Wednesday, May 19, 2004
Breakfast: oatmeal with cinnamon, brown sugar, and fresh banana. Met with Martha and Susie about a minor redesign for our site. Admissions changes for James. Lunch at desk: pbj sandwiches, tortilla chips. Reviewed Dell hardware specs from Rob. Dermatology appointment with nurse Raj Grewal-Fry, RN. The appointment went much better than my PCP appointment. She listened to my questions and did not seem hurried at all. Completed a Dell service request for Debrah's staticky speakers. Updated current students calendar. Installed Acrobat 6.0.1 Pro and InDesign CS 3.01 for Joel. Patrick sends me e-mail from China to a link on the SF Weekly Web site saying that Lodestar Quarterly received the award for 2004 Best Queer Fiction Journal. Woo hoo! I won't quibble with that except to say that we have plenty more than just fiction. Poets and dramatists and essayists deserve some spotlight, too! I don't know how they did their judging, but thanks SF Weekly! Dinner: Panda Express. My fortune: Your place in life is in the driver's seat. I discovered today that in Acrobat 6.0.1 Pro pressing the spacebar makes it behave as though you pressed Page Down which is cool to people like me who grew up with Unix. Unfortunately, Shift+Spacebar doesn't behave like Page Up (as works well in Internet Explorer). Eh, so it ain't perfect. I used the Windows XP Photo Printing Wizard for the first time today. It works rather well—I'm quite impressed. To open it, you select one or more images in Windows Explorer, then click "Print the selected pictures" in the lefthand sidebar. I was able to quickly print about a dozen images in sizes and layouts of my choosing. Very handy! What's weird is that if I select the same images and right-click them, I don't get the same "Print the selected pictures" option in the popup menu.—A couple days ago I converted some TIFF files to PDF. The conversion process in Acrobat 6.0.1 Pro is much improved over 5.0. The only trouble I had was that upon viewing the resulting PDF I found that the compression was too high (and the quality too low) for my taste and I had trouble figuring out how to configure a different compression scheme. It's in Edit > Preferences > Convert to PDF > TIFF. I believe the default was JPEG Medium, and once I changed the settings to ZIP I got larger filesizes (acceptable to me) and higher quality. I particularly like the Photo Printing Wizard because it enabled me to see all my options at each step with live thumbnail previews of my actual data. For my very specific—and common—task, it anticipated and fulfilled my needs very well. In contrast, Acrobat 6.0.1 Pro provides a context menu item called "Convert to Adobe PDF." When I use it, it does indeed convert what I wanted into PDF—and that's cool—but when the results aren't exactly what I wanted there's no easy way for me to adjust the default settings if I don't know where to look. It could be improved simply by adding a context pane on the right, such as: "The file you converted uses JPEG Low compression and is 392,283 bytes. Reconvert with [better image quality] or [smaller filesize] or [in a single PDF file rather than separate PDF files]. Or [see all conversion options]. [Help]." Started cleaning up URLs in my journal using mod_rewrite and rewriting some of my PHP code. mod_rewrite still gives me headaches! Got some of those URLs cleaned up but still need to implement redirects for people who bookmarked or linked to old URLs. Read SF Weekly's Best of 2004, which made me realize there's more to San Francisco than I would ever discover even if I had several lifetimes to do it. For example, yes, I've been to Howard's Cafe, but no, I didn't get the turkey dinner. Threw out some old flowers, changed some water in the other flowers. Washed dishes. Went to bed late.