Categories: uncategorized
Date: 29 November 2006 07:50:56
Will you forgive me for feeling just a little bit proud of myself this afternoon? I think I've excelled myself today and am feeling just a little bit chuffed...
I'm fortunate in my job to be blessed with both an accommodating Captain and access to a great variety of technological assets that I can use both for work and personal applications. Such flexibility is probably partly because (while I'm well aware that I am by no means indispensable) I do a lot of work that few people with my skills would do for the amount of my salary and partly because the opportunity to increase my skills makes me more valuable to the company. It's a win/win situation.
So here we are... Dino-boy is turning 3 next week and for me, gone are the days of home-made little woollen jumpers for birthday presents... Auntie Dee has gone high-tech. (By the way... I could do the woollen jumpers... some of the old skills still remain...). However, for this birthday, I made good use of my boss's flexibility (actually he wasn't in today...) and some fancy applications and made my nephews birthday present.
It's a DVD.
I know... a home-made DVD... how cool is that? The videos on it are simple clips of me reading story books and as Sis has been pretty religious about sending me photos over the years I also had the means to make a video slide show of Dino-boy from birth to now... 3 whole years, complete with groovy jazz soundtrack (indoctrinating early...).
I'm pretty intent on the kids in our family growing up with some kind of relationship with me, even living across the ocean as I do. We had cousins in Australia that we barely know and I while I know that it still rankles sometimes that I live here and the kids are growing up without me I make a pretty good effort to take an interest in them and spend quality time with them while I'm in the country and when we're on the phone. So, while I've been sending over the occasional video, Sis' dial-up connection has been preventing me from getting too carried away.
Enter Adobe Encore and a day's worth of tinkering.
I won't go into the technological details of how it all worked but I think the biggest pleasure about the day was the fact that I had to learn a whole new programme to make this present do all the things I wanted to. That's the buzz for me, learning the skills, solving the problems, exercising my intellect and reasoning to fix the issues. And while there are many who are in the know would be scandalised at how long it took me to get my DVD working I couldn't be happier that I made the puppy work and that this birthday present is a one of a kind!
I'm pretty lucky.