Aha!

I've been reading Bill Chance's Daily Epiphany for a good many years now. Right now he's in the process of getting rid of junk so he won't have to pack and move it.

Our Real Estate agent said something interesting about clutter, about why people don't throw stuff away.
She said, 'People keep things because they are afraid they will lose the memory that goes along with it.'"

Makes sense.

You wouldn't believe the crap we packed and took with us when we moved here. We made an effort to get rid of stuff, but there's still way too much crap around. I all but had to kick and scream and hold my breath to get Ron to let me throw away a bunch of old too-tight T-shirts.

Thomas Phinney on those damned forged Air National Guard memos

Interview with Adobe's Thomas Phinney, by Sandee Cohen, from creativepro.com.

The discussion of these memos that's filtered down to me has been extremely incomplete. Phinney's a genuine expert in the field of digital typography, and he covers his topic like a horse blanket. He explains how he concludes that the font in the forged memos is Times Roman, in terms a normal person can understand, while at the same time making the incredibly bad reproduction a non-issue. He identifies the two typewriter-like devices available in 1972 that had proportional spacing and (to my satisfaction, anyway) eliminates either of them as a source for the memos. Excellent illustrations in pdf format are included.

Phinney also discusses the unevenness of the baselines in the forgeries which have led some to believe that they must have been typed on a typewriter. Phinney points out what's known to everybody who's ever had to recreate artwork from a faxed original: that the low resolution of the fax process tends to introduce irregularities in letter forms which may be made worse if the fax is a bit crooked on the page, which isn't unusual.

There's also discussion of how Word treats ordinals and superscripts and how in spots it looks as if the forger took steps to defeat Word's automatic superscripting.

Now what I want to know is how such obvious forgeries got through CBS's fact-checking apparatus.

Recent Rebrandings

Speak Up on new doings in the world of corporate identity and branding.

Gosh, what a bunch of mediocre solutions. MBNA's new logo is probably the best of the lot, and that's not saying much. The negative space under the tree branches on the left just begs for the initials to be tucked into it.

Sure is an improvement on its predecessor, though.

Chansons

Three very familiar songs usually sung in French have been called to my attention in the last couple of days:

1. During a peculiar movie caught on cable the other day, schoolchildren sing "Dominique." (The particular scene takes place during the mid-60s in Paris, so that would still have been a fairly current song.)

2. U.S News and World Report describes Karl Rove at a dinner party singing "Alouette" by way of illustrating his lighter side. "Lighter side" is their term, but I can't read it without thinking of the late Dave Berg's regular strips in Mad. (I won't link to the story because a fee is required.)

3. A kid I saw in a drug store today, probably 7 or 8, was trying to sing "Frere Jacques." He sang:

Para yaka, para yaka
Deja vu, deja vu
I am glad to meet you
I am glad to meet you
A-a-men
A-a-men

Weird. Little kids know the phrase "deja vu"?

Desperate, desperate, desperate...

From SFGate.com:

In his Cincinnati speech, Cheney said indicators that measure the nation's unemployment rate, consumer spending and other milestones miss the hundreds of thousands who make money selling online on eBay.

"That's a source that didn't even exist 10 years ago," Cheney said. "Four hundred thousand people make some money trading on eBay."

Granted there are people who do make a living selling stuff on eBay--are there really any more of them, relatively, than there were 20 years ago selling out of the back pages of Goldmine and the Comic Book Buyer's Guide and the like? Are they making more and better money?

Gee, who'd a thunk it?

From the AP, via CNN.com: "Floppy disk nears obsolescence"

APESGRAPES - Midget Clown

As certain persons of my acquaintance would say, this is just wrong. Especially the special offer for funerals and wakes.

[By way of Jen Segrest's Very Big Blog.]

What I hate about Word, part 2

What I typed:
GAGEtrak lets you create IDs for users.

Word automatically corrected my capitalization, so the sentence read:
GAGEtrak lets you create Ids for users.

This changes the meaning somewhat.

What I hate about Word, part 1

It's exasperatingly slow: I can type ahead of it easily, and I don't type any more than 50 words a minute. Hit the delete key and it's even slower, as if it's thinking real hard about whether it really wants to do it.

I'm officially fried

Ron woke me up at 5 this morning because he wanted to start work early so he could finish work early, and after about half an hour I gave in and started work myself.

Good thing, actually. I've plowed through about half of the feature list for one product brochure after struggling for three days with it and now, at just before 2 pm, I feel justified in stopping here and now, dead in the middle of some statistical information I find very confusing. I'll handle it much better when I'm rested.

The other product brochure will be much easier.

Sir George Martin's coat of arms

From the College of Arms, via Anton Sherwood:

Among many other achievements, Sir George Martin was producer to the Beatles. The shield, crest and badge make various more or less explicit references to the group as well as to music and the recording industry in general.

Some references are less obviously explicit in America than in England. As a native speaker of American, I didn't immediately recall that the type of crosswalk the Beatles are seen in on the cover of Abbey Road is known as a zebra crossing in English. Inobservant as usual, I also didn't realize that the musical instrument under the bird's wing isn't a clarinet (as I first supposed) but a recorder.

The spam just keeps on comin'

I, or one of my e-mail avatars, just got an "Urgent Message" from someone who styles himself "platitudinous Jefferey."

Holy disappearing act, Batman!

From Ron S. Bell's evocatively named Bear Left On Unnamed Road: "The Invisibility Cloak"

Too Much Tech?

John Edison Betts, Jr., on how equipment proliferates:

I have an over-abundance of electronics in my office. No, not my work office… my home office. Compared to my home, my workplace is technologically barren.

Huh. Ron and I have no other workplace than our home office, and together we have less stuff than John has individually.

Of course, that could change. Possibly on the horizon: a laptop so I could surf the web in the living room while Ron watches TV, and some sort of Windows box for testing web sites and creating screen shots.

My Mom packs for moving

When we moved into my folks’ house in Kerrville, we found all kinds of items my mom left behind when my parents downsized and moved into a retirement community. Mom didn’t just leave us the odd item here and there, or even the odd sofa; there are many, many boxes, some of which were packed in 1984 when they moved out of the house in Houston that I grew up in. And my mom really knows how to pack.

Mom’s of the thrifty Depression generation, so everything’s worth saving and preserving: bags, foil, boxes, plastic bags, jars, old rags—everything. This is doubled, in spades, for anything durable and potentially useful. You name it: if my mom didn’t take it with her, chances are that it’s in the garage somewhere, as likely as not in its original box. I can go out there right now and grab headphones from 1972, an answering machine from 1990, a screwdriver or two from 1960, and my dad’s foot locker from his postwar stint in the Merchant Marine.

Much of it, as I say, is wrapped up as only my mom can wrap things. Usually, boxes are double-taped; once inside, the unpacker is confronted with vast amounts of old newspaper protecting the actual contents, which are themselves labeled and individually wrapped. At a bare minimum, unwrapping an item involves cutting through heavy box tape to take the newspaper off; however, if the item is remotely breakable, it’s usually wrapped in paper, taped, then wrapped in a plastic bag and taped again.

Naturally, the more breakable an item is, the better wrapped. To get to an 18” glass table top, we had to take off the outer plastic bag, then the inner paper bag. Below that was a layer of bubble wrap, which protected a layer of newspaper, under which we found aluminum foil, then an old ragged towel, another paper bag, and another layer of newspaper. Each layer was individually and thoroughly taped, all the way around, crosswise.

Mom also has a mania for documentation. I opened a box the other day. The outside was labeled in Mom’s graceful handwriting:

BILL
Household Items
VERY FRAGILE

A note on the inside flap of the box provides an inventory: “Clara’s bowl; Aunt Willie’s plate; Mama’s silverware; NSD costume jewelry; knickknacks; bric-a-brac.” Weirdly, this isn’t complete enough. Not that I don’t know a bowl from a plate or silverware from costume jewelry, but damn if I can tell knickknacks from bric-a-brac.

Defending Our Skies Against the Elderly

Diane Dimond, from MSNBC:

The last I saw of him, a burly airport screener was forcing my frail and faltering 78-year-old father to stand at attention—arms spread—for a wand search. As I watched from the other side of the security gate I saw the man in the uniform point to my father to sit down and take off his shoes.

I'm as shocked and appalled as anybody else that this kind of thing happens, but in truth I'm not surprised. (A couple of years ago in Albuquerque I saw security folks hand-search the bags of an elderly Mexican nun not once but twice.) My mom (who'll be 86 in October) was lucky to have been treated respectfully and courteously by everyone she dealt with in the two airports she went through last week. I'm glad I was there to escort her, and that I was allowed to do so.

More on QuarkXPress

Pariah Burke holds forth on QuarkXPress again:

Kamar Aulakh has taken charge and pointed Quark in a very different direction from that long travelled by Fred Ebrahimi. Pretty much since day one, Aulakh has recognized that Quark is no longer the dominant layout application in many of it’s former key markets.

Interesting. The prevailing sentiment I've seen recently about Quark--understandably so--is that Ebrahimi will never let Aulakh do anything substantive to reverse Quark's long-brewing decline among the individual designer and small business markets. This feeling is based on the fact that several years ago that very thing happened: Ebrahimi relinquished control, changes were announced, and then Ebrahimi fired the new managers and reverted to status quo antebellum before any real progress could be made.

Aulakh's done well so far, reducing upgrade prices, restoring the user forums, seeking user input, and improving customer service. If Aulakh's Quark can deliver a usable product with features comparable to InDesign's, that may slow the bleeding enough to keep Quark viable outside its strongholds while giving printers and other service providers a reason to upgrade.

But don't expect me to buy a copy unless I absolutely have to.

It's good to be back. Or here. Or something.

We've been busy with the relocation from Phoenix to Kerrville, resulting in a prolonged hiatus since my last post. We're almost done now: the furniture is (mostly) in place, we're (generally) unpacked, the cats are happy in their new home, and we are too.

None of it was as smooth or as easy as we would have liked, but we came through okay. Warning: U-Haul will not rent any kind of towing equipment for use with a Ford Explorer. (Mercury Mountaineers, for some reason, are okay, even though--to paraphrase Monty Python--a Mountaineer's an Explorer with the word "Explorer" crossed off and "Mountaineer" written in in crayon.) My name was misspelled on some of the closing documents, and the resulting delays sorely tested our patience and particularly my dad's endurance.

RP's mom and sister were here Thursday and Friday and were able to meet my folks on Saturday before they left. Everybody got along well--not that I was in any way surprised about that. We're very pleased with how the house is turning out and everybody else who's seen it so far has said the same.

GOP-led House takes a new shot at gay marriage

Hmm. Interesting.

From MSNBC:

WASHINGTON - The Republican-led House voted Thursday to prevent federal courts from ordering states to recognize gay marriages sanctioned by other states.

Congress wants to strip jurisdiction from the courts? Have they ever done that before? Can they do that? My uneducated guess is that it's not meant as serious legislation, just a way of getting on the record.

Tempest in a teapot

Amplification on the very strange Linda Ronstadt story of recent days, from the Las Vegas Review-Journal (registration required):

Some concertgoers took issue with the Aladdin's accounts of angry patrons tearing down posters and throwing drink cups.

'I was so stunned to read in the newspaper that anyone had a negative reaction,' said KLAS-TV, Channel 8, news anchor Paula Francis. 'Everyone who was leaving when I was leaving was just thrilled. They thought it was a good concert.'

Of course, it's good that they have a quote from someone who attended the concert, but why would they quote a presumably prominent employee of a competing news gathering organization?

Nonetheless, I guess all is not as the extremely cursory reports that made it into the national media would have you believe. From this story, it seems clear that Ronstadt has no love for the Aladdin historically. I also gather from the story that Ronstadt's been dedicating "Desperado" to Michael Moore during the whole tour, and the reporter seemed to take her comment "I keep hoping that if I'm annoying enough to them, they won't hire me back," as a joke (though maybe with some serious intent).

And nobody asked me, but to expel Ronstadt from the hotel without even allowing her to return to her suite seems needlessly petty–if that's not a tautology–or worse.