tag conversion…

In regards to the last entry (second paragraph, not the first), I got my answer: I have to convert from Simple Tagging tags to WordPress native tags. Manually. The author of Simple Tag[ging/s] hasn’t mentioned an import feature. :( That’ll take a while for me to complete.

[Oct 18@10:47 Woohoo! I stopped being a dumbbell and read in the support forums that there’s an import available IN WordPress for Simple Tagging! Saved myself … a few hours’ worth of work. But I have now discovered that the Category Cloud plug-in cloud doesn’t validate. Ugh. That’ll be sitting on my mind.]

plate-mounting

Today, I mounted a really tiny litho plate on a 20-year-old Apollo/Didde all by myself! And I didn’t lose any fingers or break the press! Go me!

In WordPress news … native tagging support? Does this mean all the work I put into tagging my entries with that plug-in (too lazy to look up and link) was a waste? (Too lazy to go read about WordPress 2.3 any further. I should have been in bed two hours ago anyway.)

taken for granted

Must … update … blog.

After about five or six hours coding this layout, from 12 pm (an hour after I woke up) on, I have to say I don’t like this layout as much as I’d hoped. I couldn’t do it the way I’d wanted (background images on top and bottom), so there’s lots of extra space around the boxes. murrr.

Now the colors are looking funny to me, not as nice and soft and pretty as they first were. I also just realized that I forgot to check the colors on my desktop (colors on my laptop look waaaay different from any desktop), so I don’t know how funky they really are.

But meh. No more ugly pink color and tiny box area to scroll through.

Group presentation yesterday in art was all right. Eddie Izzard was nicely received. (Her Engelbert Humperdinck bit was used to illustrate idea selection.)

The earlier part of the day was spent uninstalling and reinstalling my printer, in an attempt to get back my ability to print InDesign documents with the Composite CMYK setting. I don’t know why it takes so long to install a printer. Rather, I don’t know why it takes so long for the installer to realize that there’s just no way the website is going to be found to self-register the product, so just move on in the process already! But whatever. It didn’t work. Still can only print in Composite Grey or Composite RGB. I have no freakin’ clue why.

The HP website (I have a Deskjet 4160) has a support page about printer settings not available in InDesign, but for Macs. (Funny, I never thought of hooking Macs up to regular printers. All the ones I’ve dealt with as of late were hooked up to fancy printers with RIPs, if any.) I don’t even want to fashion that “help” to my own situation, because they suggest overriding InDesign print settings and going through the HP print settings dialogue. Ouch! No way!

The Adobe website has a topic in the InDesign support forum for Macs, but that was about an Epson printer, and a somewhat fancy one, not my dinky $60 one. The response there is that a lot of inkjet printers print with RGB or something, which I find truly odd, so might as well go with the Composite RGB. Or buy a really fancy RIP that’ll convert to CMYK for you. Right.

A couple weeks ago when trying to find a solution through Google I saw this page, an entry in a blog with a similar situation but also involving Illustrator. I can’t seem to find it now though. Someone commented saying he’s had that problem, and that he always just … does something involving the printer. I can’t remember. Removes the printer from the settings, I don’t know. Which is why I went through that whole mess this morning. But it didn’t work.

I think, I’m not sure, that this problem occurred after I changed color settings or color profiles or something in InDesign. I don’t know how or what to change the settings back to. I did synchronize color settings in Adobe Bridge though. I don’t know what that did really, but hey I got a little note about it so I did it hoping it would fix my problem. It didn’t. So I am stuck saving files as PDFs and printing through there.

(I don’t know why I don’t want to print RGB. It’s stuck in my mind that if it’s for print, I should stay away from RGB. Apparently the CMYK color gamut is smaller than the RGB gamut. I experienced that when I didn’t realize the picture for my movie poster was in RGB. Augh. But tha’s neither here nor there. What I want to say is that if I’ve designed something in CMYK [technically; I set up colors in the program using CMYK, but I am looking at the colors in RGB on the monitor], I feel that it would be just plain weird to print with Composite RGB to a printer that uses cyan, magenta, yellow, and black.)

Hmm … just read more topics at the Adobe InDesign support forum, and it was explicitly spelled out that only postscript printers accept CMYK. So what was I doing before? O_o

Another note: the funky colors are probably a result of me tilting my screen more than I had earlier this morning or last night. XD;; Wow, I really need sleep.

10:04pm The dawning light! (After looking up “inkjet printer cmyk rgb.”) Inkjet printers expect RGB since that’s what the general public would work in, and has a driver in the printer to convert to CMYK. But that brings up the question … how was I able to print CMYK?

Ugly life

Oh my goodness, Ugly Betty was all over the place tonight! o_o Trying to keep their audience … very cruel.

But I’m not really one to talk about primetime television on my blog … except Monk, of course.

My cell phone keeps “failing” calls today, I don’t know why. I had to call my voicemail four times to hear a message, write down the number, and save the message. Or did I save the message? I may have just given up the last time. It’s interesting that the message was available every time though, and not deleted. That’s nice. *pats voicemail company on the head* Then a group member called me and all I got was “Hello.” *phone ring* *some people talking* *dead air*

Oh yeah! I remember, yesterday I tried calling my voicemail and somehow I ended up getting the last person I called. In between me (what’s the cell phone equivalent of “dialing”?) going to voicemail and having someone say “Hello?” I heard some girl talking, she was saying something like “I know how to do it!” and some guy was saying “Get [something], address, [other stuff].” … Right. At first I thought it was the person whose car I whacked in the parking lot at school. (Trying not to hit a car on the other side whose driver was still in the car, both cars I guess were parked too close on each side.) But no, I ended up saying to someone else entirely, “I think I hit the wrong button… bye.”

After that I got a call from a phone in the 925 area code. I picked up ’cause I couldn’t remember if I had a group member in some class with that area code. *blink* Some guy asked for me, I thought, then the sound cut out for a bit, and I said “Hello?” and ended up hearing some lady speak Spanish to me. Riiight … She was asking for Eddie, which in a male sort of Mexican accent can sound like my name … right? My hearing isn’t that bad … right?

But I think I’m sort of rambling. I meant to say that I just hope I don’t forget something tomorrow or next week.

I can’t think, my left elbow hurts. Er, right above the elbow, on the outside. My posture probably isn’t helping. *sitting crooked* And the keyboard is pushed all the way to the right to make for the mousepad on the left so my left arm is sorta reaching to hit the keys … I hate keyboard/mouse positioning. It seems like they’re both in the way of each other. Ideally the mouse should be right in front of your hand/arm, not off to the side, but then ideally the keyboard should be smack dab centered in front of you, not off to the side. I think I need to buy a keyboard with no arrow keys or number pad. XD; Do they even make those in regular sizes? ie, not travel size?

I’m such a bad blogger. I can’t write coherent, topical entries like some bloggers. Can’t keep a personal blog that’s all nicely written and such. None of which (whom? I switched nouns somewhere) I’m going to mention here because I don’t want them to notice me talking about them. XD; I’m all rambly and blalala just like I used to be four years ago. Huh. Wait. Six years, in just a month and some days. o.o!! Wow. I might need to get a life.

Anyway! I need to finish reading chapter 15 for typography, which I find personally a waste of time because I don’t plan to set tables but then of course eventually I will but I don’t want to read the chapter because it isn’t a manual for my program of choice, InDesign, it just says what to do, and possibly ways to go about doing just that, if “your layout program allows it/has that feature.” *twitchtwitch*

Don’t get me wrong, I like the book and plan to keep it and use it for reference (in life … for life … they both sound like I’m going to make life choices based on the book O_o). It’s just that the author tries to be general and applicable to what you do, and it’s very helpful in that sense, but it gets sort of annoying when he says, “a good typographer does such and such, and I don’t know how to do it in your program specifically but you really should do it because I’ve modeled you into a typography snob and you’re going to feel guilty if you don’t.” Augh!

Right. Tables. I don’t think InDesign does tables. I know it does tabs! I like tabs. Not sucky, ugly tabs in Word, or fat tabs that take up a lot of my typing space in Notepad. Nice tabs, that you can set the way you like.

Anyway. Typing for 30 minutes. Wow. Maybe this is why I stopped writing in here. XD; Takes up so much of my time! Other things I’ve dropped this quarter: going on aim; reading (except for my typography book); any extra work on my appearance (but who am I kidding? I don’t do much more than bare minimum that often when I do have the time); tidying up apparently, there are piles of stuff everywhere that I keep thinking harbor spiders or fleas. But things I’ve picked up: behind-the-scenes site maintenance; keeping to a somewhat reasonable sleep schedule during the week (except tonight :x); nursing my right elbow >_< to keep it from hurting; making school-related supply runs alone.

Now I should get to bed.

life

New layout. I can assure you that I have no clue where the inspiration for it came from. I was just doodling in 452 while he was going over CSS. XD;

Last part on life: Lately I’ve been getting flashes of memory randomly. One I remember, Saturday night Daddy was watching some post-game yakking about a basketball game, and when one commentator said “stood” (or “still,” not quite sure) I saw the exhibit at the L.A. Zoo with the meerkats (?), and how they all stand on the top, and then there’s this cave-y “underground” maze you can wander through.

I think yesterday, I don’t remember what brought it on, but I remembered Jichan and Bachan’s house, the driveway by that tree with the orange fruit things. Persimmon. I remembered it from the perspective of a child, when the yard was bigger and everything.

I’ve heard that your life flashes before your eyes before you die, but I’m sure that’s all in one instant, right? So what does it mean when you get bits and pieces of it over some course of time?