laura j. rinaldi

Multi-Tasking while on a conference call

I was reminded, the other day, that there are only so many things you can do while talking on the phone. You can knit, you can move things around on a page, but you can't read email, or write the same, because it appears to take the same part of the brain.

I was helping a client set up her blog, one more in WordPress by the way, and we were going over every little thing she would need to know. I couldn't not listen, because it was over the phone, and I had to be in front of the computer too, so I could watch what she was doing, and comment. Unlike most of my other client, who had blogged before, she had never done so, so even though WordPress is mostly intuitive, it wasn't for her. She was a bit frustrated by the style sheets, which I gave up explaining how to alter, and just altered for her, as well as for tags.

So, what did I do for the two hour call? I knitted. I couldn't answer email, well not a lot, I couldn't. And I certainly couldn't work on anything else.

And now, having set her up, I wonder why I am still using TypePad, when I have been recommending WordPress over it? I guess because I have been using it for so long. I think, however, that soon I will make the switch, because with each new client blog, I realize how much more I could do with it.

How to solve, or not solve Dreamweaver CS3 problems.

As my mother used to say, when we asked her to help us with our homework, what about all the other kids who don't have reference librarians for mothers.

Well, not we have google and the web, but what about for al those people who don't search around to find the answer to stupid questions.

So what was my stupid question? I guess it was "Why does Dreamweaver keep doing bad things", although i would have phrased it differently than that. The problem has been that within the past two years, Dreamweaver has crashed so hard it has lost all it's settings. At first, it would lose the bility to view a page in a browser. Later, it would forget which files I had previously opened, and then, the final insult, it would forget allt he websites that I had. It would always wait until I had quite  a bit before forgetting. The last time it happened, I backed up a few. This time when it happened, I went through and backed up the whole lot.

But I still had the problem that the program was unstable.  I'm hoping in version CS4, that they make it so you can have several sites open at once, sort of like in Fetch. In the meantime, I have to go back and forth between sites, all day long, to update them.

So, in searching around, I figured I would find the problem to the crashes, but what it came down to was, ultimatly, that I had to reinstall CS3, and not just a simple upgrade, but an uninstall and reinstall, despite all the advice.

So that is how I spent my Saturday. And I would have liked to have done something else.

And I still don't know what caused the problem.  And the advise from the web basically says to just rebuild things. *sigh*.

Yahoo Shine, and I ask, ain't I am woman?

There was big hoopla on Monday as Yahoo launched it's new destination site, Shine. It sounded like a promising site, a sort of Salon place to go, but what was the first thing that greated me when I checked it out. Hollywood celberty interviews, fashion...all the stuff that one finds in those "women's " magazines. It thought it would be hipper. After all, it was supposed to be aimed at women between 25-54 years old, and I am still in that age range and I'm certainly a woman, last time I checked. Nothing, and I mean nothing on the page appealed to me. Today, as I wrote this, the headline at the top of the page is "Fancy lingerie you can actually afford". Are there women out there, in my age range, who actually care about this? I guess it makes sense, the sort of content that is there, since the editor-in-cheif is from Elle and Jane, two magazines I wouldn't pick, even if the alternative was Golf Digest.

I suppose Yahoo doesn't really care, and feels that creating a site about chatter is just fine. But here is what I read, as a woman, as a human, on a daily basis:

• ValleyWag
• BoingBoing
• io9
• Point of View
• Comic Curmudgeon

There are a few more that I read, but not every day.

The article in the Mercury News said that this is supposed to be competeing with such sites as BlogHer and Sugar. I tried reading some of the sites that Sugar put out, but found it wasn't talking to me, so stopped.

One of the sites that the article mentioned as The Women on the Web, which, at first glance, actually looks as though it might be interesting. Still light and fluffy, but interesting light and fluffy.

Fun with PDFs or wow, they've improved Acorbat 8

I am used to getting files that I really can't used in the form they are in. This is the life of a freelancer. Often the source files can't be found, or the creative artist is out of town, or some reason that all the client can give me is a pdf. I have learned, over the years, to extract every last drop from every PDF that I have had to work with.

The good news, is that each edition of Acrobat has gotten better. One can now export to html (although the results could not be put up on a page, at least you can have the pieces. But, you can also just grab text, and reflow it (which you could do before, but it wasn't always smooth. And you can click on a graphic, and export it by copying, and pasting into Photoshop. You could always do that by opening in Illustrator, but with so many ways to get things out of PDFs, perhaps I don't need the source files anymore.

And, I have been not asking for them either. If I can, I don't want to use word, or have to wait for a version to be created in Photoshop, if I can get it from the PDF, instead of Word.

I love that a product that used to be just for showing what something looked like, can do so much more. Printers, in fact, ask for Acrobat files instead of the sources files, because they are so much easier to work with.

Wikipedia has a lot on Acrobat. a lot of which i had forgotten, such as that there were others out there trying to be what Acrobat become. After that, a whole industry grew out of ad-ons to Acrobat.

Me, I'm just glad they keep improving it.