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 saw WALL-E last weekend with my wife, and we had a really good time. The movie was fun, and really worth seeing. I have to admit that when I first saw EVE, I leaned over to my wife and said, “She’s a Mac, and he’s a PC” which led to my graphic, above.

What I liked

Pixar is amazing. The animation in this movie is simply stunning. I was very impressed by the lighting, the reflections, and the texture that almost made you forget you were watching an animated movie. The story is driven by action, not by dialog. In fact, there is precious little dialog, especially for the first 30 minutes or so. This means the story must show, rather than tell, which generally makes for more powerful filmmaking anyway.

Since there is so little dialog, the sound effects and score end up being a lot more important, and they don’t disappoint. In fact, I thought they were phenomenal. I  fully expect WALL-E to be nominated for some major awards in this category.

WALL-E is a very likable little robot, and the romance story between him and EVE is cute but maybe a tad cliché: the backwards guy falls for the sophisticated, classy girl who is uninterested until he saves her by sacrificing himself in some way, and she falls in love with him. But it was well told and cute. The story while following the traditional arc remained unpredictable, and I kept wondering what would happen next and how the story would resolve.

What I disliked

In general, I love Pixar/Disney movies. I love the underlying stories that make the characters real and lovable. The character development is usually at the root of the story. In WALL-E, however, there isn’t much character development. The characters pretty much remain flat without much motivation. As my father-in-law pointed out, there isn’t much to WALL-E’s character arc; in fact, it’s pretty flat.

I decided that what brings me back to a movie is the story line, and after I saw how the story would be resolved, I’m not sure WALL-E has what it takes to bring me back to a story over and over again. I’m not in it for the action, I’m in it for the characters, and I’m not sure that WALL-E’s characters were strong enough to bring me back for more.

I am willing to give it a second go, however, so maybe I’ll find that WALL-E is charming enough to make me re-watch it for other reasons than character development. We’ll have to see about that one.

Conclusion

I really liked this movie. I thought it was well worth the time and money investment. It is a film that people of all ages will enjoy. I give it four and a half stars. You really need to see this one–at least once, maybe more.

And let me know if you thought the same think about EVE reminding you of a sleek MacBook Air, or some other Mac product… I thought it was bang-it-in-your-face obvious.

The machine, which has been called the largest scientific experiment in history, isn’t expected to begin test runs until August, and ramping up to full power could take months. But once it is working, it is expected to produce some startling findings. (source)

If the findings are expected, how will they be startling?

I get what the reporter was trying to say, but I thought the line was humerous, and thought you might enjoy it too.

I hope you don’t mind me taking a bit of personal license with my blog the last couple of days. It’s not very often that something THIS cool happens to anybody I know.

BTW, the photo was taken by a Deseret Morning News photographer, Tom Smart. I blatently copied the file from the Deseret News website. I’m sure I violated their copyright. Sorry about that.

View the full entry to see a video (the “important” part happens from 6:12 to about 6:38):

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And here is the text of the accompanying news story:
SALT LAKE CITY - President George W. Bush will travel to Utah on Wednesday, where he will present an award to a local man, who serves as a volunteer to help others.

President Bush will present the award personally to 24-year-old Rick Pehrson, whose outstanding volunteer service led his co-workers to nominate him for the honor — called the President’s Volunteer Service Award.

“It’s kind of intimidating to get calls from the White House,” Pehrson said. “I will be scared enough, I won’t say a lot.”

Rick’s superior at the Utah Commission of Volunteers nominated him for the award, saying that the decision to do so was simple.

“It was easy because Rick is an outstanding individual,” said Kathy Smith, Rick’s boss.

Rick first started volunteering because his family needed him. His father was chronically ill and passed away two years ago. As it turns out, he left behind a son who learned to give to others.

President Bush will present the award to Pehrson on Wednesday, during a trip to Salt Lake City — where the commander-in chief will help raise money for GOP presidential nominee John McCain.

mebelimebeli

mebeli

When my wife was working on her master’s thesis, she had a friend who told her “there are two kinds of theses: good theses, and finished theses.” My work feels like that a lot…

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Note: If you linked to this page from your RSS reader, you’ll notice the wrong image got promoted into the RSS feed. Sorry about that. I clicked Publish before I realized I’d pasted the code for the wrong image. Oh well.furniture Elhovo

To get started, go to www.photoshop.com/express and create an account. You’ll have to activate the account by clicking on a link they send you by e-mail. (They are saying it may take up to an hour to get your confirmation e-mail, but mine came in less than one minute.)

Once you log in, you can upload photos, or use the navigation on the left to log in to your Facebook (or other 3rd party) account. When you upload images, you can highlight multiple images (use Ctrl + click or Shift + click to select multiple images) to upload, which is a very nice feature. You can work on another browser tab or window while the files upload.

Hover over an image in the library, and you’ll see a drop-down list of options. If the photo is one you  uploaded, you have more options than if the image is one hosted on a third-party server. (Rotating and e-mailing photos can’t be done for third-party images, and album options are only available for images you can display in an album, which are photos you’ve uploaded to Photoshop Express.) When you edit an image that is stored on a third-party server and save it, a new image is uploaded to the service; so you aren’t changing the images you’ve already added to the service, you’re modifying a copy of the image.  When you edit an image that you are storing on the Adobe servers and you save it, the image saves over the old one, but you can always revert the image to its  original state.

Photoshop Express works with all the big browsers, including Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer. This is a great option for basic photo fixes, and works especially well if you already have a lot of images on Picasa Web Albums, Photobucket, or Facebook, because you can use Photoshop to edit those images and have the edited versions automatically added back to your other accounts.

There is even a nifty full-screen feature that allows you to see the site without the browser frame; it really gives the feel of a desktop application (except that in full-screen mode, you can’t use your keyboard at all; that is kind of weird).

It’s great for photo touch ups and gives you quite a bit of power without a lot of complexity. Your photos are then available to you on any computer connected to the Internet (which is a strength and a weakness, as storage space is limited to 2GB, so I can’t store ALL my pictures on the site). Google Picasa, on the other hand, works on your hard drive, so your space is only limited to your available disc space, and then you just upload those images that you want to share or store on Google’s site. But I’ve found that I quickly ran out of space on Picasa’s servers.

As for me, I won’t be abandoning my copy of Photoshop CS2 any time soon, but I may be using Photoshop to touch up some of my family pictures that I display on the web, as it seems perfect for that kind of thing.

Check it out! I think you’ll like it.