WritePoint Staff Blog

Heroes are few and far between. I suffer from hero-worship. I discover someone, never encounter their faults, believe that they can do no wrong, and then I find them completely human. I haven’t yet found flaws (what I judge flaws) in Galileo. He’s the “father of modern physics”,  “father of science”, without whom I could not understand two-body motion, which led to tracking algorithms, which led to collection systems, which led to … Adobe? Well, I had to make a decision way back when. Rule of thumb in the government contracting business was that I had to make a decision in the third to fifth year of my employment – did I stay in government contracting or leave for the commercial world. It was a hard decision for me. I enjoyed what I did. I even understood most of the systems that I worked on. I had a future. I had a career path.

Those days were heady, exciting days. Apple was thriving, IBM was competing, start-ups were starting all over the place. The smell of new riches was swamped by the smell of new product excitement. So when I had the opportunity to jump, I jumped – right into Adobe on Embarcadero. Adobe was a small company with a phenomenal product, PostScript. PostScript literally revolutionized printing. My husband used to say that I was part of the big force that brought down the iron curtain, unfroze the cold war.

From the day I started I felt like I was walking around with a crick in my neck – I kept looking up at these giants that prowled the halls. I was working at Adobe – with these talking, walking heads! My first office was a door away from Chuck Geshke’s office. I was terrified to walk to the end of the hall in case I said or did something stupid – and then he’d ask why they hired me. Don’t get me wrong – this was a very nice group of people. They didn’t eat people for breakfast. They always answered my questions. And they thought I had something to offer.

Sometimes I felt like I needed to pinch myself to know that I was working in a real place.  The more I understood the product, the more I dealt with the PostScript core, the more I hung out in the dining room, the more my admiration grew.

There never seemed to be a dress code, but the male engineers all seemed to have a common look – blue jeans, flannel shirts, beards. It was so funny that for one Halloween the female engineers (we were only a handful) put on blue jeans, flannel shirts, and fake beards. What a riot.

When we moved into the building in Mountain View we acquired a very nice dining room. In those days the engineering staff was small enough that we congregated around a few tables. One day I sailed into the dining room late, and there was only one seat left. I knew everyone on staff (we weren’t that many), so a new face surprised me. There was another blue jeaned, flannel shirt, beard (ok, only  a few days old). He seemed like the real thing, like this was the model everyone was emulating.

I sat down and said, “Hi, my name is Susan Kleiman.” He replied, “My name is Domumble mumble.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t get that. You are?”

“I’m Don Knuth.”

At which point I fell off my chair. To his feet. To modern Galileo’s feet. The father of computing. At his feet.

Everyone had a good laugh, including me. But when I got up and sat on my chair I did not open my mouth I was so in awe of him.

My opinion has not changed. He is truly himself. I may not agree with his politics. I might not have agreed with Galileo’s either. Don Knuth is a great man, a great scientist, and one of my few heroes.

They look alike, don’t you think?

skleiman about us Adobe, Apple, Don Knuth, Galileo, hero, IBM, Microsoft

I hate reinventing the wheel. I’m the youngest of a string of kids and I’ve always prided myself on learning from their mistakes. I didn’t need to ride that motorcycle to find out if my mother would go ballistic. I saw the results of a sibling’s experiment and didn’t feel the need to repeat it. This philosophy carried me through my engineering years to reuse code that worked. I am not above completely rewriting something if the original code is bad or slow. I just didn’t need to reinvent. This attitude is probably why I’ll always be an engineer and not aspire to be a scientist.

Many years ago, I looked into home schooling for our four-year-old. We were living in the San Francisco bay area, Palo Alto, where home schooling was primarily for people that opted out of public school due to the teaching standard (as opposed to home schooling for religious reasons). Part of my effort was identifying teaching material for grades K-8. The amount of available information, lesson plans, projects, sources of school supplies and learning devices was staggering. Now I’m looking for similar educational resources to create Captivate movie shorts for my grandaughter.

A Captivate user like me does not have a creative department to churn out the great images, movies, and sounds, needed to build movies. My forays into the information cloud led me to stuff beyond my imagination. To say the least, many, many people out there want to share their educational wealth.

While resources to build Captivate movies are not difficult to find, copyright infringement is a big problem. As Kevin Siegel relates in his December 2008 newsletter, even if I own the music I may be stepping on someone’s copyright if I use it in my Captivate movie. So, what can I use?

One of my projects while learning Adobe Captivate was to create a series of short movies about the Solar System. It was Arthur Griffith, once again, that put me on to the NASA government site. (By the way, Arthur Griffith is an amazing instructor. I reread his bio blurb and discovered he has worked in commercials and tv. No wonder his voice is so good.) Arthur uses Earth and Mars pictures to demonstrate java’s graphical capability. I went to NASA and found more than just Earth and Mars.

Check out the usage statement before including these pictures in your demonstrations. They are free to use for educational purposes; you’ll have to decide if your Captivate movie qualifies.

Take a look at NASA:

This artist rendition of the solar system still has Pluto. I don’t have anything against Pluto. If it wants to be part of our solar system and pretend it’s a planet – that’s ok by me.

Take a look at this NASA site for eye candy. These pictures are created using false colors to enhance features of the region.

The NASA site has great teaching resources. I basically took lesson plans that were created by teachers and started to build several shorts. Each short ended in a small quiz that fed the tally at the end of the series. I didn’t have to come up with the lesson approach; an experienced teacher already did it for me. I didn’t have to find pictures; Nasa had already compiled them. Script and resource gathering, fundamental underpinnings of a good Captivate movie, were already done for me. I had only to edit the information to my timing requirements. I’m not done yet. It has become a hobby for me, a hobby I hope to finish before my granddaughter grows beyond these lessons.

Speaking of other resources, I stumbled on this site for auroras:

This site is geared for someone with research skills. However, all the links I visited from there are user-friendly. I was able to put together a short movie on auroras that became part of the solar system project. This is also where I stumbled upon the music copyright problem. Harry Potter, Order of the Phoenix, has a great piece of music called Fireworks. I wanted to use the music for a slide show of auroras. I even found it on YouTube, and have a valid copy of the soundtrack. But the one who keeps me straight said I may still have a copyright problem. Fortunately, this, too, is for my grandaughter and not for public consumption.

Do you have favorite resources that can be shared? Send them on to me. I’ll compile a resource list and post it on the WritePoint site.

skleiman e-learning, online training Captivate, education, fair use, free, image, NASA, resources