A Weekend of Unusual Shape
Feb. 10th, 2020 10:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hrjUsually my weekends have a sort of standard shape to them. If I have a podcast to record, do that, then head out to a coffee shop to get some writing in. Do some yard work in the afternoon. Similarly on Sunday (except yard work only one day or the other).
This weekend started with recording the Week 4 essay podcast then editing it and getting it uploaded. (I'd debated picking the Week 5 story and recording it too, but I haven't gotten bio information yet and so hadn't written in intro script. Also, my voice was getting raspy.)
Overlapping with that, I started the last stage of processing the marmelade, which took up most of the afternoon since I sensibly split it up into smaller batches for the final reduction. And somewhere in there, I was thinking about how this month's essay podcast would be nifty to add slides to. (It's about the historic development of the association between women wearing masculine-coded clothing and having same-sex interests--basically, the history of "butch as an esthetic concept.")
This sent me down an unfortunate rabbit hole. No, not the rabbit hole of finding appropriate illustrations, but the rabbit hole of "I swear there should be some easy way to do this in iMovie but I can't for the life of me figure out how." (The punchline to this was when I posted a rant about it on fb and a friend who worked on the programming team for a previous version of iMove said, yep the current version is totally f'ed up.)
So I spent hours getting more and more frustrated trying to figure out how to actually manipulate the soundtrack and images (which I *think* I successfully uploaded) and not being able to match what I was seeing with any of the online tutorials.
Eventually, I gave up and poked at the Photos program to see if I could add a soundtrack to a slide show, and yes, that was possible. It involved all the annoyances of managing images in Photos. Like, I don't want it to organize the images by the date the program thinks it was taken, I want to upload them into a single folder; also, I want to use some images more than once in the slide show without having to fake the program out into thinking they're different images. But it was working. I just needed to go through the podcast sound file and identify what the display duration needed to be for each image.
That was when I discovered that the Photos slideshow function has a limit of 59 seconds for any given image. So I went back to my image file and frantically tried to figure out additional images I could add in so none needed to be up for more than 59 seconds. (It wasn't until Sunday morning that I realized I could just duplicate the image and have two copies displayed back to back.)
I came to the proverbial "good stopping place" around 1am Sunday morning. At which point I realized that I was not only dead tired, but shivering from cold (since the thermostat timer had totally taken me seriously about my bedtime being 9pm). I don't often do the deep hyperfocus thing on a project these days, but that one really pulled me in. And, of course, I woke up at 6am as usual, since my body doesn't understand weekends.
I had promised myself that I'd set the podcast thing aside for another day and work on some data prep for the FOGCon program scheduling session, but having had the epiphany about not needing to find new images, I figured, "I'll just go in and set up the necessary duplicates..." So I only got *most* of the FOGCon prep done before it was time to head to BART to get to the meeting.
Fortuantely *my* BART line was not one of the ones out of commission due to the massive windstorm throwing debris on the tracks. Unfortunately the massive windstorm meant the power was out at the co-work space in Oakland where we were having the program scheduling session. Fortunately, enough people had phone-tether connections with good signals to do the online parts of the meeting. And fortunately the power came back on just around when the ambient light was starting to get problematic for the whiteboard work. I was also glad that the organizational prep I'd done (which I developed on the fly last year) was exactly as useful as I'd hoped it would be. Now I just need to write up my process for future reference.
I was addressing two topics. 1) The logistics of scheduling groups of people for reading slots, such that they were all available and we had a good mix/balance of participants in each session. My addition was a spreadsheet to track availability and existing scheduling against readers and timeslots so we didn't have to keep checking back and forth against the database. 2) Tracking the people who had expressed interest in programming against those who had been scheduled so that we could do our best to include everyone possible and now overschedule people just because they'd expressed interest in many things. Another innovation this year will be to drop a note to people who we weren't able to schedule for anything with an explanation and apology and a suggestion to check in at the con in case we have unexpected openings.
By the time I got home (ca. 7:30pm) I was totally wiped out and went straight to bed. I'm not entirely caught up--who ever is?--but not feeling as slammed as I was yesterday. Usual weekend things left undone: yard work, laundry, dishwasher load. But I now have 14 - 8oz jars of some very delicious orange marmelade and I'm two steps away from having a great batch of candied orange peel completed. (I still have a couple dozen oranges waiting for the third project, which I think is going to be another try a Gervase Markham's marmelade recipe which comes out more jam-like and is flavored with rosewater.)
And in the middle of all the processing of the produce of my estates, I had an inspiration for the theme of my summer party this year: Sharing the Produce of Our Estates -- an opportunity to do sharing/exchanges of edible projects. The initial fb responses were very positive, though I need to figure out some promotional logistics so people who don't usually do preserving-type-stuff still feel included.
This weekend started with recording the Week 4 essay podcast then editing it and getting it uploaded. (I'd debated picking the Week 5 story and recording it too, but I haven't gotten bio information yet and so hadn't written in intro script. Also, my voice was getting raspy.)
Overlapping with that, I started the last stage of processing the marmelade, which took up most of the afternoon since I sensibly split it up into smaller batches for the final reduction. And somewhere in there, I was thinking about how this month's essay podcast would be nifty to add slides to. (It's about the historic development of the association between women wearing masculine-coded clothing and having same-sex interests--basically, the history of "butch as an esthetic concept.")
This sent me down an unfortunate rabbit hole. No, not the rabbit hole of finding appropriate illustrations, but the rabbit hole of "I swear there should be some easy way to do this in iMovie but I can't for the life of me figure out how." (The punchline to this was when I posted a rant about it on fb and a friend who worked on the programming team for a previous version of iMove said, yep the current version is totally f'ed up.)
So I spent hours getting more and more frustrated trying to figure out how to actually manipulate the soundtrack and images (which I *think* I successfully uploaded) and not being able to match what I was seeing with any of the online tutorials.
Eventually, I gave up and poked at the Photos program to see if I could add a soundtrack to a slide show, and yes, that was possible. It involved all the annoyances of managing images in Photos. Like, I don't want it to organize the images by the date the program thinks it was taken, I want to upload them into a single folder; also, I want to use some images more than once in the slide show without having to fake the program out into thinking they're different images. But it was working. I just needed to go through the podcast sound file and identify what the display duration needed to be for each image.
That was when I discovered that the Photos slideshow function has a limit of 59 seconds for any given image. So I went back to my image file and frantically tried to figure out additional images I could add in so none needed to be up for more than 59 seconds. (It wasn't until Sunday morning that I realized I could just duplicate the image and have two copies displayed back to back.)
I came to the proverbial "good stopping place" around 1am Sunday morning. At which point I realized that I was not only dead tired, but shivering from cold (since the thermostat timer had totally taken me seriously about my bedtime being 9pm). I don't often do the deep hyperfocus thing on a project these days, but that one really pulled me in. And, of course, I woke up at 6am as usual, since my body doesn't understand weekends.
I had promised myself that I'd set the podcast thing aside for another day and work on some data prep for the FOGCon program scheduling session, but having had the epiphany about not needing to find new images, I figured, "I'll just go in and set up the necessary duplicates..." So I only got *most* of the FOGCon prep done before it was time to head to BART to get to the meeting.
Fortuantely *my* BART line was not one of the ones out of commission due to the massive windstorm throwing debris on the tracks. Unfortunately the massive windstorm meant the power was out at the co-work space in Oakland where we were having the program scheduling session. Fortunately, enough people had phone-tether connections with good signals to do the online parts of the meeting. And fortunately the power came back on just around when the ambient light was starting to get problematic for the whiteboard work. I was also glad that the organizational prep I'd done (which I developed on the fly last year) was exactly as useful as I'd hoped it would be. Now I just need to write up my process for future reference.
I was addressing two topics. 1) The logistics of scheduling groups of people for reading slots, such that they were all available and we had a good mix/balance of participants in each session. My addition was a spreadsheet to track availability and existing scheduling against readers and timeslots so we didn't have to keep checking back and forth against the database. 2) Tracking the people who had expressed interest in programming against those who had been scheduled so that we could do our best to include everyone possible and now overschedule people just because they'd expressed interest in many things. Another innovation this year will be to drop a note to people who we weren't able to schedule for anything with an explanation and apology and a suggestion to check in at the con in case we have unexpected openings.
By the time I got home (ca. 7:30pm) I was totally wiped out and went straight to bed. I'm not entirely caught up--who ever is?--but not feeling as slammed as I was yesterday. Usual weekend things left undone: yard work, laundry, dishwasher load. But I now have 14 - 8oz jars of some very delicious orange marmelade and I'm two steps away from having a great batch of candied orange peel completed. (I still have a couple dozen oranges waiting for the third project, which I think is going to be another try a Gervase Markham's marmelade recipe which comes out more jam-like and is flavored with rosewater.)
And in the middle of all the processing of the produce of my estates, I had an inspiration for the theme of my summer party this year: Sharing the Produce of Our Estates -- an opportunity to do sharing/exchanges of edible projects. The initial fb responses were very positive, though I need to figure out some promotional logistics so people who don't usually do preserving-type-stuff still feel included.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-10 11:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-02-11 05:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-02-11 12:21 am (UTC)I love the party theme.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-11 05:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-02-14 03:12 pm (UTC)The party theme is a great idea, and I wish I could attend. Could the people who don't do preserving be encouraged to bring things that might be useful for perservers? Empty glass jars that are reusable that they would otherwise have recycled?
no subject
Date: 2020-02-17 05:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-02-17 06:04 pm (UTC)I can see how wanting the professional flavour could complicate that blog.