Angela Tung Oversharing on the internet since 2005.

Wednesday was the first day of my web design class. It was supposed to be Monday, but the teacher had a prior commitment he couldn’t get out of.

I went to the assigned room and no one was there, which was weird because MLS students seem to like to get to places early. I was starting to think I was the only one who signed up and that the class was canceled. But then I checked the teacher’s email again, and saw that it was in a different room that night. Dehr.

There were actually a lot of people signed up, more than 20, and as always there was a know-it-all dumbass. Like when the teacher was showing us how to do a hyperlink, she kept chiming in, “Now you underline it.” No, idiot, as a link it’s automatically underlined. She said it twice! But the teacher was very patient about it.

At first I thought he was a freak. He’s huge with a beard down to here, and lectured in this big booming voice and kept punctuating everything he said with, “Mm-okay?” exactly like that South Park character. But when he wasn’t in lecture mode and was just talking, he was normal, smart, and funny. And patient, which is good.

I thought I knew some basic HTML, but I really don’t. He had us do a survey to assess how much we knew, and I don’t know jack. All I know are how to do links.

I already feel like I’ve learned. For instance I didn’t know there was something called XHTML, a sort of evolvement of HTML 4.1 (though MB says that people don’t really use XHTML but HTML 5.0). And before I didn’t understand the color codes. And I didn’t know that a tool like Dreamweaver makes it pretty easy to design a web page (if that page is any good or not is another story). I’m used to inputting my paltry code by hand.

Yesterday was my last day at my old job. Yippee! Of course I had left a bunch of stuff to the last minute, but I was able to finish most of it pretty quickly (amazing how much time is freed up when you’re not surfing the web). An operational “cheat sheet” for my coworkers, status on a project for another coworker, an overall status report for my old boss, uploading some documents onto our team’s Sharepoint.

Then there was cleaning out my office. There was tons of stuff I didn’t need. Some could be thrown out, and some I lugged over to a common file cabinet down the hall.

Still, I was at the office till almost 8 o’clock. I probably could have finished everything sooner, but my new boss wanted to meet up in the afternoon, which was cool. He seems pretty easy-going so far, saying that if I wasn’t free, we could just meet on Tuesday as we had planned. But since I was going to be in on Monday and he wasn’t, it would be good just to touch base before Tuesday.

That took a good 90 minutes, from 3:30 to 5. He gave me a detailed overview of the organization, which is HUGE, a run down of his projects and where I’d be involved, and preview of some of the things he’s thinking about having me do. (He had an actual list, as opposed to fluffy, flighty, unattainable ideas which was all my old boss had.)

That part of the business is so different from my part, which is all unicorns and leprechauns, ie, not real. That part is how much equipment should we order this quarter, and what contracts are in place for what vendors, and how much money can we save. In marketing sometimes I felt like it was how much money can we spend on the most bullshitty project.

I guess there’s a little contention between that department and marketing. When my new boss was introducing me around, someone asked where I had come from. I told him marketing, and my boss said, “But we accepted her anyway.” I thought it was pretty funny.

And it turns out there are two people in the department whom I worked closely with in the past. In fact I sit right next door to one of them now. Crazy!

Today I have off since my office is being moved. It’s so rainy out, it’ll be hard to get motivated to do anything rather than lounge around.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 16th, 2008 at 7:59 am and is filed under library, work. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.