When I was getting ready to switch jobs back in June, I decided it would be a good time to consolidate all my backups and archives, sort out my files, and in general clean up my data. The vehicle I chose for this exercise was a pair of LaCie 500GB Firewire 800 drives.

The idea was to copy everything to one of them, then clone it all to the second one, which would be kept offsite and synchronized on a weekly basis over the Internet. My many other Firewire drives could then be used for short-term backups, scratch space, etc. One thing led to another, though, and I didn’t unpack the second drive until Tuesday night, and it was DOA.

LaCie’s online tech-support form didn’t produce a response, so I called them this morning. Ten minutes later, a replacement was in the mail, due to arrive tomorrow. They charged the new one to my credit card, and they’ll refund the money once I ship the dead one back (using their prepaid label). Because the price has dropped since June, the refund will be about $30 larger than the charge.

While I’d have preferred to have a working drive the first time, I like the way they handle problems.

I hate Adobe Illustrator. I’ve always hated it. If the folks responsible for CorelDRAW! hadn’t turned it into crap by constantly shipping new major releases that didn’t fix crippling bugs that were in the previous version, I’d still be using it. On Windows, no less.

Oh, sure, they never really got on the typography bandwagon, severely limiting your ability to use features like ligatures, swash caps, true small caps, optical kerning, etc., but there were a lot of things I could do in Draw 4 that are still a complete pain in the ass in Illustrator 12. Some days, I still find myself writing PostScript by hand and importing the results, just to save time and energy.

And it keeps getting slower. Photoshop is still pretty snappy on my 1.25GHz G4 PowerBook with 2GB of RAM, but Illustrator gets sluggish well before I start trying to get fancy, and it doesn’t have Photoshop’s scriptability, so I can’t easily automate a complex task and walk away while it runs. There’s no real competition out there today, though, so I’m stuck with it.

Sigh. Done ranting for the day, off to cook and kill murlocs. (note that these are separate activities…)

After trying out a few types of sake and doing a little reading on the subject, I decided to gather up all of the useful information commonly printed on labels and menus, and arrange it on a double-sided 3x5 card. It was as much an excuse to play with the new version of Adobe Illustrator as anything else, but it should come in handy the next time I try to figure out what to buy at Mitsuwa.

As a rule, I’m reluctant to contribute when bloggers seek donations; for the most part, I’m a “friends and family” giver. In the specific case of Kate’s teeth, however, it’s the timing that really makes her stand out from the crowd.

With Bush’s latest wishy-washy statement on the subject getting a lot of attention, I thought I’d repost my comment from the creationist “debate” over at Cold Fury:

Joe said: I see a building, and I can recognize that it was created by some intelligence, for some purpose. I may not know how it was built, or for what purpose, but the form and symmetry and structure (the sides are plumb and level, etc.) tell me it was created by intelligent design, and not a random occurance of stone and glass.

I answered: Setting aside the strawman nature of this analogy, imagine two men confronted with this building. One devotes his life to methodically studying what it’s made of and how it was built. The other guy sacrifices a goat in front of it once a month.

If you went to these men and asked them what they knew about the building, the first guy would show you his notes, explain his methods, and present the evidence for his claims. The second guy would ask if you had any spare goats.

Intelligent Design is what you get when the second guy pretends to adopt the methods and terminology of the first in order to talk you out of your goats.

The lesson that Jeff and I took away from this experience can be summed up as follows:

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Friend and co-worker Jeff was an unhappy typist, suffering under the tyranny of mushy keyboards. Soon after I started my new job, he complained about the pain (both spiritual and physical) that these devices cause him. He lamented the passing of the Apple Extended Keyboard, code-name Nimitz, which reminded me that I’d blogged about its return more than a year ago. Jeff ordered one five minutes later. Ten minutes after it arrived, I ordered two. There was another suspiciously keyboard-shaped box sitting in his office today…

Pay no attention to the Mac-themed advertising for the Tactile Pro keyboard; it works just fine with “those other operating systems”. Pay close attention to the mechanical keyswitches that make typing a joy, and that fill the air with a reassuring clatter. My PowerBook isn’t bad, especially compared to the dreck Dell ships with their desktop PCs, but I’m seriously considering picking up another one for travel, even if I have to buy a bigger laptop bag to hold it. It’s that good.

We’ve been buying them straight from the manufacturer, but it turns out that SmallDog has them at a better price.

[Note the correction in red; see the update section for details on my mistake]

This is, of course, a bad translation of written Japanese, created by the SYSTRAN query tool supplied with Mac OS X Tiger. The original phrase was 「このはしは、もち方のれんしゅう用です。」, and it comes from the items shown below (the small white piece reads 「はしのおけいこ」, by the way, which is also the name of the complete product):

The correct translation is left as an exercise for the reader. :-)

Update: the correct transcription would help. I goofed. If you click on the picture, you’ll see that the eighth character is actually 方, not 万. This makes the sentence so easy to translate that even SYSTRAN produces something mostly comprehensible. (or not. I forgot that I’d converted れんしゅう into the correct kanji; without that, SYSTRAN’s effort is still pretty bad)

The reason I wrote the wrong kanji is that, as printed on the chopstick, it looks like three strokes rather than four, and the three-stroke kanji it most closely resembles is extremely common. I noticed the visual difference, but disregarded it when I couldn’t find a better three-stroke match.

Update: to make up for my error, here’s another pair of training chopsticks, that teach a different skill…

Installing random Windows software under XP Home/Pro (for me, it was Minolta’s DiMAGE Capture software, that lets me control my A2 from a (Windows-only) laptop). InstallShield locks up, and has to be killed from the task manager. After dismissing several pointless dialog boxes, the error The Installshield Engine (iKernel.exe) could not be loaded. appears.

Eventual solution: completely delete C:\Program Files\Common\InstallShield

If that still doesn’t do it, nuke the directory again and follow the detailed instructions here.

Apparently, the person at work who built my new Alienware laptop (“Hi, Rory!”) installed something that left a broken version of InstallShield on the drive. In the fine tradition of robust software engineering, any subsequent installer built with that particular version of Installshield will cough up a lung when it tries to save time by using the cached version.