Life Less Literary

Here’s something else which will make my page layouts shine.



Haha! I just imported this into Illustrator, rotated and overlaid on my Portcullis. Turns out that the top half of the Portcullis (down to the bottom horizontal bar) already exactly matches the top part of the spiral.

Had a very strange, rather productive trip to London yesterday. Went out with Mark to buy suits and a couple of books: Magazine Designs that Work, which has some excellent tips and pointers, and is a hell of a lot cheaper than buying up a whole magazine rack from WH Smiths, and Graphic Design Cookbook, which is just an incredible source of instant inspiration.

Had design and strategy meetings for the magazine, things seem to be finally moving. Went down the pub with Trevor and his “bodyguard” afterwards. Bizarre. I will not say any more, for fear of putting anybody’s nose out of joint (in particular, my own), but suffice it to say if you put Guy Ritchie and Ian Fleming together in a room for a month, they’d have a hard time coming up with a scenario quite as fucked up as this one.

And then I sloped over to Ed’s, to grab an hour of (relative) sanity. We talked design ideas, and I got fired up. We talked about how design is really just a function of time. That you can’t hurry good ideas, just be receptive to them, that inspiration can come at any moment, and that once it does, you see it everywhere.

I got the 21.25 train back up to Sheffield, my laptop battery once again only lasted for half-an-hour, and so once again I resorted to drawing… and drawing… and drawing. And sleeping, or trying to except the ideas kept on coming too fast. I arrived in Sheffield, pages spilling out of my notebook, and suddenly inspiration was everywhere. All day I’d been trying to visualise a grid system for the magazine. On the train I realised I’d been staring at one these last few weeks: the Portcullis. I might have a go at redesigning it slightly, using some kind of golden ratio-type logic, but once I have it laid over the page… the grid possibilities are limitless.

And I stepped off the train, and into Sheffield, where everything I saw had its own grid structure, every building’s windows were laid out like portcullises, and lines criss-crossed everywhere.

As if anyone out there wanted to hear more computer woe from me - earlier today I installed some piece of software called ABF Internet Explorer Tools (it’s a long story, I wanted to be able to test Flash files without having to delete my browser cache each time, for some reason IE doesn’t seem to re-check SWFs to see whether they’ve been updated).

The software didn’t help me do what I wanted, but it didn’t seem to do any harm either. Until I rebooted. Then every time I tried to open an Explorer window (which includes trying to navigate my hard disk or open Control Panel) the machine would just sit there for an eternity before telling my that Dr Watson Postmortem Debugger had crashed.

Turned out this ABF shit was hooking itself into every Explorer window, and then buggering them up somehow so they never showed. Problem was, because I couldn’t open Control Panel, I couldn’t get to Add/Remove Programs, so I couldn’t get rid of ABF. In the end I did it by going to Start->Run, then browsing through to Program Files/ABF blah blah blah and running the Uninstall program from there (I’m just glad it didn’t bugger up the File->Open dialog too).

A tough one to crack that.

In other news, I was at a lock-in last night, at a pub which shall remain nameless. I had I don’t know how many pints of bitter plus a Laphroaig, didn’t feel very drunk at the time (although I do remember sort of staggering off in search of a chip shop at 1am) but I haven’t half been suffering today (also due to the fact that I smoked my first cigarette in a month or more).

Happy Birthday Rowan, nine today!

Gill made a nice cake:

and Rowan had a few friends over. Tomorrow she’s off to the Theatre to see Grease with two of her school friends.

For her birthday, we got her (with contributions from other family members) a portable DVD player. So she’s been locked in her bedroom at every opportunity, staring at the tiny screen.

In other news… Gizmo, our hyper-intelligent lurcher, has been a pain in the arse. I left him in the house for five minutes while I took Lola to nursery, he discovered the pencil case Rowan was given for her birthday (foolish me: I should have shut the bedroom door), smelt the chocolate inside it, ripped the pencil case open and ate the chocolate. Cue tears from Rowan when she got back from school and discovered the carnage. He also barked and snapped at everybody who came around this evening, and got his teeth into Emma’s brand new coat (bought in Barcelona last week) and damaged it. Ouch.

Also, I’ve been feeling generally shit, I think it’s because the central heating is back on. But, I did do some more nice logo designs which made me feel better. I’m feeling much more confident in my design skills after a few days spent practising them almost exclusively. Now I just need to get the rest of my programming work out of the way, which I can’t quite bring myself to do right now

This makes you wonder how they managed to squeeze any other words into the Republican convention.

Yay! Got my posters and flyers back from the printers… Boo! They weren’t perfect.

As I mentioned, RCS said the bride image was pixellated> Turns out they were right - they meant that the edge was pixellated. I fixed it before sending it off - couldn’t work out how to do this on the original (the Photoshop file didn’t have a jaggy edge, instead it faded into transparency), it seemed to be InDesign that was imposing the hard edge on it. So I feathered the edge, but this meant that on the poster my hand started appearing behind the bride’s veil. I tried different types and amounts of feather, until I got one which looked relatively OK, as if my hand were just visible through the translucent veil.

I spoke to RCS yesterday, and they said they’d had another problem where half of one of the men disappeared when converting into PDF 4, but they had managed to solve it. When I got them back today… the entire hand is in front of the veil, so it looks as though the two of us tiny men are in the foreground - doh!

It’s not a big fuck-up, but it is enough to be annoying. So Will says… tonight we order more posters. Damn, this is getting expensive.

The Great Escape! (Check out the video). Waddya mean “lurchers aren’t normally known for their intelligence”, bollox man. Erm, woman. Funny thing is, I’m in the middle of reading Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH to Rowan, Red’s night-time antics remind me very much of the rats in the laboratory at NIMH.

Dammit! I got a phone call from RCS Printers who are supposed to be making me 5000 flyers and 350 assorted posters (100 A3 and 250 A4). They told me that the bride is pixellated on all three and the men are pixellated on the flyer. Also that the word “Marriage” is too close to the edge on the flyer (actually I suspected that, but forgot to fix it before sending to print). I’m confused about the pixellated shit - I did a trial print before sending it off, looked fine to me. I very much suspect what they mean is that the bride is out-of-focus. I would have expected a printers’, especially such a large and busy one, to know the different between blurred and pixellated but, WTF, they’re humans and humans are stupid. As for the men… ? I dunno, perhaps they mean that on the reverse of the flyer they’re faded? Yeah, I knew that, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to read the writing.

Anyway, I took the call in a library, which wasn’t really the best place, so couldn’t discuss it at length. By the time I got back here, they’d all gone home, so I’m left pondering.

Meantime I tried to track down the InDesign originals… you guessed it, they’re on my faulty hard-disk. Ah well, I was going to have to open up the machine and have a poke sooner or later, might as well make it sooner.

First job is to try and work out which drive is which. I have six (count ‘em) hard disks stuffed inside my machine (albeit one of them has been unplugged for months, it’s just taking up space) and as well as the two onboard IDE channels and two SATA I have a PCI card with another two IDEs. Cue lots of unplugging and re-plugging trying to work out which was which. In the process of which I discover that G:\ - my “general crap” drive full of warez, DVDs and junk which I thought crashed out about a month back, is actually still operational, either it works intermittently or I just knocked a cable somewhere. So that was quite a nice surprise, but far nicer would have been to have got D:\ - my data and everything drive - working.

No such luck yet, but my detective work has revealed that the problem with D:\ is likely to be fairly high-level: it shows up fine in the BIOS, and even Windows Disk Manager reports it as “Healthy (Active)”, it’s only when I try to browse to it or use any files off it that I get the “file or directory is corrupted and unreadable” error. Also the volume label (which I think was “Data”) is not showing up in Disk Manager or Explorer, the latter just refers to it as “Local Disk”.

So I’ve downloaded a couple of trial versions of disk recovery tools, am running one right at this moment which has happily located and is now scanning the disk. If it comes up with anything then I’ll have to sling the authors $70 or so, which will allow me to use the full recovery power of the software to copy all my files off somewhere else (hmmm, lemme scan through all those other disks to find one with 100gig of free space…). Once I’ve done that I’ll probably… well, you know me, I live dangerously, I’ll probably just re-format the dodgy disk and stick everything back on there again

So, like I said before, all is not yet lost. It’s just… well, as is always the case with these type of events, it couldn’t have come at a much worse time.

But it’s nice to re-acquaint myself with the computer’s infernal internals every couple of months or so.

I can’t wait for the movie if this preview is anything to go by.