My Hamilton watch is on its way to Secaucus, New Jersey this evening. I was in the shower last week and pulled my towel off the sink, carrying my watch onto the floor, where it stopped working. From what Rob tells me, high-quality mechanical (winding) watches are delicate beasts; the spring and moving parts are held together by millimeters and don’t respond well to shock. While I won’t hide the fact that I’m disappointed, I suppose it’s understandable.

Hamilton is owned by the Swatch Group, who also own the high-end brands Breguet, Longines, and Omega, among others, but their service procedures are straight out of the back of a comic book: You mail your watch to a nonspecific address and hope it gets there, then pray someone acknowledges receipt. No RMS number, no automated service; no way of notifying them you’re sending your expensive timepiece in advance. I’ve had better returns service from counterfeit sidewalk vendors in New York City.

Rob still has my Field Watch, and promises to get to it when he’s not pulling so much overtime. I miss old faithful.

At WRI, I’ve been working on a web project, which has been a lot of fun: I’m building a workflow to port all of the content from an InDesign file to HTML. I’ve been pushing to get all of our reports online in mobile-ready format, and built a template version using an open-source framework, a handful of jQuery tools, and some elbow grease. I’ve figured out how to get inDesign to spit out basic formatted HTML that gets pasted into the template, cutting back on the tedious work of formatting tables and boxes. The most time-consuming element now is formatting live charts, but I’m tempted to just use images. It’s been a lot of fun, having been away from pure web production for two years, to dive back in and get my hands dirty. I remember more than I give myself credit for, and after some initial roadblocks I got a lot of new technologies hooked up and working correctly. Not bad for an old man.