Twas the night before leaving

Shaina (the youngest sister) left this mornin’ fer New York and a three week summer camp acting experience-thingy. Sounds like fun. Jewish camp, so she gets to keep kosher for a while, and if she likes it she can add on to her stay and be there for six weeks. She left on a jet plane, don’t know when she’ll be back again, oh, God I hate…wait, what was I saying? Ah, yes, left from LAX on a Continental flight non-stop to NY, and should arrive there later today, if the time doesn’t change first. Strike that: six hour flight, left at 9ish, got there 3ish, which in NY is 6ish, so she is there and probably quite confused from the fact that it is dark right now, what with the lights in LA staying on until 7ish every night lately.


N-E-Way, I have spent me second glorious day at Maintex (the family company) working on graphics, catalog, database, and computer troubleshoothing. There are a lot of troubled computers here that need to be shot, and no one with the know-how to shoot them. Now I’m really no great technician, and I really don’t like the job, but I oblige and try to help as best I can when I feel like it. 😉


Their system is a mess because the UNIX server runs one piece of proprietry software while the art department works on another database and the catalog is based on a third set of data, so everything must be updated in triplicate. Meanwhile, the two art guys have to do some occasional computer troubleshooting and lots of data entry to get stuff online, in the catalog, etc. I’m talking with them about how to automate this process a lot more, basically by linking the two databases together and hooking the QuarkXPress publishing program up to the FileMaker database that the Art guys are using. Sorta complicated, but pretty cool if it all works. I’m waiting for the real fun to begin, however, when we start shooting training videos. Then we get to go to crazy places like grocery markets and I get to direct some serious movies. Well, okay, not serious, not movies, but industrial training does have its charm, and its fun doing digital editing with FireWire, at least more fun then entering data into a database….twice.


Confused? So am I, but we hope to clear it all up. I think some kind of tech guy would help, but they try to keep costs low ir order to run an efficient business and so far there hasn’t been an incredible pressing need to get all this stuff together. Gradual upgrades are what wins the day, I just ope that these DBs will all work without any major hassles, being as they are quite different and being as money to waste….errr..spend on them is tight.