Pressure Rising...
Seeing how it's been a while since I posted, I've realized that this has probably been the toughest week I've had in a while - at least since the website when live earlier this year. There's so much to do and so little time to do it in...
Trainings - One of my trainees has come and gone this week. I'd like to think that my training him was fruitful, but I have my doubts. The tools that were supposed to be working did not. It's an embarrassing situation to be in when the product that is supposed to be the answers to a filmmaker prayers isn't doing what it's supposed to. Not much for the confidence, especially before a big show.
Manager - My new helper/graphic designer started Tuesday this week without me being told in advance. This is also quite stressing and embarrassing because I had nothing for him to do and no workstation or software to do it on. I temporarily put him on a colleague's computer which is running on a P3 866Mhz and had a 6GB drive or something ridiculous like that. Not very handy for running Photoshop and Illustrator CS2. Upon the return of the colleague, I had no choice but to send him home to work on his computer. I wonder what it feels like to start a new job like this? To make matters worse, there is no sign of having a workstation for this poor sausage any time soon.
I think this week is going to be a bit of the same..........great.
Tell Me Why I Don't Like Mondays
Things are going to get well out of hand in the coming weeks. I was just told that my graphic designer will be starting work here tomorrow - something that really screws up my schedule. Actually, it makes me want to give up scheduling all together because nobody respects my schedule except me. This recent change of plan means that I will have to cram the following into three (painful) days:
- Training of a two-person team
- Climatization of a new employee
- Writing for my beloved brochure
- Writing my beloved press releases (thankfully not as urgent these days)
I suspect that this week will be a bit of a bitch...
Now for better, more fun, news. My long-lost colleague and partner-in-crime for interface development is back from her maternity leave. This, hopefully, will signal a new hope for our currently shamefully under-developed GUI. In the near future, I could have features such as editable scrollbuttons and TAB navigation! Yeehaa!!!!
In other news, I found some time to see what Jon Hicks is doing and found out about personaldna.com. It's a sort of advanced personality test...quite cool and different. It calculated me as "a genuine inventor". Check it out.
Training Day
Don't be put off by the title. It's actually more like "Training Week". As if I didn't have enough on my plate until the NAB, I now have to train a person on our system. I don't usually mind training people - this guy is actually quite motivated and learns quickly. It's great because we were talking over lunch and I was explaining what I do for the company. I'm glad he shares my opinion that I should be on much more money than what I'm on now.The problem is that our new workstations are stuck in customs (quelle surprise) and I have graciously given my workstation to my trainees - not allowing me to work on my beloved press releases and brochure. I smell a very close finish for the brochure...
Trainer - It's actually quite intresting doing this training. This guy has never used our system before but he's really enthusiatic and progressing rapidly. This is where I realize that documentation is super-important. I shamefully say that we have no user manual for this thing.
Human Resources - Today I have to interview a person that's applied for a graphic artist position. I haven't really interviewed anyone before so I guess I'll steal a couple of questions from people that interviewed me. Until now, I have been the one doing all the layout and publishing work so a little help would be welcome. The most important thing, for me, is that whoever gets the job can take direction (from me) and pull their weight.
The calm before the storm
Today's been relatively quiet. Didn't do much aside from work on another press release (brain still feels like moosh). I guess I subconciously gave myself a mental half-day off - took a long lunch break, had a caf with a visiting colleague, had a chat with the new guys...I know this is only temporary though.
Human Resources - Today we had a guy walking into our office looking for a job. He's a graphic designer that's currently working on mostly religious themed stuff. It's funny actually because his look of hope mixed with desperation reminded me of myself when I moved to Geneva (I walked into Motorola's offices and asked for a job - any job). I had a bit of a mini interview with him today but the boss asked him back on Friday so I guess I'll be interviewing him then. Would be nice to get some help...
Tomorrow I'm starting to train one of our clients on our system - he'll be joining us at the NAB. Cool guy, very good editor. Maybe he can teach me a thing or two in return.
Tsimbaloumba...
Press(ure) Release...
I think I've probably repeated this phrase to myself over a hundred times in the last few days:
"I hate commercial writing and worse yet, writing press releases"
There is no particular reason for hating them - it's just that I'm probably the most laconic person I know except for Andy off Little Britain (pictured right). I hate dragging on about things. Sadly, I am required to do this to promote our company's product. In the process of battering readers' brains about how great our product is, I have gone completely mental - every time I sit done to write, my brain bleeds in trying not to make a press release that's three or four words long ("Our product rules." or "We are the best.")...
Press Liason - Nevertheless, today I managed to write two (actually, one-and-a-half) respectable press releases. I haven't posted them yet because they need be cleared by the partners. I've once again met my deadline.
Copywriter - Another task I loath is writing content for our brochures. This is much worse than writing press releases because there is a zillion times more to write. With brochures, It seems that I have a permanent case of writer's block. Anyway, I've started writing the brochure for the NAB. It's a bit overdue because I've been distracted by all the other things that have to be done.
Miscellaneaous - Popped a couple of press photos on the site and corrected some tech info errors.
Basecamp - Speaking of deadlines, I finally decided (or actually, had a chance) to have a look at 37Signals products. Their product line comprises five easy-to-use, web-based applications that are meant to help workgroups increase internal communication and manage projects. I decided to go for a free demo and let me tell you - I was well impressed at how simple and very effective they can be for freelancers as well as project groups. Well done...
A bit of variation
So here we are again. Another day, another dollar as the old saying goes.
Today was quite interesting because we have two new people joining the team. They will be in charge of designing a prototype for a film scanner that will eventually be marketed with our product. Its a bit worrying actually because we (or they) have 6 months to do this. God speed...
Anyway, on to the task at hand - today's job descriptions:
PHP Developer - Its been a while since I've worked on the website. The new version (v3) went up around the end of January. Since then, things have been getting better on the sales side and I've been asked to set up a secured page where registered resellers can log on and get information such as pricing, availability upcoming features etc. Not too difficult this one because I have already done that for the Support section. Piece of cake...check it out here.
Stand Designer - It's the season to be getting ready for NAB2006 in Las Vegas. We'll be going there as co-exhibitors on two stands. This is when you have to work with partner companies in perfect harmony to make sure that everything fits where its supposed to etc, etc. I won't go into too many details but the person in question did'nt know the difference between a television monitor and a computer monitor.I remind you that we work in the film and video industry...nuff said.
Graphic Designer - As far as this is concerned, its basiclly a continuation of yesterday's photo session. Just plopped some images onto a pricelist and did all the layout. It would be nice if everyone I asked new what the correct price information was.
And it starts here...
So here it is...the whole point of postdivision will be one: I will write the job titles that I carry out every day where I work. See, I work for a post production system developer in Geneva. I've been with them for a while now (this is actually the second resurrection of the company after they went "bust" in 2001).
My job descriptions here vary from day to day so I thought it would be interesting keep a journal of them.
Today, for instance, I have carried out the following:
Application Designer - If anyone actually ends up reading this, you'll be seeing alot of this job. Today I followed up on the development of my "baby" - a subtitling tool for our digital intermediate system.I've been dealing with designing tools for quite some time, but I can safely say that when I started on Subtitle, I decided to do it right. Not a single line of code was written by Suzanne (one of our developers) until I figured out exactly what subtitle will and will not do. Three weeks later and after about 2 dozen interface layouts, flowcharts and feature lists, the actual development started. Let me tell you, it pays to take a crap-load of time to design.
Photographer/Photo Retouching - This is something I don't get to do very often. We needed a packshot photo of MATRIX and I'm the only one with a respectable digital camera (my trusty Kodak DX4530). So we set up all the system components in an empty meeting room and I took some snaps.
Afterwards came the fun part. Touching up the photos in Photoshop. I basiclly took away everything but the system components and beautified the photos a bit. See below...
Anyways, tired now...me sleepy. Time to get out of here... à demain.
