack of sleep is translating into a lack of patience. I'd take a day off of work to recover except that all of yesterday's deadlines were rescheduled to today because of --yeah, you guessed it-- a bunch of colleagues didn't follow through as promised. Now I have five projects all on hold, waiting for a number of people to get their collective asses in gear.

I need a day off. And a massage. And ice cream. With chocolate cake.

Save the Trees!

During my three year stint as secretary of the DC Lambda Squares, I received a large quantity of paper. Specifically, these were financial statements, cancelled checks, membership forms, meeting minutes, etc., from about 1985 to the present. While some of the more current items went to my successor, I had more storage space so I kept the bulk of the oldest archives.

I have access to a delightful photocopier which is capable of scanning pages from the sheet feeder and e-mailing me the resulting PDF file. This morning, when every other task I attempted was blocked, I pulled out the first few files and began scanning the archives.

The process was both harder and simpler than I was expecting. I discovered the sheet feeder had issues with more than about 35 sheets at a time. I learned the copier itself also had a limit of 10 MB per PDF file, although it would only tell you this several minutes after maxing out by printing an error page once the stack was scanned. I also occasionally found stapled documents which had to be separated manually, slowing the process a little. Still, if all went well, I could scan almost a page per second.

My hope is that the current board will agree that most of the paper may be shredded and recycled, and the digital archives will be passed to the new secretary. In an e-mail this afternoon, I proposed the board solicit a volunteer as a semi-official archivist. I'm not interested in the role myself, but it's useful to have a particular point-of-contact to whom official documentation may be passed for digitizing and/or storage once its currency has passed.

I've done a preliminary cut of the archives, selecting the files which would be most easily scanned. Things like old cancelled checks would be much more labour-intensive so they'll wait until the end, if indeed we scan them at all.

Save the Trees!

During my three year stint as secretary of the DC Lambda Squares, I received a large quantity of paper. Specifically, these were financial statements, cancelled checks, membership forms, meeting minutes, etc., from about 1985 to the present. While some of the more current items went to my successor, I had more storage space so I kept the bulk of the oldest archives.

I have access to a delightful photocopier which is capable of scanning pages from the sheet feeder and e-mailing me the resulting PDF file. This morning, when every other task I attempted was blocked, I pulled out the first few files and began scanning the archives.

The process was both harder and simpler than I was expecting. I discovered the sheet feeder had issues with more than about 35 sheets at a time. I learned the copier itself also had a limit of 10 MB per PDF file, although it would only tell you this several minutes after maxing out by printing an error page once the stack was scanned. I also occasionally found stapled documents which had to be separated manually, slowing the process a little. Still, if all went well, I could scan almost a page per second.

My hope is that the current board will agree that most of the paper may be shredded and recycled, and the digital archives will be passed to the new secretary. In an e-mail this afternoon, I proposed the board solicit a volunteer as a semi-official archivist. I'm not interested in the role myself, but it's useful to have a particular point-of-contact to whom official documentation may be passed for digitizing and/or storage once its currency has passed.

I've done a preliminary cut of the archives, selecting the files which would be most easily scanned. Things like old cancelled checks would be much more labour-intensive so they'll wait until the end, if indeed we scan them at all.