Day 27

This morning I slept in until I woke up naturally (except for that phone call at the unearthly hour of 8:30, but I managed to fall back asleep for another hour after that). Glorious. When I finally dragged my well-rested body out of bed, I found my way to the kitchen and conjured up a tasty oatmeal breakfast, which I may or may not have eaten while watching part of another episode of Joan of Arcadia. By that, of course, I mean that I did indeed watch TV, but only while I ate, and then it was off to work I go-ed.

My day was spent playing with pictures. Not entirely "playing" per se, rather engaging with Photoshop in an attempt to produce some nice graphics for the new MA site, a task I feel I succeeded in, with no small thanks due to Peter, our new web consultant, who sent me a PSD with all the necessary components to break out into smaller, individual graphics. The superb graphics were well received by both Merry and Rich when we met this evening, and, even though we did some tweaking to them, I can rest easy knowing we ended with a pretty good result. Even with regard to the new website as a whole, I'm feeling much better about where we are. We're nowhere near done, but we're a lot closer than we were not too long ago, and I feel like we're finally on the right path toward completion of something we can be proud of.

Harry Putter once more ruled my evening. When I got home from work I spent some length of time redoing some of the the color correction on the two scenes I'm showing in assembly at MA tomorrow, as well as a little sound tweaking (and one instance of soundtrack addition). I want to have the best quality to show, and I just wasn't happy with what I'd burned last night.

Then there was the whole speech thing. Yes, I've had since August or so to write this speech. It's not like tomorrow was any big surprise (ironic, no?). Somehow I just haven't had the time to devote to actually writing anything for it yet. My big fear was that I'd leave it until the morning of and then do a terrible job, but I couldn't let that become reality. Now it's crunch time. I started typing somewhere between about 9:00 and 10:00, and I just went. I'm basically talking about me, my favorite topic, so it went very quickly. I scribble typed a few things I wanted to say into a semblance of an outline, and then just wrote. The end result, which from the future I can say I don't proofread until tomorrow morning, I thought was decent, maybe even pretty good. Now my big fear is just whether the students will like it. Not much I can do about that. I think the film clips are funny, I think my speech is relatively sound, and I think there's a message to be taken from it, if only about why I think I'm in the film business. I'll post a copy of the speech tomorrow.