Tuesday, July 22, 2003
Oatmeal for breakfast. There was no 8:50 AM bus 66 this morning. Left home at 8:45 AM. Got to work at 9:30 AM. Today's driver (the 9:10 AM bus 66) is a driver I haven't seen before on this route. One block in to the route, he missed a turn. He got back on the route, but not until after missing 2 of the stops where people could have been waiting. After many weeks of not bad service, I think things have taken a turn for the worse with my route. More leftnav work. Link checking. Environment configuration in bash. Set up offsite synchronizing of global files. Prepared workspace for directory project. Updated orientation pages for Joel. Dinner at home with Patrick: leftover yellow curry chicken with naan Patrick found at the little grocery across the street from Safeway at Church and Market. The naan was surprisingly delicious for being store-bought, pre-made. I called Mikey, left a message. He called when Patrick and I were watching Banana Battle Iron Chef, left a message. Michael D. Smith stopped in the office accompanied by a pet carrier holding a little kitty cat he found at the beach. Patrick made German chocolate cupcakes with creamy white frosting and various sprinkle decorations. Spent about 2 hours trying to get TWAIN to work with my Epson CX5200 in Win 98. It had been working fine in the past, and I don't know what had changed to cause the problem. I tried lots of different things, including ugly things like fiddling with the Startup Manager, trashing Photoshop preferences files, registry editing, forcing Windows to redetect all hardware, uninstalling and reinstalling the device's drivers. In the end it was an Adobe Technical Support document that provided the enlightening correct answer, even though it was for LiveMotion rather than Photoshop and even though it was unbearably long. (So many possible solutions. So little time and patience.) Long story short: I copied twain_32.dll from c:\win98\system to c:\win98 and now everything is fine in Photoshop but not in Acrobat. Will try reinstalling Acrobat (and then possibly again reinstalling TWAIN) tomorrow. Read Tufte's "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint" which arrived a few days ago. His emotions get in the way of his logic at times, but I agree with most of it. His "solution" to PowerPoint is to not use it. Instead, he recommends a tabloid sheet of paper with relevant data. However, most PowerPoint users aren't graphic designers or information designers—that's why they're using PowerPoint. He can propose his solution all he wants, but without a tool most people will be at a loss as to how best to communicate their information. The tool could be Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign, Adobe PageMaker, Adobe Photoshop, Quark XPress, or even Microsoft Word or Microsoft Publisher, but people will still abuse typography, spatial relations, chartjunk, grammar, consistency, colors, and a zillion other aspects of information design. Couple the right tool(s) with education about how to use the tool(s) as well as education of information design (his books are a great start), and I'll say he has a winner. However, for the typical office person, that's quite a long way to go. I would have preferred seeing examples of what would be acceptable content to put in a PowerPoint presentation. Also, a larger discussion of appropriate media for various content types would have been fitting. Why not also complain about the linearity and templatized NPR broadcasts or television news which are also filled with fluff and inhibit comprehension of data? Intro music. Announcer with topic. Announcer introduces another person (the content). The person talks. Cut back to the announcer with closing words. Exit music. Commercial. Intro music. and so forth. Why not analyze how much content is really in a typical 30-minute television program as compared with 30 minutes of, say, an opera?