The Last Word

A few days ago, I started working on the announcement postcards for the Hartnell show. I’ve had good luck with Modern Postcard in the past, so I decided to use them again. When I took a look at their website, I found that things have changed for the better. There are a number of available [...]

Yesterday, I signed the prints, put them in the transport case I had purchased from Archival Methods, and took them over to Hartnell. Eric had already received the plex, and had arranged it on the gallery floor as he figured out how many pictures would fit on each wall. He told me that he thinks [...]

After I installed Office 2010, I noticed that the Acrobat ribbon was missing. I went to the Adobe website and learned the story. It seems that in versions of Acrobat 9 before 9.3, the Acrobat ribbon didn’t work right with Office 2010. Adobe came up with a fix in the 9.3 release: they removed the [...]

I told you all in a previous post that my experience with Microsoft support on what turned out to be a font problem with Office 2010 was abysmal. I promised to spare you details then, and I won’t rehash that call now. However, yesterday I received a signoff e-mail from the support tech. The critical [...]

In previous posts, I reported that upon upgrading from Office 2007 to Office 2010, corrupted some fonts caused Outlook and Word to crash. There are a couple of possibilities here. Maybe the fonts were fine before the upgrade, and somehow the upgrade corrected them. Maybe the fonts have been corrupted for a long time, and [...]

Just when I thought the Office 2010 font wars were over, a new battle broke out. I got an e-mail with a Word attachment that crashed Word 2010. I brought it up in Word on a computer that had only the standard Windows 7 fonts installed, and saw that the predominant font was Times. I [...]

Those of you who regularly read this blog know that I’m a heat seeker: somebody who gets involved in technology before it is well tested and debugged. I don’t do beta tests, but I’m usually near the front of the line for new versions of operating systems and applications. I try to do most of [...]

I talked to Eric the other day about the wall labels for the Hartnell exhibition. He said he’d be happy to format and print the labels; all he needed from me was a Word file with the titles and dates.
Since the titles of the images were already entered as metadata in the image files, I [...]

Within a few months of starting to use Lightroom, I was using it for all my printing. The Hartnell show is no exception. Printing from Lightroom has many advantages over printing directly from Photoshop. Parametrically specifying the margins means you can print a whole series of images without worrying about the detailed layout of each [...]

The standard typewriter keyboard was designed in the 1870s to minimize jams. The key layout had the unfortunate side effect of slowing down typists compared to alternative schemes. None of the alternative layouts are popular today, in spite of their demonstrated advantages to a typist trained in their use. The reason? People have gotten used [...]