Leaving on a jet plane... prerequisites

I’m at the passport office. Why do I feel guilty? Maybe everyone feels guilty when they brush up against officialdom. Oddly, the people behind the counters servicing all the passport applicants all seem to be rather cheerful and happy. Not what I was expecting. It’s like that time I went to get a special permit form from the City of Toronto and they fell over themselves trying to make sure that I was comfortable and that I didn’t have to wait too long. Definitely not what I was expecting. I am here to apply for passports for family Lugs. Little Lugs and I are going to whizz over to England during March break. He wants to see castles and they have them there aplenty. It will be good to visit Brother Lugs and Nephew Lugs too.

Brother Lugs just sent me a detailed potential itinerary (he lives over there) which is most unlike him. That is something that the other Brother Lugs would do (and he lives in Calgary) Still, he had some good suggestions in there, they are worth investigating. It looks like it could be fun planning this jaunt.

Moving on

Assistant Lugs has wrapped up her belongings in a red spotted hankerchief, slung it over her shoulder on a bamboo cane and taken off, choosing to seek her fortune elsewhere. Well, she may be back to help on some jobs occasionally, but for the most part it is now just me again. I’ll miss her. There’s something empowering in a work environment where you can say “we” as opposed to “I” Well, I wish her all the best.

Things are still pretty hectic in the illustration pit here so I expect this will mean longer hours and later nights for the next while. Currently I am still working on the big posters for the agency of the large beverage firm, I am finishing poster number three of four. I am still in the middle of all those icons and I have a few retouching jobs coming through all the time.

Forced into cleaning up

I was moving some stuff in the basement on the weekend (to make way for more stuff) and I discovered a box on the floor that contained piles of examples of my work during a certain period of my career. It was from the heady early days for desktop publishing when we first started exploring the use of computers to do graphic design and layout. Unfortunately the box had lain in a damp part of the floor and much of the lower portion of the box was a solid sodden mess of newsprint, negatives and magazines. I discovered all sorts of things in there I had long forgotten about: magazine articles I had written or were written about me, posters that mentioned I would be speaking at a certain event. It was odd to see it all reduced to this sodden smelly mess. I managed to recover about a sixth of it and had to toss the rest out. It filled a garbage bag.

Well, nothing like circumstance to force you to clean up. I am pretty bad at that sort of thing so at least it gave me a criteria for the clean up: Mouldy = Toss, Clean = Keep.

Well, I blew that!

Turns out it had been 250 gig all the time. For some strange reason I had assumed it was a 500 gig disk in the G5 but it wasn't. That was pretty embarrassing. I can only assume that I got confused by the fact that I had installed a 500 gig drive in the recent imac I bought and that I was thinking of that. Well. I am still installing software on the machine on and off and the whole thing was pretty irritating. Still I am back to normal now (mostly)

Update on the drive

As if you cared. Hah! Well, the story does have some wrinkles and it isn't over yet. Here's the scoop. I took the computer in and we all sat on our hands waiting patiently while Apple send a new drive down for installation at the store, Carbon Computing. That was on Wednesday. Assistant Lugs and I shared the laptop one day... not a good experience I can tell you!. I was pleasantly surprised when I got a call on Friday that the new drive had been installed and the G5 was ready to be picked up. I went over and as it had been repaired under Apple Care, paid a nominal fee just for the rush service I had requested. I then dashed over to the Apple Store at the Eaton Centre to pick up a family pack of the new Mac system software: Leopard. I figured that with a brand new drive this might be a good time to upgrade. I get it home, eager to start installing stuff but soon realised that I don't have any DVI monitors. This Mac has 4 DVI ports on the back (Illustrators: we need lots of monitors, what can I say?) but I only have a spare analogue monitor at home. So I waited until this morning to bring the computer in to the studio and power it up. Immediately I notice that they had installed a drive of the Wrong Freaking Size!! It went in with a defective 520 gig drive and came out with an operational 230 gig drive. I was hopping mad. So my commitment to installing all this software was immediately tempered by the knowledge I may need to have to take the bloody thing in again. Still I had to install it so I can work this weekend. That took three and a half hours. I am still mad.

I do like Leopard though. I thought I wouldn't have much used for it but I'm thinking the new features will be quite useful. Okay, rant over, now back to your regularly scheduled blogs.

It all grinds to a halt

What a great way to start a new year! The main drive in my honking big Mac at the studio has gone kaput. You can’t believe how annoying that is, well, I suspect you can, actually. I will now have to endure 2 or 3 days of mild frustration (at best) while the tech people replace the disk and move the existing content over from the old disk or two weeks of complete torture while I rebuild the contents of the disk from 2 month old back ups.

I back up my working files every day and I have 2 copies of those. But the main disk which contains all the software and stuff I have been remarkably lax with when it comes to backups. Oh what a fool I have been! Let’s hope I recall the discomfort of the next few days clearly for an awfully long time to ensure that I also back up my main disk at about the same frequency as I back up my working files.

The Annual Gap

This gap between Christmas and New Year’s is always a weird kinda time. I often have to work but I admit it is very half-hearted. Family time and new things are calling my attention away and that is a good thing. Ms Lugs gave me a book on Pigeons for Christmas. Who knew that they would be such interesting creatures? Not I, that’s for sure. I haven’t read a book in ages but it was super today to just curl up on the couch for a few hours and read. My thoughts of work were fleeting and rare. Not so tomorrow, though. I have to get back to it then... but today was a nice break.