Category: personal

Travel Overload

Another day, another flight. The plan: 2 hours at San Jose “international” airport. 1 hour flight San Jose to LAX. 5 hours layover. 14 hours LAX to Sydney. 3 hours layover. 3 hours Sydney to Auckland. Total = 29 hours “on the road”. Yes, sports fans, jetsetting is a glamorous lifestyle of the rich and famous. And what makes it worse: I have about 467,000 Qantas Freaky Flyer points – and its impossible to do anything with them.

For those in New Zealand, I’ll see you at Printtech 2002. You will find me at the Fuji-Xerox stand doing mini-training courses on InDesign 2.0.

I love visiting New Zealand. It has to be the most beautiful place in the world. Thankfully, I get to visit as a part of my job. When I told my friends at Adobe US I “was off to NZ” after this visit to the US, they were all amazed… Kia Kaha!

Ok, this is coolness. Sitting in the terminal @ San Jose International Airport – wirelessly online and able to send emails. Alan Rosenfeld and I are now so sick of the musak we’ve got our headphones on and are doing work. Alan is listening to African music wishing he was still on holiday. I am listening to Neil Finn – to get into a NZ mood. Saturday in San Jose, Monday in Auckland.

Video to India

Video day today. Appeared in a soon-to-be-released show talking about Photoshop 7. Lots of fun flubbing lines and making a fool of myself. All for 2.5 minutes of air time. Felt like an info-mercial geek. Then later in the day on a video conference link to Noida (near New Delhi) in India. Didn’t have to wear shoes in either instance!

Got 5 minutes? Look at this: Generate your own South Park character

I think I’ll buy the new Moby album 18.

14 emails in InBox

Down to 14 emails in the Inbox. For those who have sent me an email, don’t panic: I am not ignoring you. Just getting through them as quickly as possible and as time permits. Don’t be surprised to see emails sent late at night!

“The Adobe InDesign 2.0.1 update addresses several issues that were identified in InDesign 2.0. It also incorporates updated versions of the Scripting and Cross-media plug-ins…”

InDesign 2.0.2 Update (Mac)

InDesign 2.0.2 Update (Win)

From the InDesign 2.0.1 Readme:

“Placing PDF Files

PDF files that are saved from Photoshop with the .PDP file extension on Windows are recognized
by InDesign 2.0.1 as PDF files. [504600]”

Thanks to Samantha for fixing this, this was a bug that ACP reported and I escalated to the US – and was fixed. So I’ll call it “my bug”

Update city, today. The Photoshop Scripting plugin is at 1.0.1

Photoshop 7.0 Scripting Plugin 1.0.2a (Mac)

Photoshop 7.0 Scripting Plugin 1.0.2a (Win)

Coding time! Best coding music is classics of the 1980’s.

My Next Car

Mini Cooper, my next car Its all about the style. Yeah, baby! my car, a new mini cooper s

How did I miss out on The Smiths in my younger days? Morrissey and Marr rock! How Soon Is Now is a classic I remember from the 80s, but their music is really, really… good. The line I am the son/and the heir sounds almost like I am the sun/and the air – a completely different meaning and spin on the song altogther. This creativity in lyric and music is equally only by early Lennon/McCartney and of course, Neil Finn.

I just love it when the software you create does something that you don’t expect! In the Adobe PDF & Acrobat section, I’ve added the links to the updaters to Acrobat 5.0.5. They now appear in the overview for this section – and the navigation on the right handside. The layout of these areas are automatically created from the content in the database. This wasn’t designed, and not the intent when creating the feature. But works the way you would (sort) of expect. Cool.

Last year I purchased a baby Firewire hard drive. I’ve plugged it into my Windows XP Dell Latitude C800 (which has built in Firewire) and reformatted the 10Gb drive. I selected FAT32 as I know that MacOS X can read this, too. Backed up my data, and mounted the same drive on the Titanium PB. MacOS X can see the FAT32 volume (albeit not reading the volume label/name correctly) and read/write data too! I don’t think I would trust all of these devices plugged in together at the same time…

WindowsXP Likes: faster hibernation, neater hardware removal interface, hiding service icons, new control panel interface and ‘helpers’ on the left in explorer windows, nesting of windows for an application in its icon on the start bar. All minor.

Oh, also some work related stuff. The MacOS Acrobat 5.0.5 Updater is now available. (Most) of the components are MacOS X native.

Trip to US

Back from the US, so much to talk about.

As you have read or seen, Adobe announced new versions of Adobe Illustrator (now version 10) and InDesign (now version 2). To me, InDesign is the most exciting. I have been doing tests to various RIPs of output, experimenting with Spot colours and transparency. It rocks, and will change publishing more than any other application since QuarkXpress 3.32

Something non-Adobe related. I have recently taken possession of a Titanium PowerBook G4 with MacOS X 10.1 installed. At Seybold I saw AppleScript Studio: a good mind meld between NeXT s excellent developer tools (now incarnate in Cocoa) and AppleScript. The more customers Apple get using these tools, the better future for the company. This is a developer s dream operating system. I’ve installed PHP and also purchased ScriptDebugger to do more in the scripting realm.