Thought of the Day
There’s been a lot of great technical advancements over the past ten years. but I miss the 2005 Internet with all its faults. It was a more optimistic place to write.
Writing Skill I am Working On
An Attempt at Plotting
I am trying to get a handle on plotting, which I think is my biggest weakness as a writer, at least in in the fiction arena. I can think of characters all day long, and I can think of general scenarios, but I have never been good at figuring out what happens next. In most cases, I just start writing, hoping inspiration will come. That is not an entirely bad system, but judging by my thin number of completed works, it isn’t getting me where I want to go. Therefore, I have been practicing building out plots using Trello. Trello which is a nice list program that I can move things around in. My first couple of attempts have been a difficult and unsatisfactory, but the goal is to get better. See the image for a picture of my struggles.
Song of the Day
Tom Sawyer – Rush
“And what you say about his company is what you say about society…”
I tend to listen to one song on repeat throughout the day so that it becomes something of background noise and I can concentrate on my work. This is today’s song. Rush was one of my favorite bands growing up, and for a long time held the record for the band/artist I had seen the most in concert (three times). That total has since been surpassed by Roger Waters and Weird Al (four times each).
Work Projects
A sample of the new site. I had to blur the content a bit, but you get a taste of the site design.
A small team I led recently completed an overhaul of our development division’s SharePoint site collection. This was a large, and long overdue effort. When I started on the project last fall, the main page had basically had an “Under Construction” banner since early 2012. There was plenty of content, but little of it was very fresh or useful.
My first step was to get the existing site (And 150 sub-sites) cleaned up. I removed outdated content and web parts, even removing about 60 sub-sites that had no valuable content. As the project progressed, I worked with a designer and the tech services team to create a new look for the site. A week ago, we moved the main site and all of the sub-sites to the new design.
Overall the response has been very positive, although now that people are looking at the site again they are finding issues that largely went ignored when the site was moldering in the background. That has led to additional cleanup, which has kept me busy this past week. It has been a long process, but we finally have an intranet site that is attractive and usable.
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