Isn’t evolution a wonderful thing? With the possible exception of Tallahassee, Florida, it seems to work at least 51% of the time. This means the blog has yet another name change. “The Mechanical Side of Life” has become “In Search of Boredom”, for the obvious reasons. If it is not obvious, ask yourself if you are in Tallahassee.
First thing this morning I was over at the Nippon Express building in Doral. The guy who did their spreadsheets really left them hanging. Even I cannot crack the passwords on MS Excel. They were not macros, but full-fledged VB [Visual Basic] which anyone who has looked at it knows it is not BASIC at all. He designed an input spreadsheet, replete with the utterly most stupid feature possible. Merged cells. If you want to draw pictures, go to Paintbrush, dammit.
I opened a series of the formulas and more obvious cell groupings to quickly convince the staff that it was a better choice to start over than to try to repair that mess. It may be acutely sad that I could not recommend anyone to help them with that. I won’t touch Visual Basic because I am a real programmer. Some of the formulas had embedded if statements past the limit of seven layers. This is typical of a male programmer around 28 years old in the middle third of his class. They often do things because they can. Nippon Express was shocked when I showed them how complicated it had become.
Since the purpose of it all was to produce two simple reports off an email attachment, I advised them to look at a database solution. On the way home, I stopped at BrandStupid and picked up a digital camera for (sound familiar?) $18.88. This is a “24280 Digital Concepts” camera. It is around 1/8th the size of the Argus, and recharges from the USB cable, but otherwise is much the same. What was amazing was the software that came with it. It contains something I had never heard of, “Active Captions”.
This feature allows you to caption photographs without burning the text into the picture. If you squint at the Nippon Express photo, you will see those words as a caption. Prior to May of this year, all the pictures in this record were captioned using the MS system, which my new video card will not display. This is not the same as either previous method [burn text or MS Insert Reference]. Active Captions adds a new layer of information to the photo. The date is in the lower right-hand corner. The point is, this layer can be turned off or on by a viewer with the proper software.
That is, you can download software that would allow you to toggle off and on the caption and datestamp. There’s more. Also in this layer are keywords and other features that are searchable. These items “follow” the picture when it is copied or emailed. I never missed this handy option because I assumed it was up to me to categorize my photos. Now, I will likely use this all the time. I’ll have to read the manual again, but it may also have a [great] feature that warns you when there are any duplicate photos anywhere in the same computer or disk.
I dropped in to see JP at Quizno’s. That place is a high-speed production line when the Corey [Alain’s husband] is there. He can assemble a $10 sandwich that looks almost identical to the advertising pictures every 40-45 seconds and have at it for hours at a time, all while keeping an eye on everybody in the place. He has also been dieting and has dropped that ten pounds that was making him sluggish.
Two things happened there. One, Corey asked me if I wanted to help out with the deliveries. Yes, but he is a year too late. He needs somebody reliable at the other store. Ahem. Two, JP dumped the bowl of business cards into a to-go package and slipped it to me. I should have them scanned and back before anyone notices. Easier to get forgiveness than permission.
There were 161 cards, a damn good start. Not only that, I strongly suspect these cards will all soon have embedded searchable keywords, but I know you already figured that out. Plus watermarks and captions to prevent anyone from wholesale copying my work. Oh, and for the record, the MS images search site finally copied my idea of rollover enlargements. My point is that I am missing being first with new ideas by a smaller margin each time. That is twice this year a major corporation barely beat me by a matter of hours.
I went through Coral Gables to get to the restaurant, which is always a nice drive. I could not stay to visit as Ruth called. Her new employee, Rose, may be a keeper. Put it this way, Ruth knows what to expect now, so I think she made a much better choice [of computer employee] this time. I can usually tell when they are able to follow a set of instructions over the phone without arguing. Proud I am of the progress, because they called about a known glitch where most others would have done the wrong thing. That is, they spotted a problem before they went there.
What? Okay, I’ll tell you. When you attach a photo to an email, you have to be careful when you use the command instead of the icon. The command will come back with an option to attach a “picture” or a “file”. Do not choose “picture”. That is the glitch. If you choose picture, the computer expects you to have a camera hooked up. You are actually attaching a file, which happens also to be a picture. I’m going in there at 10:30 tomorrow.
Back home, I lost an hours work on Don’s books. When will I learn not to touch a spreadsheet that has been worked on by Secretary Sally? It was a problem with merged cells, nothing to do with the other problem at Nippon. When you cut and paste sheets with these cells, it often causes unpredictable errors, not only in the source but in the target. For example, I regularly worth with three or more copies of Excel open at the same time. If any one of those copies is a sheet with merged cells, you have to click up to three times to select a cell on the other, unrelated worksheets. The very presence of merged cells causes problems.
Well, they have another annoyance. They will often close another spreadsheet without asking to save changes, or will close themselves when you exit another. That is what it did to me – I closed the author’s table and without warning, the active book list I was working on also closed – minus all the saves I had done in the previous hour, impossible as that seems.
That called for a break. I went over to Panera and sorted out the duplicate business cards for an hour. Some people dropped in as many as six cards. Tatiana Alvarez, whose address in the Fountainbleau, must get free cards or own a [printing] press. Panera would be a good place to collect more cards but they are a chain and would have to be approached indirectly. On the way back I did five laps of the dog track parking lot. You see, Alain bought me the lunch special and that makes today the first time in three months I ate the standard 2,000 calories in one day.
Anything else before I start scanning? Yes, Dickens called. He is also having a riot with that Safety man. It is quite realistic even up close. Dickens is happy with the way things are going and generally so am I. He sold that Shure microphone for $40, the one that made my voice sound half-decent. Society’s loss, I guess.
A little later, I have been experimenting with Active Captions. You can add the caption in a variety of ways, so I chose to add the phone number of the card in a colored strip along the bottom. This application is very well-planned. There is even an option to rename the picture to whatever you placed in the caption. This may also solve the problem of white cards with no background, as I can place a border around the card without using CSS. This is another potential measure to prevent copycatting. No watermark feature, and it turns out MS can only add them to text documents anyway. Either way, this opens up a great new level of potential.
Good morning. It is past 2:00AM. Not being tired, I scanned around half the biz cards. I noticed as you go further south from here, the cards begin to reflect more of the corporate system. That means a shift to business cards that are almost totally company owned. The rate for downtown Miami is nearly 100% corporate cards so I had to alter my filing system. Also, the instances of duplicate cards is worse than mentioned earlier. Add an increase in poorly designed cards and cards with ridiculously small printing, as in 4.5 points.
