Requiem Aeternam

Rebellion.

The air is rank with the smell of it. Swamp gas fueled army camp fires pollute the air with their sooty smoke, rebel yells swarm the mason-dixon line, and the ghost of Jeffy Davis rides again.

Has so much time elapsed that the supremacy of ice and snow has been forgotten? Does Johnny Reb think that the wizards of the North  slumber? He is sadly mistaken if so, for they do not slumber but keep careful watch in their icy halls, nor has their strength, drawn from the iron hard earth, diminished.

After the Northern Wizards sweep across the South, crushing the foolish uprising and leaving rebel ranks frozen midstep from Gavelston to Charleston, there will be a second period of reconstruction. And this time, we will ensure that there will be no more forgetting.

Phase 1 (Compensation)

• Each state south of the Mason-Dixon line will pay a yearly tribute of seven young maidens. These maidens will be taken North and ceremoniously dumped in snowbanks as a metaphor for the North’s victory. South Carolina, as instigator, will be required to send an additional seven maidens, all from the town of Early Branch, the birthplace of the second rebellion.
• There will be a 97% tax (the average Southern summer temperature) on all teas containing sugar and/or artificial sweeteners. Teas served hotter than forty degrees Celsius are exempt from this tax.
• Representatives of the Southern states will sign a statement admitting responsibility for whatever atrocities (such the use of peanuts to create boiled products) the rebellion causes and binding the South to make financial reparations for the war.

Phase 2 (Readjustment)

• Oral exams will be administered to determine competency in Standard American English pronunciation and phraseology. Those with low scores will be restricted to making fried chicken, tobacco farming, and demolition derby driving.

Note: this item is currently being reevaluated by the powers that be (TPTB) as it is not expected to actually alter the current situation.

• Air Conditioners will be outlawed.
• Grits will be replaced with oatmeal in all stores.
• Rather than mandatory military service like some countries, beginning at age 4, all male children will be required to participate in hockey leagues. Additionally, parents or other spectators heard asking questions like “what quarter is it?” or “when’s halftime?” at hockey games will be flogged with a combination of live salmons and wet noodles (as will you if you don’t understand why those are bad things to say).
• All girls found complaining about the heat and lack of AC while wearing knee-length skirts and nearly sleeveless shirts will be required to wear full dress suits during summer activities and on Sundays.
• Those too old for the mandatory hockey program will be forced on a rotating basis to take mandatory vacations in Alaska and the Yukon Territory, including mandatory swim time in lakes fed by water from glaciers.

Phase 3 (Integration)

• Those who fail the Standard American English test (see phase 2) will be relocated to snow-making machine factories.
• The machines manufactured in this manner will be distributed throughout the South and used 24/7 to bury the South in glorious white flakes allowing everyone to enjoy white Christmases, sledding parties, and daily snowball fights.
• A large screen will be launched into space to reduce the amount of radiation reaching the South, causing a 30-60 degree drop in temperatures throughout the South. This is expected to be greeted with much rejoicing due to the previous termination of air conditioning (see Phase 2).
• The status of hoodies will be changed from “unprofessional and slobbish” to “appropriate for all settings.”

Disclaimer: should any Southerner find this post offensive, I completely understand given the amount of fire present in Southern blood rather than ice and hardness. However, I would like to also refer any such offended personages to the link at the beginning of this post and remind them that this was started by a Southerner (some things just don’t change . . . ).

^_^

I have had enough of frivolous blog posts for a while. Today’s post leaves behind childish things to explore a very mature and important subject which has serious implications for every American (and probably Kazakh) family. My subject has its roots in the great American and Canadian prairies where it is carefully cultivated and nourished, growing tall and golden until it is cut down in its prime, dried, sorted, processed, and shipped to millions of households across the world. I speak, of course, of cereal.  And here, for the very first time, I list the ten best cereals * available to mankind.

10. Honey Nut Cheerios

Normal cheerios taste good enough with milk and sugar, but it’s even better when the sugar has already been added! Honey’s one of the best tasting natural sweet flavors, and is well applied to these delicious little o’s. Equally good with milk or handfuls straight from the box!

9. Alpha-bits

Marshmallowy cereal at its best! Of course the little marshmallows are the all-stars of this cereal, but unlike lucky charms, marshmellow mateys, and other similar cereals, there’s something left to do with the remaining cereal once you’ve picked all the marshmallows out! See how many words you can find, write a story even since the marshmallows will be gone looooooong before the rest.

8.Golden Grahams

I haven’t had these for a while, but I like them much! They have the honey flavor fused with a little graham square. While some people I know have a distinct disregard for “SQUARES!!!!,”  squares in this instance are umm…not square.

7. Oatmeal

Plain but hearty, it’s perfect for cold northern mornings and gives some good lasting energy. Plus it’s healthy! At least that’s what it says on the canister. I’ll admit it doesn’t taste too good on its own, but there are lots of ways to spruce it up. My favorite is with butter, brown sugar, and cinnamon.

6. Cinnamon Toast Crunch

Cinnamon and sugar toast was an integral part of my childhood. Almost as much as spankings and groundings, but much tastier.  This cereal brings back great memories and tastes, but is much faster and easier to make. Plus it leaves behind some of the best tasting milk.

5. Cinnamon Life

I must sadly make a confession: I terribly enjoy a good bit of cinnamon. Probably more than is healthy. In fact, I used to eat cinnamon sticks from my mom’s kitchen. In fact, I still would, but there seems to be  a distinct lack of cinnamon sticks in the guy’s dorms. There aren’t any cinnamon trees nearby either. I weep.

4. Frosted Mini-wheats (Maple and Brown Sugar or Vanilla Creme)

I still shudder at memories of mini-wheat’s predecessors. Big bricks of wheat that you had to break up by hand. We heated it with milk in the microwave and added sugar, but it was still rather wretched. These, on the other hand, are delicious bite sized crunchies with great flavor. The strawberry flavored ones are probably good too, but I’ve never had them.

3. Honey Bunches of Oats with Almonds

Mmmmmmmm. Now we’re getting into the really good stuff. Sweet, nutty, and even a little healthy. I could eat it all day long just about.

2. Blueberry Morning

Beats out Honey Bunches of Oats by virtue of fruity goodness. The blueberries are vastly better than the fake fruitiness of Trix or Fruit Loops or Fruity Pebbles. On a similar note, Strawberry Special K is really good too, but I forgot about it until now and I don’t have room to put it on the list because the top spot is reserved for the one, the only . . .

1.  Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs

Calvin, the world cannot thank you enough. ^_^

* The committee has deemed grits inelligible for this list on principle. Also because it is corn rather than wheat based. Also because of your face. And because I said so.

Dona Nobis

I dream of street lights passing by:
Sleeping against the window, your face fades
In the dark spaces between
Then returns; the shadow of rain on the windshield
Cascades down your face like dark tears
Dissolving your form into darkness
Until the next light passes and you reappear.

Once, time slowed and the sun obeyed
Us, our arms outstretched binding
Afternoons and evenings to eternity,
But now we hurtle over pavement,
A wheeled rocket racing toward the end of the world,
Incapable of turning or stopping.

Dies irae, dies illa
Solvet saeclum in favilla

The city blinks away behind us and
Street lights pass less frequently.
The dark spaces grow stronger,
Leaving you longer in shadow,
A black hole just beyond my elbow.
What beauty was in the world vanishes
As the last light fades, leaving
Only headlights to light the road ahead,
And no light shining on you at all.

Qui Mariam absolvisti,
Et latronem exaudisti,
Mihi quoque spem dedisti.

I must drive deeper into the night,
Hoping to reach some distant sunrise
In whose light you would again appear
And wipe the sleep from your eyes.
If I stopped while darkness still veils you,
I would reach out my hand to wake you
And find only air where you once were
Because you had faded away forever.

So I grip the wheel and drive sleeplessly
Toward morning hoping desperately
That the road beneath me will last
Until the sun rises from its grave
Reclaiming you from shadow,
Despite knowing, as one does in dreams,
That night would prove longer than pavement
And the road would end, leaving me alone
Listening to windshield wipers in the rain.

Fac eas, Domine, de morte transire ad vitam.

Exhausted I wake relieved of dreams and see
Shadows diminished, through the window
I feel sunshine and hear a new day calling me

Lux aeterna luceat nobis, Domine,
Et requiem aeternam dona nobis.
Lux perpetua luceat nobis, Domine. Amen.

It seems that for some reason people get the impression that all I do at work is write e-mails and surf the internet, but I want to make perfectly clear that this is a totally false presupposition–I drink coffee and eat donuts too! But here’s a brief description of what our job requires.

Introduction to Project Management

As project managers, we attempt to manipulate the project management triangle and direct team members in order to effectively produce a product (textbooks, in our case).

The triangle demonstrates the relationship between a project’s scope (its size or amount of work required, for instance how many pages will be in a textbook), the time needed to complete the project, and the cost necessary to complete it. For instance, if you want to decrease the amount of time needed to finish a project (demonstrated by shortening the corresponding side of the triangle), you would also have to change the other two sides to maintain the triangle shape. You could decrease scope (the amount of work you plan on doing), or increase the amount of money you want to put into the project, or decrease both scope and cost in order to make the project’s duration shorter. You could also accomplish a project in a shorter duration by changing the angle where the cost and scope sides meet without reducing scope and without increasing cost, but that would negatively effect the quality of the product. It’s not a perfect illustration, but it gives a general idea of what we’re trying to do, namely manipulate the three sides of the triangle to be the optimal size and shape.

Meetings

Pretty much everything we do to accomplish this job ends up in some sort of meeting, so the best way to describe more precisely what goes on would be to discuss the different types of meetings that we have. Most meetings fit into the categories of project planning, implementation, and tracking.

Planning meetings include product line meetings, charter meetings, and project planning meetings. Product lines include all textbooks of a certain subject. For instance, the product line I work on the most is secondary Bible, which includes Bible Truths A, Bible Truths B, and so on up to Bible Truths F (7th grade-12th grade). Our goal is to maintain a copyright age of 5 years or less for all textbooks. Since there are six products on my product line, this means we need to come out with a new textbook revision every year (the first year a book comes out it has a copyright age of zero, so it works out). In product line meetings all the different department supervisors (authors, art/page design, page layout, photo/text acquisition and permissions and editorial), as well as marketing representatives and a few others try to balance the consumers’ needs, our resources, and our time requirements to develop a general plan for the next twenty years or so. My job is to organize the meetings, direct them, make sure all relevant information is examined, and finally to produce a written version of the plan (normally an excel file complete with charts and graphs) to hand to sponsors (the really high up people in charge) for them to approve.

Charter meetings are more specific in nature; rather than looking at all the products in a product line, a project charter defines the attributes of all the items in a single product. My team just finished a charter for our next Bible Truths project and the charter goes into the particulars about what items will be included (student text, teacher’s edition, a CD to go with the teacher’s edition, tests, and test answer keys), what level of revision we will do (generally light, medium, heavy, or full), how much money we can spend on the revision, and when the items need to be finished. In other words, a charter defines what the triangle will look like for each individual project. Pretty much the same people come to charter meetings as to product line meetings, although supervisors might send a worker who will be working on the project instead of coming themselves. My responsibilities are similar as well, but the final draft of the charter is prepared by a marketing representative and then given to me to route around to the sponsors.

Project Planning meetings are even more specific. Project planning meetings include the workers from each department who will actually do the work on the project rather than their supervisors. These meetings produce the specific schedules that we use to execute and track the production of a text book. Normally I will create a preliminary schedule for the different items of a project in Gantt chart form using Microsoft project and go over that schedule with the team who will suggest changes to make the schedule more realistic by dropping tasks or adding them or changing their durations. We break each schedule up into work packages so everyone is working on a maneagable amount of work (like a single chapter or section) at a given time rather than just trying to complete the whole book. Each work package will consist of 5 to 20 tasks depending on the project and what stage of development it’s in. A team member will complete their task and pass the work package on to the next person. For instance, an author will write the revisions for a chapter and then pass the work package on to an editor who will edit it for conceptual or structural problems (proofreading type editing occurs later) and then hand it back to the author to incorporate the editor’s suggestions. I have to schedule and coordinate all the tasks for all the departments and make sure the durations are reasonable and everything is in the right order (trickier than it may seem sometimes–on our current project we’re scheduled to finish the testpack before the teacher’s edition, but a certain amount of the teacher’s edition needs to be finished first because the test answer key references page numbers in the teachers edition).

Moving on to project implementation meetings–these are meetings that take place weekly or biweekly after work has already been started on a project. The team members meet to review what has been accomplished, communicate and resolve issues, prepare for upcoming tasks, and reexamine whether or not the team can meet the scheduled completion dates.

Project reporting meetings consist of a weekly meeting between all the project managers, all the department supervisors, and a few other people. The main purpose of this meeting is to make sure that supervisors are aware of potential problems in their departments and that the head of the product development division of the press has an accurate idea of what projects are running late or early or on time. To relay this information we use an excel chart such as the one below.

Each vertical column represents a work package. A column that is green all the way to the top means that work package is ready to be sent to the printing press. Red indicates where a task or series of tasks is late, light blue means a schedule has been made, and so on.

We also have meetings within our department to discuss better methods of management, strategic planning, and tactical approaches.

Summary

A good analogy for a project manager is a coach on a sports team. Like sports players, our team members do the real leg work, but we are the ones planning and directing the team members to do what they do more effectively and meet a common goal. One of the most important aspects in project management is communication, and that means a lot of meetings, and standardized graphs, and charts, and forms, and templates that we create and use as tools to help the teams as they work.

Now, if you actually read all that, congratulations! You get a big fat juicy cookie!