Blog: Ramblings and Rants

Powells Bookstore, a massive Portland bookseller that has become a regional must-see tourist attraction, lists my books. Check it out:

Adobe Illustrator CS2 @work: Projects You Can Use on the Job

Special Edition: Using Creative Suite 2. I’m a contributing author to Michael Smick’s book.

I just stumbled across the below service. It’s new and still in beta, but looks promising. Check it out.

RSSCalendar

RSSCalendar is an exciting new way for individuals and organizations to share their calendars with family, friends, and co-workers - utilizing the latest in “Really Simple Syndication” (RSS) technology, including RSS channel creation and aggregation. Not only is RSSCalendar easy to use but it is also easy to administer, and setup is a snap.

Has “Innovation on Demand” become “Innovating Our Way Out of Demand”?

StarDock: Innovation on whose demand?

Lately StarDock, the company that makes the finest skinning and Graphical User Interface-enhancing applications for Windows, has begun slacking off. Beginning with allegedly stable dot releases and formerly stable betas of several of their products in March and April of this year, customers have been experiencing terrible conflicts and system issues—and StarDock has ignored, stone-walled, or deflected many of them.

In the case of Enhanced Dialog, a little application that finally brings some use to the Places bar, the left-side icons in Windows applications’ Open, Save, and Import dialogs, severe issues have abounded. For all users, Enhanced Dialog prevents Adobe Creative Suite and Creative Suite 2 applications—specifically Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign—from saving or exporting files correctly. For many other users, Enhanced Dialog actually blocks the Windows system’s ability to run JavaScript, which is required in a number of core functions. Such users find their anti-virus and firewall applications turned off and unusable, exposing them to who knows what kind of attacks, and, since both Windows help and Windows System Restore employ JavaScript-enhanced HTML user interfaces, the system cannot even be restored to a point prior to the installation of Enhanced Dialog.

Wednesday morning I delivered my final drafts (”author review”) of the chapters I’m contributing to Special Edition: Using Adobe Creative Suite 2 (Que, 2005). So, barring any last minute changes to my illustrations and figures, I’m done with that book.

All of my first drafts for Adobe Illustrator CS2 @work: Projects You Can Use on the Job (Sams, 2005) have passed through tech edit, wherein my good buddy Samuel J. Klein goes through my step-by-step how-tos looking for errors, leaps in logic, or confusing instruction. About half are in final draft, being indexed and laid out. Two are still in copy editing and development editing (before I get them back for author review), and the rest I’m working on now in author review.

What a wonderful experience it’s been working with the two groups of editors at Sams and Que. The entire process—both books—has been a tremendous education into the process of book authoring. I’ve designed and laid out books in my career, turning word processor templates into Quark or PageMaker templates and layouts (pre-InDesign days). But now I’ve seen the other side of the process as well, from the writer’s standpoint and from the editor’s.

OK. Enough of a break. Back to editing Chapter 4: “Designing Corporate Identity Material.”

I have a confession to make: That’s me. It’s a photograph—I have no depth, wrinkles, or nostrils, and living with one-piece hair saves on conditioner (once in a while I ArmorAll it).

When Mattel was going to do a line of Barbie dolls called “Barbie: The College Years,” they built me to be Barbie’s bad boy boyfriend she’d take home to her parents in an act of defiance. When Ken began dating G.I. Joe, though, Mattel scrapped the whole College Years line of dolls so Barbie could go back to him and rehabilitate Ken’s wholesome effeminate but straight image (poor Ken had to go back into the closet).

With no doll career left (my hair was too long to enlist with military doll outfits, and my super power of drawing wasn’t flashy enough to get me a spot in the super hero toy corps.), I took my wind-up motorcycle and moved to Oregon to start a career consulting and writing about software.

Actually, that’s a 1-minute self-portrait I drew in Illustrator CS2 to illustrate a chapter on the new Live Paint features. With coloring, it took almost 2 minutes. I thought I’d share.

From the India Daily newspaper (online edition), 9 July 2005:

Reverse engineering quark accelerating high mass bunker busting precision bombs from extraterrestrial UFOs

How do extraterrestrial UFOs penetrate earth’s crust to build bases under the tectonic plates? How do they enter the earth’s crust so quietly without massive effects on the surface of the earth?

And there’s this one from the same source, on the same date:

So here I was in my home office, happily writing away on Illustrator @Work (the DVD label and package project chapter, if you must know). The pungent odor of a fire begins to waft through my window. I thought it was a barbeque grille, which is odd because it was the middle of the afternoon, and none of my immediate neighbors works from his home. Still, it smelled good; the scent got stronger over the course of an hour.

While trying to mediate an argument between Photoshop and Illustrator, alarm klaxons suddenly began to sound inside my head. I’m too wise to ignore them, so I leapt up and flung open the door to my office.

Smoke. Everywhere.

Well, it’s installed. The site runs, though a few things are different.

Some of the plugins used with WP 1.2, for instance, have not been updated to function with WP 1.5. Even some of those that have, have not been updated well. PageNavi is one such plugin—at the bottom of every page used to be page hyperlinked numbers, allowing rapid navigation to different pages.

I found a couple of bugs, too. For example, regardless of the post ID, two posts with the same title will create a foul merging. This happens even with draft status posts—I watched a draft go live all on its own as part of the same page as another published post of the same title. Not good.

I also haven’t re-customzied the admin interface. I just don’t have the time at the moment to do that or much else. I still have to upgrade my other WP-based sites.

At this very moment I’m upgrading to WordPress 1.5. While it’s an upgrade I’ve been contemplating for a while, it was one I had intended to put off for another month or two—at least until after I had finished writing my books and launched two new websites I have in the works. Regrettably, I don’t have the luxury.

Apparently today a security vulnerability was discovered in WordPress—not the version I was using, but that doesn’t matter to my hosting provider. At 2 PM EST this afternoon the provider issued an (unreasonable) edict that all sites using WordPress of any version must be upgraded to the latest inside of 24 hours, or those sites would be deactivated.

The company doesn’t care that they sent the notice at 2 PM on the Friday before a holiday weekend—they will enforce the deadline. They were quite unsympathetic when I contacted them for more time. I have multiple sites running on or using WordPress, and I really couldn’t afford the time to…

1. Back up the databases and pages of each one;
2. Train myself on the new WordPress version (a significant upgrade);
3. Recode the majority of each highly customized site to the new WordPress themes system;
4. Install the upgrade;
5. Test the whole thing, and;
6. Fix the inevitable glitches.

So much for my plans to take my daughter to the movies tonight.