Distracted

I have a task/meme that has been put to me by Philip Willey, who may or may not have once blogged under the pseudonym of Dick Headley, to answer some question about my blogging (or more appropriately, the lack thereof). I have been working on this, Philip, and I promise that before I die or maybe soon thereafter, I will submit this to my vast reading public to add to the circle of responders.

~~~~~~~~~

In the meantime I have been finally, as in at last, hit with a load of genuine, employment related work, as in preparing some training PowerPoints, most of which have been written already and just need translating from Japglish into Australglish. The question for me is what the fuck are these people talking about, mostly.

Example: "Both X and Y are possible to cope with different purpose." It is almost understandable, but not quite right. What is purpose? Do they mean situation? Aiyah! This is one of ten lines on an over-crowded slide (this is not an iPhone launch) and I have maybe 150 slides to rewrite.

~~~~~~~~

There are two training sessions. One is two days of new product introduction to be given to our distributors. This was meant to be held in the sunny, smiley land of Siam in May, but political matters have intervened at the cusp of our triumphant "press this button then press that button" sessions. So the initial numbers of 80+ will probably drop to about 30 as the venue has shifted to our office in outer sticks of Singapore. Pain in the arse.

Secondly, I have a day and half to teach salesman of one of our partner companies about the basics/advanced physics and technology of ultrasound - something that took me 12 months to study and 30 years to, um, master - as well as do the "press this button then press that button" routing on a machine from my parent company that I have hardly ever used. Sigh.

For this second session, I have become bogged down continually rewriting a presentation that I started 14 years ago to explain visually quadrature phase detection so that I can talk about it without getting lost and without having more than 50% of the audience start snoring. That's a tough job, even though... zzz... zzz...

~~~~~~~~~

Meanwhile I have been asked to run this week's Pub-Quiz at the salubrious venue of the Sportsman Bar in Singapore. Come one, come all. The spectacularly predictable task is for me to set up a series of obscurely-themed questions that make me sound smarter than I actually am (not a difficult task), ask the questions to the hopefully full-pub (maybe 30 people), get the results tabulated, and then announce the winning team - they get a free drink! Whoopee! - all in a suitably E@L-style of flamboyance, intellectualness and culturality. And to avoid mumbling throughout.

But being much more a visually communicative person (see above) than a non-mumbling person, I am putting all the questions and answer into -- wait for it -- a series of PowerPoint presentations. To show my style I have used several of the default PPT themes. Awesomely crap.

~~~~~~~~~

So guess on which of these tasks I have been spending the vast majority of my time?

~~~~~~~~~

First Round, Mysterious Persons:

Q1: Who and why is...


E@L