Busy Two Weeks

Busy, busy, busy.

Man, these have been a busy two weeks. What have I been doing with myself, one might ask. Well, I might respond, let me tell you.

Here’s the overview (in no par­tic­u­lar order); details are below.

• Revised a book pro­pos­al and out­line (twice).
• Spent near­ly an entire day–7.5 hours–booking travel.
• Working on year-end tax­es, receipts, etc.
• Spent three sol­id days buy­ing and return­ing a new car and fix­ing Strawberry Blonde’s SUV.
• Wrote my reg­u­lar columns on Quark VS InDesign, The Design Weblog, The Magazine Weblog, and (Unofficial) Photoshop Weblog.
• Contracted a com­put­er virus, refor­mat­ted, and rein­stalled every­thing for three days.
• Prepared to teach class­es in Mac OS X and QuarkXPress 6.
• Spent time with my kids.
• Approved the appli­ca­tions of 21 new mem­bers of the Graphic Design Resource Group (and denied three).
• Trouble-shot a CSS issue on this site (still work­ing on that).
• Negotiated a part­ner­ship with a stock pho­tog­ra­phy agency.
• Answered a ton of e‑mail (after wad­ing through thou­sands of pieces of spam).
• Bought a new Mac Powerbook G4.

Keep in mind, I’ve only been home for less than two weeks. The two weeks pri­or to that I was in Fort Worth and Dallas, Texas.

Revised a book proposal and outline (twice).

That’s as much as I can say, real­ly. At least at this point. In a week or two I will know for cer­tain if the book is a go… At which point I still will not be able to dis­cuss it. You will be among the first to know when it’s pub­lished, however!

Spent nearly an entire day--7.5 hours--booking travel.

Oh, my word! Booking trav­el to a place I’ve nev­er before been is always a chal­lenge. I have to obtain the address of my train­ing site, then deter­mine the near­est air­port, car rental agency (usu­al­ly on-site at the air­port, luck­i­ly), and hotels. The hotels part is always the most difficult.

Sometimes Expedia, Orbitz, Hotels​.com, or some oth­er resource will give me a list of near­by hotels; some­times none of them will or the list will be too com­pli­cat­ed (i.e. long and clut­tered with unsuit­able lodg­ing). This time around, with the clien­t’s loca­tion being just out­side a major East Coast city, it was extreme­ly difficult.

After a lot of work I got a list, but I had to keep cross-referencing each address with a map of the city. Very few things in busi­ness trav­el are as prob­lem­at­ic as stay­ing on one side of an unfa­mil­iar major city and hav­ing to com­mute through rush hour traf­fic clear to the oth­er side. Then add in the com­pli­ca­tion that I have spe­cif­ic (but very sim­ple) hotel needs–high-speed Internet access, wired or wire­less, chief among them–and the poten­tial for a night­mare book­ing can be real­ized. Aside: In this day and age, how can any hotel call itself “busi­ness class” while only pro­vid­ing guests with dial-up Internet access or, worse, no Internet access at all?

Even after find­ing a hotel, the air­line rates and avail­abil­i­ty fluc­tu­at­ed so fre­quent­ly, that I would just get through pick­ing flights when they would change. Clicking “book now” sud­den­ly tells me that seats are no longer avail­able on the flights that were pre­sent­ed just a few sec­onds before.

Then, of course, hotel check-in and check-out and car rental times are all depen­dent upon when my planes land and take-off.

Holy gua­camole, Batman! This round of trav­el book­ing was a bitch!

Working on year-end taxes, receipts, etc.

‘Tis the sea­son. And, when you’re self-employed, accu­rate finan­cial records and data are cru­cial and complex.

Spent three solid days buying and returning a new car and fixing Strawberry Blonde's SUV.

Late last week Strawberry Blonde’s SUV died. After run­ning just fine, it sud­den­ly would­n’t turn over.

We tried fix­ing it, but even with the help of an expe­ri­enced mechan­ic, the prob­lem could­n’t be found, much less fixed.

So, we decid­ed to buy a new car. That took up an entire day–most of it stand­ing around the deal­er­ship wait­ing for this per­son or that to be avail­able. We drove away in a new Mitsubishi Montero Sport.

The next full day was devot­ed to DEQ (emis­sions test­ing) and the DMV, both required since we bought the SUV across the bor­der in Vancouver, Washington.

The day after that was pri­mar­i­ly return­ing the car to the Vancouver dealership.

For the last year I have been self-employed. When one is self-employed, regard­less of one’s prov­able income lev­el, banks get ner­vous. Consequently, while a year of work­ing for some­one else, a so-called “W‑2 job” in ref­er­ence to the fact that employ­ers pay out your tax­es, is suf­fi­cient for most lenders to pro­vide favor­able terms, being self-employed (a “1099 Job”) requires five years of prov­able income. Then bank gave us financ­ing, but we did­n’t like the terms (even with a hefty amount down).

We also did­n’t appre­ci­ate the way in which the terms were changed after we signed the con­tract and had dri­ven away in the new vehi­cle. So, we gave the car back.

Towing Strawberry Blonde’s Blazer to a rep­utable shop and hav­ing it fixed took half a day, but far less mon­ey than we had thought it would. The ter­ri­ble elec­tri­cal prob­lem that wor­ried us was mere­ly a burnt out con­duc­tor in the igni­tion switch. A new part and a cou­ple of hours work dis­as­sem­bling and reassem­bling the steer­ing col­umn and all was well.

Wrote my regular columns on Quark VS InDesign, The Design Weblog, The Magazine Weblog, and (Unofficial) Photoshop Weblog.

‘Nuff said there. Check ’em out.

Contracted a computer virus, reformatted, and reinstalled everything for three days.

Suddenly late last week my main com­put­er’s anti-virus and fire­wall soft­ware dis­en­gaged. They would not re-enable. Simultaneously System Restore and online anti-virus active scans would not run; they all came up with blank inter­faces. Windows Update failed to run as well, but it was more enlight­en­ing than any­thing else: JavaScript sup­port, on which System Restore, active scans, and many sys­tem secu­ri­ty and restora­tion util­i­ties depend, had been dis­abled. In the UIs it was appar­ent­ly turned on, but some­thing intere­cept­ed the JavaScript rou­tines and pre­vent­ed them from actu­al­ly running.

After try­ing every­thing I could think of a day and a half, I gave in and re-installed the OS. Then spent sev­er­al days installing my mission-critical appli­ca­tions (Creative Suite, Office, Quark, HomeSite, etc.). Thankfully I had my oth­er com­put­ers to enable my work while I pieced back togeth­er the main sys­tem, named ImaginationBox on the network.

Once every­thing was running–albeit not yet con­fig­ured for my workflows–I dis­cov­ered that it was not, after­all, a virus that had harmed my system.

It was a piece of soft­ware from Stardock’s Object Desktop suite, the new Enhanced Dialog. It has wrought hav­oc with many users’ sys­tems, in most cas­es dis­abling anti-virus soft­ware and trig­ger­ing some kind of script fail­ure, either JavaScript or Visual Basic Script, on which much of the Windows XP OS and pro­grams like Microsoft Office depend. Had I fig­ured this out soon­er, I would have saved myself days of lost or low­ered pro­duc­tive time.

Prepared to teach classes in Mac OS X and QuarkXPress 6.

I have upcom­ing class­es to teach in Mac OS X and Quark 6.

Spent time with my kids.

I don’t usu­al­ly have the chance to walk them home from school, so it was a treat for all of us. We drove around, played, watched TV, used Magic Sand, which stays dry even sub­merged in water, and with which crude sculp­tures can be cre­at­ed beneath the water.

Approved the applications of 21 new members of the Graphic Design Resource Group (and denied three).

The GDRG is grow­ing so rapid­ly! When I joined in late 2003 it had few­er than 350 mem­bers. Now we’re approach­ing 750! I approve an aver­age of three new mem­ber appli­ca­tions per day.

Trouble-shot a CSS issue on this site (still working on that).

Negotiated a partnership with a stock photography agency.

Another deal I don’t want to talk about just yet. It should come to fruition soon, at which point an announce­ment will be made.

Answered a ton of e-mail (after wading through thousands of pieces of spam).

No, I don’t need anoth­er mort­gage. Hair loss treat­ments? Look at the top of the page. Do I look like I need hair trans­plants or Rogaine? Would I like to increase the size of parts of my anato­my? Uh, no thanks. I’m not a fan of online pok­er. Nor am I into watch­ing hot, teen, dwarf, les­bian, bes­tial­i­ty on my com­put­er (or any­where, thanks). Oh, and if I want take a trip to Costa Rica, I’ll book it through some­one who does­n’t send thou­sands of mes­sages per day about it spoof­ing the return address as my own domain name.

In between all of that I helped out for­mer stu­dents, pro­vid­ed files and assis­tance to read­ers of my columns, and even got heart warm­ing ecards from my kids.

Bought a new Mac Powerbook G4.

This was a process. I had want­ed to just run out and pick up a Mac Mini–45 min­utes tops, I thought. Alas, every­one was sold out. The Apple Store told me to go online and order (only 3–6 weeks deliv­ery time!); Circuit City does­n’t sell Macs any­more; Best Buy was, as usu­al, filled with idiots who could­n’t under­stand a sim­ple ques­tion, and; CompUSA was also sold out.

Having got­ten myself men­tal­ly geared up for a new Mac, how­ev­er, I relent­ed and bought a new G4 Powerbook with a 15″ screen (have you seen how hideous­ly awk­ward are the 17-inches? Gawd!). It’s got all the bells and whis­tles, and, of course, it match­es my office, which is built almost com­plete­ly of indus­tri­al post steele shelving.

I feel com­pelled to give props to CompUSA. In the Apple Store, owned by Apple com­put­er, mind you, a sim­ple ques­tion about the bus speed of the Mac Mini mod­els baf­fled three store sales reps. The CompUSA peo­ple, how­ev­er, knew their stuff. For every ques­tion I asked, they had a straight-forward answer. One per­son was an Apple Computers employ­ee assigned to that CompUSA, but the oth­er oth­er worked for the store. Both impressed the hell out of me after my expe­ri­ences with the morons at Best Buy and the idiots at the local Apple Store.

The wrap up.

I love times like these past two weeks, when near­ly every minute has some­thing for me to do–whether it’s work or just spend­ing time with my fam­i­ly. It makes me feel alive.