A Day In The Life:  08/30/2021 / Application Essay

 Today was a typical Monday for me.  I had originally planned on traveling for work, but the project associated with the travel was postponed.  Although I am relieved about having more time to plan for the project, I’m wary that this schedule change will create conflicts later this year.  As that was cancelled, I instead went through my normal daily routine that Looked like this. 

·        05:00 – Wakeup: 

o   Wakeup with the alarm clock and make a pot of coffee

·        05:15 – Morning routine: 

o   Shower

o   Breakfast

o   Laundry

o   Dishes

o   Dressed for work

·        07:00 – Dr. Appt: 

o   Stop at Dr. office to review blood work

·        08:00 – Arrive at work: 

o   Badge in,

o   Park

o   Boot up laptop

·        08:15 – Warehouse: 

o   Stop at warehouse to pick up packages

o   Deliver equipment to work area

o   Process goods receipts

·        09:00 – Hires and Terminations:

o   Disable Accounts

o   Coordinate security access

o   Process chain of custody documentation

o   Administer inventory items.

·        10:00 – Break Fix:

o   Review network health and process repairs as necessary

o   Check trouble ticketing system for escalated work items.

o   Work on hardware and software repairs and configurations

·        12:00 – Lunch

o   Salisbury steak – Yum!

·         13:00 – Project work

o   Prepare power plants for divestiture

o   Configure drives to onboard a new power plant

o   Check on NYC power projects

·        17:00 – Head Home

o   Commute Back Home

·        18:00 – Dinner

o   Dinner

o   Dishes

o   Cleanup

·        19:00 – Homework

o   This!

Today was nice as I didn’t have a single meeting planned.  This is because projects have been postponed due to contract negotiations or Covid-19 related delays in inventory or workforce.  It was nice to be able to have a productive day with the rumble of the #4 steam turbine spinning away behind me providing power to all the air conditioners that are fighting this humidity.  What I have failed to mention in my list here is the 4 cups of coffee along the way to keep my eyes open. 

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This week we used various applications to work with a journal entry.  Word, PowerPoint, and Excel were used to work with journal text and information in various formats.  These are just a handful of application types.  There are also communication software and database programs.  Although there are many programs with specific functions, they all mostly fall into these categories listed here.  Additionally, many of these programs have features that cross over into the others.  For example, Word has table features that give it some limited spreadsheet abilities. 

Our text states that “A word processor is a common computer application for creating formatted text” (Vahid, & Lysecky, 2017).  A word processor is a writing tool best suited for papers, documents, and legal and literary texts.  It is very good at letter formatting and text printing functions.  This application would be an excellent tool to document one's daily activities in a diary format.  However, depending upon your intent, other software could also be helpful.

 Excel, for example, would be very useful in calculating and sorting daily activities by time spent.  A spreadsheet could also track expenses associated with daily activities and is also great for comparing day-to-day activities.  A spreadsheet program is a powerful tool that allows us to apply formulas and formatting to data sets to sort, filter, and analyze.  The downside to this is that each day would require a separate page or sheet, which would get quite bulky very quickly.  A less cumbersome option may be a database as we could enter each record through a form, and then we could analyze the data through reports all in one place instead of needing to scroll through pages to see what you are looking for.  Excel, however, is not the place to do the journaling.  Long text is not Excel's strong point.  The textual nature of the data also leans towards database use as searches for text and operations on numbered data would both be available.  Excel is also an excellent tool for budgeting and tracking with its number formatting and formula capabilities, whereas a database would excel at cataloging a collection such as baseball cards.

 “Presentations are often accompanied by a slideshow to help the audience visualize information” (Vahid, & Lysecky, 2017).  PowerPoint would be the tool of choice if one needed to convince the boss of one’s productivity.  The ability to format for large displays, add animations and transitions, and transition tools make this a good choice for presenting the journal information to others. Presentation software would make for an awkward tool for journaling itself as it is not conducive to document typing. Data analytics would need to be done elsewhere before being presented.  Although PowerPoint is mainly presentation-oriented, it also makes for a great impromptu sign maker with its large fonts and bold layouts.

 In conclusion, all the applications listed here overlap functionality in one way or another.  One must choose which to use based on the desired result.  For a well-written and easy-to-read essay format, the author would use a word processor.  To present the same information, a slide deck would be the best option.  To analyze numbers tracked a spreadsheet and to catalog the whole thing for future reference and data analytics, a database would be the way to go.  

References

 TIOBE. (2021). TIOBE Index Retrieved from https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index//

Vahid, F., & Lysecky, S. (2017). Computing technology for all. Retrieved from zybooks.zyante.com/

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