Marky-Mark
This morning’s (Wednesday, March 21; Bach’s birthday) dream was about Marky-Mark, recently retired from the mighty Mezz.
Mark (Syverud) was an editor when I first appeared at the mighty Mezz long ago as an unpaid intern following my stroke.
As such Marky-Mark assembled pages for the mighty Mezz, one of a few page-editors.
His bias was more national than local, as I recall.
As an unpaid intern I used to rewrite, and/or type in, press-releases for “Names-and-Faces” for the mighty Mezz.
“Names-and-Faces” might be college Dean’s Lists, military assignments, whatever.
One afternoon I was typing in something, when I observed “If you can’t do it, teach it; if you can’t teach it, teach others how to teach it;” a comment I made at Houghton regarding my boring secondary-education classes.
It stopped Marky-Mark in his tracks.
He looked at me as if to say “And this guy is brain-injured?”
Years later Marky-Mark was head of the so-called presentation-team that constructed all the papers (Messenger daily and 10 Post weeklies).
As such he reviewed me at that time.
He couldn’t believe I had reduced the time of the daily stockbox from two hours to 5-10 minutes.
Previously the stock info had come as a fax from Canandaigua National Bank, and had to be retyped by a secretary, about two hours.
I cut it to about an hour by OCR-scanning the fax.
Then Linda and I decided to try getting the stock-values over the Internet.
Our first attempt was Yahoo, but I discovered that with Quicken I could construct a complete stock-portfolio that was the exact duplicate of what we ran in the paper (open/close/change and percent-change; the whole kabosh), and that in fact I could rename the stocks to be what we ran in the paper.
End result: access the Quicken-portfolio, copy it, then flow it right into the Quark stockbox template.
Wham-bam; ready-to-run in 5-10 minutes.
“And you’re running on only seven cylinders?” Mark asked in amazement. “I got people running on all eight who I wish could do as well.”
We had been doing the astronomical-events (sunrise, sunset, moonrise, moonset) from the Farmer’s Almanac. The events were projected, and not very precise (mostly the moon-events).
I stepped out the garage-door one afternoon, looked up, and said “What’s that moon doing up there? I had it setting four hours ago.”
I thereupon began Googling an astronomical-events site on the dreaded Internet, and found the Naval Observatory site; which gave me the exact times of astronomical-events for Canandaigua.
No more “What’s that moon doing up there?” From now on the astronomical-events could be precise; and we renamed that section “Skywatch;” which was what it was called in the Altoony paper.
Marky-Mark’s retirement is rather sad. He’s only 53, but has Parkinson’s — about the same condition as Reynders; i.e. not very bad, but noticeable.
Marky-Mark’s retirement-party was a few months ago.
The dream was about a mighty Mezz recollection Marky-Mark had written. The recollection is just a dream, but Marky-Mark was an excellent writer.
Mark (Syverud) was an editor when I first appeared at the mighty Mezz long ago as an unpaid intern following my stroke.
As such Marky-Mark assembled pages for the mighty Mezz, one of a few page-editors.
His bias was more national than local, as I recall.
As an unpaid intern I used to rewrite, and/or type in, press-releases for “Names-and-Faces” for the mighty Mezz.
“Names-and-Faces” might be college Dean’s Lists, military assignments, whatever.
One afternoon I was typing in something, when I observed “If you can’t do it, teach it; if you can’t teach it, teach others how to teach it;” a comment I made at Houghton regarding my boring secondary-education classes.
It stopped Marky-Mark in his tracks.
He looked at me as if to say “And this guy is brain-injured?”
Years later Marky-Mark was head of the so-called presentation-team that constructed all the papers (Messenger daily and 10 Post weeklies).
As such he reviewed me at that time.
He couldn’t believe I had reduced the time of the daily stockbox from two hours to 5-10 minutes.
Previously the stock info had come as a fax from Canandaigua National Bank, and had to be retyped by a secretary, about two hours.
I cut it to about an hour by OCR-scanning the fax.
Then Linda and I decided to try getting the stock-values over the Internet.
Our first attempt was Yahoo, but I discovered that with Quicken I could construct a complete stock-portfolio that was the exact duplicate of what we ran in the paper (open/close/change and percent-change; the whole kabosh), and that in fact I could rename the stocks to be what we ran in the paper.
End result: access the Quicken-portfolio, copy it, then flow it right into the Quark stockbox template.
Wham-bam; ready-to-run in 5-10 minutes.
“And you’re running on only seven cylinders?” Mark asked in amazement. “I got people running on all eight who I wish could do as well.”
We had been doing the astronomical-events (sunrise, sunset, moonrise, moonset) from the Farmer’s Almanac. The events were projected, and not very precise (mostly the moon-events).
I stepped out the garage-door one afternoon, looked up, and said “What’s that moon doing up there? I had it setting four hours ago.”
I thereupon began Googling an astronomical-events site on the dreaded Internet, and found the Naval Observatory site; which gave me the exact times of astronomical-events for Canandaigua.
No more “What’s that moon doing up there?” From now on the astronomical-events could be precise; and we renamed that section “Skywatch;” which was what it was called in the Altoony paper.
Marky-Mark’s retirement is rather sad. He’s only 53, but has Parkinson’s — about the same condition as Reynders; i.e. not very bad, but noticeable.
Marky-Mark’s retirement-party was a few months ago.
The dream was about a mighty Mezz recollection Marky-Mark had written. The recollection is just a dream, but Marky-Mark was an excellent writer.
posted by BobbaLew at 9:11 AM
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