fine whine

Tonight we went and hung out at Scott & Carina’s place with a bunch of folks and lampooned Day of the Triffids, which, as was often pointed out, covered more than a day.

I don’t have much else to type. Still busy with house stuff.

I just sat through a typical PowerPoint presentation. It is my hope that in ten or twenty years if anybody reads this they will say “PowerPoint?” just as now we would say “Harvard Graphics?”, as something new will have long since come along and deposed king Microsoft from its ill-deserved throne for slide presentation software. I can hope, can’t I?

Some people may say that PowerPoint gets a bad rap. Some people also say that lima beans are tasty, too, so we can’t put too much faith in most people for their opinions. PowerPoint is evil, not so much for what it is as for what it has done to the whole idea of presentations.

Incidentally, some people probably know exactly what I mean.

Take the example of the presentation through which I just sat. Thankfully it was short, but I was left with the impression that I’d really gained nothing by sitting through it rather than waiting for the slides to be emailed to me (as I am sure they will be in the near future). Fifty or so of us sat there at rapt attention as somebody read exactly what was on screen to us. She even looked up at the screen with us to do it; she didn’t even have cheat sheets.

Now for a guy like me who was sitting in the back and didn’t put in any contacts today, I suppose doing things her way might’ve been considerate, but for the rest of the ably-sighted crowd I can’t help but wonder if they felt somewhat cheated, if not downright insulted. How stultifying is it to have somebody read something written in huge Arial or Times New Roman to a roomful of adults? Not since elementary school has that sort of thing happened to me, at least this blatantly. I was somewhat annoyed, you might say.

Now let me describe my approach to the slideshow presentation. I practice my material out loud first and only thereafter make slides of things that should be highlighted or reinforced. The only slide to which I stick closely is the summary, and people are lucky if I happen to throw one of those in at all (generally only doing so only to pad the runtime out to a respectable length). Everything else I basically ignore completely. I get away from the podium and try to keep the audience’s attention. The slideshow goes on behind me, minus bells, whistles and other needless transitions other than being synchronized with the major points I’m making if I’m lucky enough to have a mouse, otherwise a sidekick needs to be on top of things to know when to flip my slides. As for me I don’t care what’s up there as I’m focusing on what I’m saying. The slides are up behind me for convention, not because I want them there.

It works for me. That said, I’ve never gotten real feedback if my method works for the audience or not. When I do it, though, I can be pretty sure I’m not treating anybody like a kindergartner.

Tonight I accomplished much: replaced a lost screw keeping me from attaching the dryer’s cord. Then I replaced the wall receptacle for the dryer cord, cleaned out the dryer vent (formerly full of that nondescript blue lint dryers produce by the bucketful) and even reattached the washer’s drain hose. And that was just the basement’s worth of work.

Before I get to the real meat of things, let me say this: I don’t think I’ve been bored for many years. What brought that on was Glenn MacDonald’s “37 attempts at a morality of joy” line item number 3:

3. The world is big, we are small. Boredom is a failure of imagination. If you don’t wake up curious, you didn’t get enough sleep.

I just can’t think of a time in the near past wherein I sat, befuddled, with absolutely nothing to do. And now that we’ve bought a house, I don’t see any boredom getting slated into my schedule for quite some time.

So anyway, we’ve almost completely moved everything, save for much of my computer and stereo equipment and our telephone service. Cursed SBC.

Actually, I should not curse them so much as telephone companies in general&0151;but I will. Curse you, Ameritech, for driving me into the waiting arms of CoreComm with their more attractive offers and seemingly better service. Curse CoreComm for assigning me an abnormal dialing prefix, but curse you Ameritech again too, dammit. Curse you for your DSL service which was unavailable to me before as a non-SBC customer and still unavailable to me now because the CO’s too far away. Curse you for your inflated rates and lackadaisical support. Curse you for your repetitive hold music. Curse you for not killing the fattened calf upon my return!

Sorry. I just needed to get that out of my system. This moving process has not only been unending frustration, but also a learning experience. I learned to make sure that socks, underwear and alarm clocks get packed in properly labeled boxes. I learned that any number of hand soap dispensers is useless without any hand soap, and I also learned that we won’t need to buy toothpaste or toothbrushes for quite some time.

I learned that some people don’t always check that the hot and cold on a faucet have any grounding in reality. I learned that some people don’t look at what electrical socket they install for a dryer. I learned that if a lightbulb’s not in a socket that fixture doesn’t get checked. I could go on and on but really, everybody’s getting tired of this. I know I am. Just not bored.

The funny thing about wasting time at work making up for an internet-access-free weekend is now it’s time for me to get going and I haven’t written anything here yet. Oops.

[I’m backdating this, as I was away from internet access all day. Boo hoo]

Well, we moved almost all of our stuff yesterday and today. I gave up on the master box count after one hundred.

I’m gonna post this entry in advance, as I expect to get little internet time in for the next day or two. Moving day and whatnot, you see.

We took another carload over tonight, squabbled for a bit, bought a washer and dryer, and packed more boxes, but not necessarily in that order. Tomorrow we move.

I’m gradually working on migrating this page from one bit of software to another, and somehow found myself reading just about every entry I’ve written the last year. Back when I was writing more sporadically I had some pretty good stuff. I’m not sure if it’s quantity over quality or what but tonight I don’t feel like being witty, sardonic or sarcastic. I don’t have anything to say about rewatching Enemy of the state or packing or moving or homebuying or anything. There’s probably something funny I could come up with but… nothing. I’m pulling a blank.

We’re over thirty boxes moved now and we’re going to make another drop tomorrow. Then, Saturday, we get the truck to take the furniture and other big stuff. After that, I get to break down my rack and pick up the stragglers. Then, no more apartment living. No more renting. Woo hoo.

Arrr, me hearties. Me and the skipper have put out the plank for renting and have set sail for the seas of debt ’round the straits of homeownership. We’ve been moving some booty over to our new digs and soon we’ll be swabbing the decks at both places. Arr.

Um, yeah. We closed on the house today, and I took the day off from work to shuttle some boxes over, sit around and wait for a locksmith, and to put together a hammock with frame from Meijer. All in all it was a productive day, I think, even in light of the fact that now I am potentially going to be paying a quarter million dollars over the next half-lifetime.

Well, maybe a third of a lifetime if I get into some new sort of fitness regimen. I did pick up some sort of weird rowing machine from a friend but haven’t yet figured out how it works. It’s got two arms with hydraulic pulls and a chair on a track, and that’s as much as I’ve been able to ascertain so far. More on this later, I suppose.