Today I have two major tasks at work: prepare for Planning Commission meeting tonight, and prepare for the brown bag class I’ll teach tomorrow noon. The P.C. meeting is easy to prep for: ten copies of two figures and about three pages of text. The figures need some hand coloring, but that’s a throwback to childhood and not at all unpleasant.
The brown bag is tougher to prep for, because I want to include a PowerPoint presentation with it. This is my second PowerPoint to prepare. The last one was all text. For this one, I want to include photos and drawings. This increases the degree of difficulty (from about 1.0 to about 3.5, I’d say). Plus, the last one I did was back in March, and I’ve pretty well forgotten all I learned then. So it’s a learning day. When I get frustrated with building the slide show, I just pull out one of the figures to color. I have till 6:00 PM to complete them.
Then there’s the whole question of learning photographs for the Internet. I spent some time at Flickr, following a link to their Creative Commons, which is the area that’s supposed to have the copyright-free photos. I had a little time with this, then Internet Explorer locked up. So I exited and went back to Flickr, this time the home page. And on that page I could not find a link to the Creative Commons. Am I missing something? I’ll get back to that after this post.
I love learning, but this is almost too much today. PowerPoint alone would be fine, or maybe the photo study would be fine, but the two together are somewhat overwhelming.
On the other hand, the pleasant evening I wrote about yesterday came to be almost exactly as I hoped. The genealogy meeting was good. I actually knew the speaker, and met a few new people. Any time you are in a library, even if it’s just the meeting room, is a good time. At home I filed and wrote and read and talked on the phone for a long time with my son. I balanced the checkbook, which in two prior sittings had refused to be balanced. I didn’t get to my financial record spreadsheets, or paying a couple of bills, but I have tonight for that. Another pleasant evening coming.
