little reminders

listening and watching leo during "the techguy" broadcast, today, i was reminded about being prepared. his video stream went down after just two hours because he forgot to bring his power supply cable for his macbook pro.

it's such a little thing; a simple cable can ruin a session with a client. same thing for card readers, backup drives, e-manuals... i've done it myself.

a couple years ago, i had the opportunity to create a DB for a client on a new eMac (new then!). "the DB is ready!" i proclaimed over the phone, and set up a time for delivery. to my chagrin, I had loaded it on a floppy disk, completely forgetting his new 'puter did not have a floppy drive... completely wasted my afternoon (not a "close" drive), and disappointed my client, terribly.

keep up with your clients' requirements! double check your travel kit for cables, necessary peripherals, etc. and back up! back up! back up!

finishing projects

i have a short attention span. i know it; it's not pretty :-(

in the past month i've made four afghans and a sweater.  i've worked on two sets of socks and some cross stitch projects. two of the afghans are completed; the rest are in various stages of completion.

the sweater is blocked and ready to be sewn together; it needs a button band and collar. two of the afghans need to be sewn together (sewing in all the ends and then finishing the edges. blegh!) i've decided to start over on the socks...

the cross stitch projects are on-going. sometimes my eyes just don't see the holes to put the needle through. i like working on linen, but it is usually a little trickier, as the thread count is higher. the results are well worth the effort.

i'm sewing today...

phone is dead :-(

i finally got so fed up with time warner, i ordered verizon FIOS about 10 days ago. it's not due to be installed until 25 march, however.

i paid the time warner bill online on 2008.02.26. shouldn't be a problem, the payment isn't due for another week. right? leave it to TW to mess it up, however. somehow, in the process of "changing ports" for my digital phone service, they managed to drop my billing information. the phone's out; it's been out for two days now. and the "recent activity" page is showing credits to my account for the next month's service. according to the site, they owe me $57.89!

not so! i'm not switching service for another 28 days... the tech support agent assured me he was working on the problem and would call me back... i have no idea how long it's going to take. but this is just one more good reason to switch

not bad at all

so i trimmed most of the photos to 160 pixels wide, and cut down the number of pictures. then i combined 7 photos of costumed attendees to a nice composite about 480 pixels wide. i love layers ;-)

i have to remember to name the layers as i create them. sometimes the thumbnails are small enough that it's a little hard to identify which layer i want to move or transform... still, the results were nice and the entire review with 14 pictures capped out at 168kb...

changeing layouts

sometimes the best laid plans aren't... i thought i was almost done with the newsletter supplement, but when i got the pictures inserted, i hated the look of it. that happens sometimes.

needless to say - i'm back at the drawing board, and adjusting the layout and the size of the images to suit it better. it might take a few more days, and i may end up cutting the number of images down by a large percentage. it's just a newsletter, after all... it shouldn't look cluttered and hard to read.