Fresh Wallaby Juice

If you have a skill, and it’s a relatively rare skill (at least in your particular set of friends and coworkers) then you have to be somewhat careful about who knows you can do that. For instance, let slip that you know a bit about Labview interfaces, and you find yourself getting talked into “helping” other people with that. Or word gets around that you know a bit about HTML…

“We need someone to work on the website for Project. Would you be interested?” “Well, I guess I could do it, yes.” I’m physically able to type »HTML« into a text editor, but not particularly interested in doing so. A week passes.

“Oh, John said that you’re interested in taking over the Project website! That’s great!” “Well, I said I could do it if you can’t find anyone else.” “That’s fantastic! Because we haven’t yet.” “You can keep looking if you want to. I’m not very good.” “But you’ve done one before?” “Yes,” I cringe. “It’s going to be tough to find someone, because we have to update the database thingie so people can register and submit abstracts, and that means SQL. Can you do SQL?” Stop me, someone, please?! “Yes. A little bit.” “Great! shall I just send you a list of changes that have to be made to last year’s Project site?” “If you can’t find anyone else.” “Don’t worry, we can keep looking.”

So yes, now I’m working on the website for this our-department-only “conference”. Which was created three years ago using HTML from three years before that, using MS FrontPage or something. Possibly even Word. With so many nested tables I couldn’t even tell for sure where the actual text was supposed to go. Fortunately, it was pretty easy to overhaul it using examples from Maxdesign.com. Even for me!

So that’s what I did yesterday afternoon, while waiting for Edmund Optical to ship us the new camera I ordered last week. Can’t take data without it, better than sitting around reading journals all day.