Help Bush flush out the leak!

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Our dear Pres. Bush is apparently having some difficulties with the task of narrowing down just who in his staff would have been so underhanded as to leak Valerie Plame’s name and CIA affiliation to the press. However, we can help!

President Bush told the press on Tuesday that he doesn’t “have any idea” whether the senior administration officials who blew a CIA operative’s cover will ever be found. But if he just asked his staff to sign a legally binding affidavit confirming that they weren’t involved, and referred anyone who wouldn’t to the FBI, it’s possible he could flush out the perpetrators in a day. To date, the President hasn’t even discussed this matter with his staff.

We’ve already done the President’s homework for him by writing the affidavit. Now let’s show him how easy it is for innocent people to legally declare their innocence. You can sign the affidavit and send it to the President in under a minute by filling out the form…

(via Lane)

New $20 bills

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The US’s new twenty-dollar bills should start hitting banks today, soon to start circulating around to everyone else.

The most noticeable difference in the new design is the subtle introduction of background color, which makes it more burdensome for potential counterfeiters because it adds complexity to the note. The color will also make it easier to distinguish between denominations because different background colors will be used for each denomination.

Sigh

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As of right now — 10am on the day that tickets were available to be purchased — the Lord of the Rings Marathon at the Cinerama is sold out.

At least, that’s what I’m getting from the MovieTickets.com website. For all I know, it may be different at the theatre itself, but I don’t have time to go stand in line there.

Bummer.

Ah, well. As they’re playing the Extended versions of both TFotR and TTT in two weeks immediately prior to the release of TRotK, I went ahead and picked up tickets to the Saturday showings of each of those. Not the marathon, but this might be a little more comfortable anyway. ;)

It must've been the full moon

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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.

iChat faxes?

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iChat sends faxes?

A minor but amusing goof on Apple’s site right now: in the Top New Panther Features sidebar on many of the pages, iChat’s one-line summary is “Send and receive faxes.”

A friend filled me in that you can now fax directly from any print panel in Panther, which I could definitely see as being extremely convenient. It doesn’t really have anything to do with iChat, however.

Still. It amused me.

42 minutes

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Not having a digital video camera to play with video bits, and hot having any multi-megabyte Photoshop files to play with, I have to admit that I haven’t exactly been taxing my G5 since I got it. I’m loving the speed, to be sure — but I also know I haven’t even begun to push the limits of what this machine can do.

I stumbled across a post by someone who does do video rendering work, though, and they posted a comparison of video render times for whatever project they’re working on. The clip that they were working on took 6 hours and 46 minutes to render on a dual 500Mhz processor G4 — but only 42 minutes to render on the dual 2Ghz processor G5.

That’s fast. Time for me to upgrade my projects! ;)

No kidding

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The result of attempting to open a .mix file with Microsoft Digital Image Pro 9:

Sorry

Thank you so much for that insightful and helpful piece of information. No indication of why the file is having problems, or what problems might have been encountered, or anything else. Just the computer equivalent of “Screw you, leave me alone.” Joy.

Don't ignore the youth

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Many years ago (well…not that many, I am only 30 after all), I was part of the Episcopal Diocese of Alaska‘s delegation to the Episcopal Youth Event, a huge gathering of kids involved in the Episcopal church. Not merely a local event, the EYE works on a three-year cycle: one year locally, with Diocese level gatherings; one year regionally; and every third year, the EYE is a national event that often becomes international, with attendees coming in from all over the globe. If I’m remembering correctly, I was about 16 at the time (I think this happened the summer after my sophomore year in high school), and the EYE that year was in Missoula, Montana.

That trip has always been one that I’ve looked back on fondly. It was a lot of fun, it affected me fairly strongly in a few ways, and there were three key events that helped both to shape me, and contributed strongly to my continuing to stay a part (if, admittedly, not a very active part in recent years) of the Episcopal Church.

The first thing that impressed me was the level of devotion that some of the attendees had. I don’t mean that to sound like they were ultra-conservative “Bible Thumpers”, either — merely that the church was a strong enough part of their life that they were willing to entirely transform their lives in order to attend this event. There were two or three people there who had come from Jordan (I believe) to this event, and because of the political climate in the world at the time, they were not going to be able to go home afterwards. Quite mind boggling to me at the time, and even still to this day.

The second impression that made a huge impact on me was how wonderfully inclusive the atmosphere was. While the Episcopal church, like all large organizations, encompasses people across all walks of the conservative/liberal spectrum (for instance, I and my family are all quite liberal “West Coast Episcopalians”, while George Bush Sr. is a far more conservative “East Cost Episcopalian”), I had always gotten the impression that the Episcopal church was very open and accepting. This was driven home during the EYE for me. One of the adult RA’s for the EYE was an absolutely drop-dead gorgeous girl who went by the name of Xena (or possibly Zena, this was years before Xena the Warrior Princess was on TV); dressed all in black; wore whiteface and impeccably applied Egyptian-style eyeliner with deep, blood red lipstick; and had her head shaved on one side and long on the other with her hair dyed an incredible iridescent emerald green. I figured if someone like that was not just a member, but was put in a position of authority for the event, than this was likely an organization that I could stick with.

I also think that my life-long attraction to Goth women is based partly on Xena, and partly on Mia Sara in the 80’s fantasy movie Legend, when she’s dressed in the black dress with the plunging neckline — but I digress. ;)

The third thing that has always stuck with me was when the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church addressed all of us in a huge gathering at the amphitheater. While most people would have an immediate preconceived notion of nearly any Bishop as a somewhat dour, stuffy man, the PB was anything but that. Striding back and forth across the stage as he talked, laughing and joking with all of us, and keeping us all involved with what he was saying. During his talk, he was speaking about how so many people tend to look down on the youth of the church, discounting them because they aren’t adults yet.

“Many people say that that all of you are the church of tomorrow,” he said, and we all applauded. After the applause died down, he strode toward the front of the stage. “Well, I say that that’s bullshit!” he yelled. Then, barely pausing while we were all processing the fact that the PB of the Episcopal Church just cursed in front of a few thousand kids, he went on to declare, “I say that the youth of today are the church of today!”

The place damn near exploded.

Here we had someone very high in the church who didn’t talk down to us. He didn’t treat us as if we were inconsequential to the church at large, only to be paid attention to because someday we’d grow into good, responsible, tithing Episcopalians. Rather, he wanted us involved, wanted us to take an interest and be a part of the church we’d all grown up in, and in many cases, had more or less taken for granted. It was a wonderful moment.

What put all this into my head was a report from a Generation Dean rally at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, NH that was posted on the Dean blog today.

Dean says, “People say you [young people] are the foot soldiers of the campaign. Baloney. You are driving this campaign… and you are the driving force who are going to inherit this country after this election. And the kind of country you inherit is very much up to you….”

[…]

The Governor ends by telling the more than 1,000 students and young people and people of all ages that “you have the power to change this country,” and now as the music starts up again he’s down in front, being mobbed by people who want to shake his hand, surrounded by photographers snapping pictures for the wires and the local and university press. It’s incredible.

Also, this bit from a wrapup post at the Generation Dean blog:

Dean opened his speech thanking the young people in the room for driving his campaign. UNH has received or will receive every single presidential candidate, but it was clear that Dean’s message of not using young people as campaign “footsoldiers” was a point not made before on this campus. That message clearly resonated with everyone in the room.

It is incredible. It’s always incredible when people can stop and take the time to recognize that if you can talk to today’s youth rather than at them, if you can take them seriously, and if you can tap that enthusiasm, energy, and initiative, that you can muster a force that is truly one to be reckoned with. The PB knew that at EYE, and it looks like Dean and the people at Generation Dean know it and are doing everything they can to put that boundless energy to good use, and to knock Bush on his elitist little keister in 2004.

Keep it up.

TypePad discount codes

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Today TypePad moved out of “Preview Release” status, making them officially open for business. I still have fifteen fourteen thirteen twelve ZERO (this offer has long since expired) discount codes available that will get anyone who uses one a 20% discount for as long as they stay with the TypePad service — they make what’s already a really good deal just that much better! You’ve only got until November 30th 2003 to take advantage of the codes, though, so don’t dawdle. Feel free to e-mail or leave a comment here if you’d be interested…first come, first serve, of course!