Technically Speaking

In my spare time I occasionally do some web design and web hosting work for a couple of different clients. Mostly these are my family members, friends, and neighbors who need a relatively simple website and a place to host it.

Recently I started helping out an uncle with a site for his new business. He had already worked with a designer to create some printed letterhead, and he wanted to use the same stuff for the header on his website. He said he’d send me a copy of the letterhead so I could put it on the site.

The letterhead came as a Word document, and I didn’t love the font choice, so I told him. He said he did like it, and he’d already used it to send out some letters and create business cards, so he wanted to keep it. I said I’d get it up on the site.

The Word document had the following font (I’ve only reproduced part of it, for the sake of my client’s privacy):

I thought the font wasn’t very professional, and I couldn’t get the font out of the Word document, and I wanted to make it a bit clearer for the website, so I found a close font which looked like this:

It wasn’t a perfect replica, but I thought it looked better than what he had. He contacted me and wanted the font changed back to the original. This didn’t look like his letterhead, and he wanted a consistent look and feel. I told him that without the font file I couldn’t re-create the logo in Photoshop, so I’d have to just take a screen shot of the Word document and make that the header image. He thought that was a fine solution. I took a screen shot of the Word document, and up went the original image:

The next day he contacted me again and said he still didn’t like the image. He thought it looked unprofessional and by the way, weren’t we going to just take a screen shot of the Word document?

Then it dawned on my wife that what he was seeing in his Word document was different from what we were seeing in our Word document. In fact, he hadn’t embedded the font into the Word document, so when I opened the document on my machine, Word did a silent replacement of the font.

After he embedded the font in the Word document, I was able to see the same letterhead he was seeing:

No wonder he didn’t like the first two attempts!

We both thought we were communicating, because we were both looking at the same source document, when in fact, we were seeing something completely different, but didn’t know how to talk about it. That was due, in part, to our family relationship; he didn’t want to tell me how ugly it was, and how it didn’t look anything like what he was seeing. Our family relationship hindered our ability to communicate properly in a business relationship.

At least now we have the right font on the site. And next time, we’ll make sure we’re both talking about the same thing when there is an apparent disagreement.

I still need to write up a review of my impressions of MadCap’s new Flare V3, but I did want you to know that I’ve updated my previous post, Six Persistent Flare Problems, with some corrections. In one case, I realized that the error was due to pilot error, and in other cases, Flare’s new V3 corrects problems I was experiencing previously.

I really like Flare. I hope to get my write up done before I leave for a two-week vacation on Thursday. Stay tuned!

This weekend I received an invite to beta test a service from a company called GrandCentral. (GrandCentral was recently acquired by Google; I’m not really sure how far along the transition is at this point.)

GrandCentral gives you a phone number that you can use to ring all your other phones. Rather than give your home, your cell, and your office numbers, you can just give everybody your GrandCentral number. When a caller dials your number, GrandCentral rings all your numbers. Whichever phone you answer gets the call routed to it. You can add as many numbers as you want. If you move or your cell phone provider changes, your GrandCentral number stays the same, so you don’t have to call a million people to tell them about your number change.

GrandCentral includes a voice mail box that removes the need to have any other voice mail. If you don’t answer a call, (or if your home answering machine picks up, etc.) the call gets routed to your GrandCentral voicemail. When you have a new message, you can check it by dialing your own number, or by logging in to the website.

You add people to your address book, and then based on the caller GrandCentral can perform certain actions. For example, you can have one voice mail greeting for callers in your “friends” group, and a separate greeting for callers in your “family” group. You can set one group of calls to ring your home phone and your cell phone, and have another group of callers ring your work phone and your cell phone (but not your home phone). You can also change these settings on a per-caller basis. (So, I can have a specialized greeting just for when my mom calls.)

You can also have a web-call button. When visitors to your website click your web-call button, they are prompted to enter their phone number. GrandCentral then calls them, and then calls you. The web visitors never see your phone number, and you can route all your incoming messages from your web-call button right to voice mail if you want. (Check out this feature in my blog’s sidebar. If you click it, you enter your number, and you will be able to leave me a voice mail message. This button doesn’t currently call any of my phones.)

When you have a new voice mail, GrandCentral e-mails you, and will even send a text message to your cell phone (if you are into texting, you may find this feature handy).

All this is free. GrandCentral intends to charge for outgoing calls when the service leaves beta, but all incoming calls are always free.

I’ve found a couple of limitations: first, you can only have one phone number. Once you sign up with that number, its yours and it appears to be very difficult to change. It would be really cool if you could have multiple phone numbers (even if it were just two or three, which would make local calling easier for relatives in disparate parts of the country). Second, you can only have one web-call button. Well, I suppose you can post your button in multiple places, but all those buttons use the same settings. However, if I run two different websites, I may want to have different voice-mail greetings based on which button they clicked on. Maybe GrandCentral/Google will consider these features going forward.

So I’m replacing my numbers with my GrandCentral number. If you want to know what my new number is, you can leave me a voice mail by using the Call Me button in my sidebar (or below), or comment on my blog. I’ll e-mail you the new phone number.

Adobe Labs has released a new RSS feed aggregator called myFeedz. Adobe brands it as a “social newspaper”; basically you include topics in your myFeedz profile that you are interested in. Then when you log in, myFeedz checks for RSS feeds that match your profile topics. Matching topics published in the last 24 hours are displayed. Thus, the content is always fresh — in the last 24 hours — and you don’t have to find the feeds yourself; they are “pushed” to you.

Once you are reading the feeds selected for you, you can give feeds a thumbs-up or thumbs-down (Stumble-Upon style) so myFeedz gradually learns the kinds of feeds that are interesting to you.

I only started using it recently, but so far, it’s given me some interesting blogs with posts I’ve found interesting. My only complaint is that they need an editor (even a spell-checker would do). When you are creating or modifying your profile, you can specify feed languages you are interested in. Look at the selection option for Portuguese:

Of course, what do you expect from a company that can’t spell “Feeds” properly! <grin>

(For those of you who don’t know, one of my pet peeves is the intentional misspelling of words, especially in company names.)

I’m here today to tell you a Very Sad Tale.
It is a tale of a Very Wet Phone.
It would be sad if it weren’t so funny.
So get ready to laugh as I drone.

I awoke last Saturday morning
ready to Race for the Cure™.
I looked and looked for my cell phone
It was nowhere to be found, that’s for sure.

I thought long and hard where I’d had it.
I looked on the living room floor.
We had gone swimming on Friday evening,
so I sat and thought long, hard, and more.

The phone wasn’t in or by the pool.
It hadn’t been turned in either.
It wasn’t in the grass, nor
by the sidewalk neither.

Saturday turned into Sunday.
I still didn’t know where to look.
Then it was Monday,
and I searched every nannie and crook.

I called up the provider, T-Mobile.
The phone, it hadn’t been used.
I supposed that it hadn’t been stolen,
“It must be at home,” I mused.

Finally I searched in the bathroom.
My swim trunks were still hanging, now dry.
Inside the pocket, I found it.
But my Very Wet Phone was fried.

I tried to charge it, but it failed.
The rust marks inside looked awful.
There was corrosion and junk on the battery.
Yet still, my story was about to get more stressful.

See, all the data on the phone was lost.
If I had your number, I don’t anymore.
If you want me to call you again, send be your info.
In my new phone’s memory, I’ll put it in store.