Traces of Oliver

Amity website "Newsroom"

We created a "Newsroom" page on the Amity website - a collection of links to our "press releases" (which we release to anybody but the press ...). So far, we have released 4 such texts: 3 in October and November 2006, one today. Our press work is a quixotic fight, with virtually everybody saying yes and doing no.

Amity start page is online

Well, that took us quite a while ... Now the start page has a new look - and it works. Big improvement!

Amity Newsletter online

With the latest issue already on the way to the printer (or so we hope!), I finally got round to posting the 3rd issue for this year. With the CMS we're still using for the ANL, posting articles and photos is always a terrible hassle. Very time-consuming, and it's all but impossible not to make any mistakes. The end product looks rather middling, too. Time to move on to something much better: Mambo? Plone?

The elusive quest for productivity

Or should it be "quest for elusive productivity"? - I need neither boss nor staff meeting in order to get hardly anything done at work. Spent the whole morning putting up 4 links and making tiny changes to the stylesheet of the new Amity website.

(Boss and staff meetings do help though. It's difficult to bring down everything without them.)

In an hour, I'll start recording my radio thing.

Positive coverage banned at the office

We're about to announce the new website in the printed "Newsletter". I wrote a draft announcement yesterday. However, it was then made clear to us by XXX that we were not to describe it as "using state-of-the-art web technology". Fact is, the new website does use such technology. Only, to the aforesaid person (who knows nothing about the internet) it's a self-evident truth that her underlings can't possibly ever come up with anything of high quality and cutting-edge. Grumble ...

Well, who cares!

The great spoiler

Work can really spoil your whole day! I wasn't able to post a single thing here this morning because of it.

Put up a working donations link

Just before calling it a day, and indeed a week, I realised that the link to PayPal on our donations page was still leading nowhere - I had put a "blind" link there just in order to show colleagues what our new website could look like. So I was in for a last-minute repair.

Well, so much for "Today, I'll be back home around noon" ...

One more goes down the drain

Sometimes, when you look closely at what you're supposed to translate, you realise it's just too bad. Better to sweep it under the carpet and hope that overseas audiences will never find out anything about certain aspects of our work, such as working with the Communist Party in order to create a "harmonious society" - a dictator's dream, everybody else's nightmare.

Reduced my workload

I magically reduced the number of articles I still need to translate from 8 to 2. Some things just take care of themselves if you wait long enough. My letters and e-mails, though, won't write themselves.

Amity 2008 calendar announcement

At least I got one of the things on my list done. A nice calendar, by the way. (True, the design is still rather conservative but we're working on it.) So go ahead and order your copy now!

Getting lost in less relevant jobs

Fixing links, replacing a picture, writing an announcement ("Buy our new calendar!"), checking e-mails, replacing the broken start page for both the Chinese and the English websites, tracking a cancelled PayPal payment ... All at the same time. More important than all of this would be writing 2 letters and several e-mails, as well as translating the remaining 8 or so Chinese articles.

If you want to make sure you don't get anything done, go to the office.

Finished one translation: Qinghai biogas project

That went more smoothly than I had anticipated. Fortunately, the article I started working on turned out to be quite well written - not the usual kind of "On September 26, a great mobilisation meeting was held in the beautiful city of XXX in the presence of CPPCC member YYY ..." - yawn ... No, this was quite different; and well written texts are a lot easier to translate than the mumble-jumble we get so often. It's the story of a great success, which even in my less jubilant English version sounds a bit too good to be completely true, but there you are. (Chinese version)

Chat attack

I should be translating some 9 articles ... But then everybody is coming online and I'm chatting all afternoon.

Chinese-English translating

Time to translate a few more articles from the Chinese website into English, so we can post them on the English website. Not before our weekly "Amity Lunch" though ...