Personal

I so was not planning on being at work until midnight tonight. Ugh.

A small but important project came through. Had to be finished tonight, as they were needed for a meeting with BillG and SteveB tomorrow morning. Not very big at all — just twenty prints, five double-sided 11×17 sheets folded and stapled into magazine style booklets. Should’ve been a quick and simple half-hour bang it out job.

Which, of course, meant that Murphy’s Law kicked in — with a vengeance.

The first major issue, nobody could do anything about. Our primary color printer, a DocuColor 2060, was out of commission — horrid copy quality on all colors, and images skewing up to 10 degrees. Not anywhere near a printable state. Service was called, but not likely to show up for a few hours at best, most likely tomorrow morning. So, rather than that, we had to use our DocuColor 12 — decent copy quality, but not nearly as fast. Still, it was at least working.

The customer brought in a DVD with a PageMaker file and all the linked high resolution graphics. Seemed like we were off to a good start, as that’s far more than many people know to bring in (“Oh, you mean that the 342k Publisher file I sent you doesn’t have the 2Mb graphic image I used for the design already in it?”).

There were two files on the DVD, too. In the first, the file was laid out in seqential order (page one, page two, page three, etc.). While this is a perfectly reasonable way to set up a document, it won’t print correctly like that, as the pages need to be reordered to align correctly when set 2-up on 11×17 sheets, assembled, and printed (the process is called a “signature” — you’ll have to pardon me if I don’t try to explain it in more detail than that at the moment).

Thankfully, there was a second file on the disk that had the document signatured correctly for printing, and where the first file was just named “document”, this one was named “document_print”. Rock on, we’re off and running.

After a bit, we finish up, and the customer comes in to get the books — and what do you know, but they’re all bad. Turns out that there were some last-minute edits to the document just before it was burned to disk and brought to us, and those edits were only made to the sequential document, not the signatured document with \”_print\” in the filename. Argh. Okay, then…time to start over. Now, though, I’ve got to work with the file that’s set up sequentially.

Now, normally, this wouldn’t be too much of a hassle, as PageMaker includes a plugin that automates the signature process, determining which pages need to go where. Click the menu item, watch PageMaker think for a moment, and bingo, everything’s reordered and print ready. Unless, of course, the bookletmaking plugin crashes halfway through the process. Okay, time to figure out why that’s not working, as a little troubleshooting time is (at this point) preferable to breaking the publication apart and rebuilding it by hand.

Eventually, I find the problem — a single line that was placed outside of the 11×17 print area, all the way to the edge of the pasteboard (the largest area that PageMaker can work with for each page image). Apparently, as PageMaker was working its way through the page reordering, it found this line that was so far off to the side that it couldn’t create a workspace large enough to include the line after shifting and combining two of the pages, so it just crapped out. No good error message, so it took me a while to track that down, but at least I found it. Re-ran the bookletmaking plugin, and everything looked fine.

Until I started flipping through the pages. Turns out that some of the pages had images that spanned the gutter, so they’d been split between two spreads. Not normally a problem, but these images had 2-pixel borders around them that I couldn’t find a way to delete, and would have ended up creating a single solid line when the booklet was assembled. Not good.

Okay, time for plan B — break the booklet down and reassemble it. Luckly, there’s a good shortcut for this. Rather than having to entirely break the publication apart and reassemble it, I can just print the entire thing to 8.5×11 images as a postscript file, convert that postscript to a .pdf file, and then import each page as a single entity into a new PageMaker publication. Fairly quick and simple to do, so I did, and we started printing the books.

Here comes the next issue — the Doc 12 started acting up. The booklet had a lot of deep blacks, and the toner wasn’t adhering to the paper correctly. Suddenly, all of those deep black areas were flaking off like crazy on the cover page. Luckly, that was the only page, but it still meant trouble. Once it was obvious that we weren’t going to be able to get that to come out quite right, we started improvising — combining printed pages for most of the body, with copies produced from the few prints of the cover sheet that didn’t have the flaking problem. Since the copies were done slower, one side at a time, they took longer, but the toner was able to adhere to the page. Okay, so we’re making progress again, and the end is in sight.

At least, the end was in sight. Our customer came back to pick up that round of books, started flipping through them, and realized that there was yet another problem! One of the pages had an image of a person, with the text wrapped irregularly around the person’s silhouette. For some reason, at some point during the postscripting, .pdf’ing, and re-construction of the document, that text had been dropped behind the image of the person, and the background of that image was now obscuring about half of the text on that page.

Crapola. And many other stronger words, to boot.

Back to improvising. The end result was a mishmash of printed pages from the final document, copied pages for the pages that had flaking problems, and a copied page from the original booklet to take care of the text wrapping problem around the picture on that page. Not nearly as easy as it should have been, and not quite the quality that we would have liked to have seen, but in the end, it was passable, and it was done.

And at midnight, we were out the door.

Some days I walk directly from my apartment to the bus stop. Others, I swing through downtown Seattle to pick up my paycheck or do some shopping before hopping the bus to work. Days when I do that, it’s not uncommon for me to stop by the McDonald’s in the Westlake Center food court and grab some food (or at least the close approximation of food that McDonald’s serves). Double Quarter Pounder with cheese and a small Mr. Pibb — \$4.80. Not a bad under five dollar lunch.

Until today, when the price came to \$5.12. At first I thought the guy at the register had goofed up my order, but nope. A manager came over and said that over the weekend, they’d raised the price of their small drinks. Okay, prices fluctuate from time to time, usually upwards, but a 32 cent jump for a 12oz (if that) soda? Yikes!

Bummer. I liked being able to spend less than \$5 to feed myself on the way to work. Now I’m either going to have to remember to keep change in my pocket, resign myself to paying a bit more, or see what other options I might have for quick, cheap, edible, and portable munchies (many of the other food stands in the mall are equally quick and cheap and more edible, but not as easy to munch “on the go”).

Tiny Sugar Packets of Evil is asking about nicknames today. Since she asked…

I’ve had four nicknames that I can remember off the top of my head.

My first and earliest came about before I was even born. Since mom and dad didn’t really know what I was going to be (in fact, if I remember correctly, mom was absolutely convinced that she was going to have a dark haired little daughter, and even the dream of having a red headed boy didn’t convince her until I actually showed up), they referred to me as “The Kid”, or “TK”. When my brother was on the way, he became “TK-2”.

When I was a young kid, mom nicknamed me “Punkin”. I can’t come up with any funny or cute stories about that one, though, sorry. ;)

In fourth grade, I met Royce. His family had nicknames for each of the kids: Royce was “Trooper”, his little brother Corey was “Packey”, his little sister Haley was…my lord, I can’t remember anymore…, and I ended up being dubbed “Pokey”, thanks to my tendency to be abysmally slow about getting anywhere. I dawdled constantly — not to be difficult or anything, it’s just that there was so much cool stuff everywhere! My parents used to joke that I was always late to school (a three block walk from home) because I had to examine every snowflake to be sure that they were all really different.

My last, and most long-lasting nickname, was also given to me by Royce’s family. At one point, Royce’s dad remarked that I looked like “a young Woody Allen” (here’s a picture, judge for yourself), and he started calling me “Little Woody”.

In high school, I was getting more and more fed up with the fact that, as Michael is the most popular name for males in my age group, there was at least one other Michael in almost every class I was in. In my Yearbook class, there were two Michaels, and we (along with some of the other non-Michaels) all decided that it was time to adopt nicknames to differentiate ourselves. The other Michael became “Milo”, my friend Jason became “Spanky”, Mark became “Stiffy” (his last name is Stiffler), and, while I thought that “Little Woody” would raise a few too many eyebrows — especially in high school — I started using “Woody”.

And yeah — Spanky, Stiffy, and Woody. We also had a friend named Rod. We figured that all we needed was a Richard, and we’d have the whole set. But anyway…

So I started using Woody. As time went on, I used Woody more and more often, and Michael (or Mike) less and less. I was going through a lot of personal, introspective changes at the time (in many ways, discovering that I actually had a personality of my own), and in some ways, Woody became almost an entirely separate persona from Mike/Michael — to the point where it sometimes felt almost like something of a self-induced schizophrenia. It wasn’t long at all until I was using Woody exclusively, and it was only my family or very old friends who called me Michael.

Over the years, Woody itself picked up a few nicknames — Woodstock, Woodorama, Woodster, etc. At one point, Royce was joking around and gave it the pseudo-German spelling of Wüdi, which ended up coming in handy once I hit the ‘net. While Woody isn’t an incredibly common name, it was common enough that an internet search would come up with quite a few others (not least of which was Woody Allen), but I’ve yet to find another ‘Wudi’ on the net (aside from Wudi county in China, at least).

Over the past few years, though, I’ve finally gotten around to using Michael again. It started a few years back with my friend Miranda, who decided that she liked that better than Woody. That started getting me used to hearing my name from people other than old friends and family, and as time has gone by, I’ve been using Woody less and less. It will live on through djwudi.com and my DJ Wüdi propaganda, but as a nickname, it definitely seems to finally be on its way out.