where does the good go

finally, a new blog entry.

I spent most of last week taking late nights at work and working from home and working on the weekend to finish the web stat report. It was a much longer process than I had expected, but usually when things are relatively easy - just merely tedious and require a lot of work - they take up quite a bit of time. Needless to say I got it done, and presented the highlights during the HIV and AIDS strategy group meeting today. I'm not really sure how much people cared to hear about the web statistics - I mean that kind of stuff really has to only interest people like me. Like ooh, we would so obviously benefit from RSS feeds for the campaign pages and we should really be properly marking up our html image tags so that we're indexed more by google, and gasp, people aren't navigating the site as much as they should be so lets conduct some user testing in order to enhance the navigation. Not terrific insights I know, but ... uh...yeah. My brain is officially dead from web stats.

Anyways, tonight was a nice end to that shoot-myself-in-the-foot fest.

The EAA organized an outing tonight for its HIV strategy group members and the staff. We went first to a museum that was holding an exhibit on Martin Luther's works. The museum was across the lake, overlooking with this fantastic view. It was very modern and posh, and we had wine and snack type things outdoors while waiting for a worship to begin. Once it did, we went into the museum (hey - its a Lutheran service and it was in French and my mom said not to join a cult, and since Catholicism is a pretty big cult I'm not really sure where her standards are, so I'm assuming I'm best off just not converting to any religion for the sake of her sanity). Anyways, this museum (who's name right now completely escapes me - starts with a B) has original manuscripts and first editions of books and various other artifacts. Breathtaking. The kind of things you only learn about in school but never actually see. And to see it, after feeling so detached, and never really giving it the appreciation it deserves, suddenly you're face to face and it actually exists.

I'm talking of course about an original Gutenburg bible, first editions of shakespeare and marlo, original manuscripts by Sir Isaac Newton, a page out of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, an original book of the dead, first edition Franz Kafka and Tolstoi and Dostoevsky, a first edition communist manifesto, first edition on the road by jack kerouac, a gift list by queen elizabeth, Dante (inferno), Voltaire, Freud, samuel becket, Goethe, Marco Polo, Marie Curie, Charles Dickinson, Edgar Allen Poe, The Gospel According to Judas, Neitzsche - the list goes on and on, and I can't even recall them all because I didn't recognize them (though there was this book, with this picture in it, of a rhinoceros hand drawn like he's in armor, that we were shown a slide of in the history of graphic design - there was that book, open to that page, as well). Even as we went to dinner, even as we sat and ordered, we still all talked about the books that we saw, the history in that tiny little museum, the hidden little treasures scattered around Geneva.

Speaking of dinner, we later went to a yatch club (which, apparently was supposed to be members only) to eat and drink. I just got home, just out of the shower, and I'm pretty impressed by how well it at all went. As we were sitting there looking out at the lake at dinner, waiting to be served, seeing the jet d'eau infront of us, boats becoming silhouettes as the sun set - I muttered a bit to myself (and a bit to gilberto) - we're freaking lucky, how the heck did we get here?