Technical Difficulties

So, like I mentioned before, today was Thanksgiving. And to prepare for this day, I was given an assignment.

It was called, 'slide show'. More appropriately, it was termed 'funny slide show' but for all intensive purposes, I will just call it 'slide show'.

I actually inheritated this project from somebody else who was busy doing other things, I guess. And I have found all this free time recently (well, people seem to think I've found free time) so they have given me all of these tasks, this being one of them.

Well, since I've been collecting pictures for the website fiasco as well as the yearbook, truthfully I was a perfect candidate for the job. That, and 89.5% of the task force seems to be computer illiterate. So I looked through the thousands of pictures I have accumulated (many of which I had even taken) and looked for mildy humorous ones. I sent out emails asking people to send me stuff. Begging at times. And considering that half the task force these days hates my guts (or so it seems at times), sometimes this can be a tricky task.

So anyway, I had acquired about 450 pictures of various people doing funny stuff, some pictures only mildly so, and had arranged them from the point of Fort Lewis, Hohenfels, at work, at play, just setting them up in different categories. I sifted through them some more, making sure I had enough pictures, dumping ones that just didn't work and put together a little powerpoint presentation using all of these pictures, and dumped them all into a file when I was done with them. I also encorporated about 7 videos or so, hoping to space those out throughout the show.

As the day came closer, more people would give me pictures, some of them sent anonymously (for obvious reasons it soon became apparent) but I had them organized, captioned if necessary, and put in a row.

Getting the equipment together turned into a pain. But it all got together and I felt satisfied.

And then I discovered that the file for the slide show had grown to be so big, that it was freezing up my computer (which lately is already on the fritz, so this wasn't helping.) We're eating dinner, people saying what they are thankful for, getting awards (I got my solitary Certificate of Achievement, I think I am now the least awarded person in the Task Force, GO ME!) while I'm trying to figure out how to get this thing going.

And then they turn the attention to me, and I've got the 100+ people of the task force (half of which already hates my guts remember) staring at me waiting for the slide show, and all I can say is "having technical difficulties, please give me a second while I move to plan B"

I had to sort through and get rid of one or two 'innappropriate' pictures that didn't make the original cut and move some others and forego powerpoint altogether. Then I put on the default slide show, and every one got to see 'slide show' with a bunch of pictures at random. Videos were shown at the end.

Overall, I think it went fairly well. I got one criticism that I had to many pictures of PM in there, as well as a certain Sergeant or two, but I worked with what I had. I had several pictures of me doing stupid stuff because I don't take myself seriously and I don't care if people laugh at me. If people wanted to send in pictures, I had given them ample opportunities in the form of three emails (not to mention that I've put out notices in the past asking for people's pictures for Yearbook and Website purposes) so some people were not represented at all. And there were quite a few pictures that ended up in the slide show that I didn't intend to make it.

Now I got a bunch of people asking for the pictures and what not. But half the task force still seems to hate my guts so its all good.