Have you ever found a program that does everything you need it to, and in a way that you love, and you become blind to any other software that does what this program that you love so dearly does? And then, have you updated your operating system only to find that your beloved piece of software no longer works?

I’m there, right now.

The Font Thing was such a great font management tool, and followed me from XP to Vista, and then attempted to follow me from Vista to Windows 7. Now, it shouldn’t come as a shock to me, but I can’t even install it; Windows says “nope! Not gonna happen!” I hadn’t realized that development on The Font Thing stopped 10 years ago. Holy cow.

So, I seem to be in the market for a new font management program. I’ve got over 1000 fonts that I need to organize and selectively install.  Does anybody have a good recommendation for a new font manager? I prefer free (ideally open source) where possible, but I’ll consider commercial options.

I’ll miss you, Font Thing!

Yesterday, I rolled out of bed all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed (read: exhausted and just wanting to go back to sleep) and plopped down in front of my Mac to start working, just like every other business day. Except, I couldn’t connect to AIM, my work email address, or my work support tool. Everything else seemed to be working though, which was kind of odd. Called my coworker; he said he wasn’t having any trouble, so it had to be on my end.

So I power-cycled my router.. and then couldn’t get to anything on the interwebs. Ok… pick up the phone and call Verizon. Half an hour later, somebody finally picks up the phone and informs me that they’re having outages and that it’ll be working again by the end of the day, get off my phone. Swell. So I packed up and went to a coffee show to hijack some wifi so I can, you know, do my job.

Over 24 hours later, my internet is still not working. I am not a happy camper, at all. I tried calling again this morning and got a busy signal. a;sldkfjgh.

So I’m at the coffee shop again. You know, being here just isn’t fun when I *have* to be. I want to go home!

The most annoying parts are: 1, there is NO INFORMATION ANYWHERE about what the hell is going on and why they haven’t fixed it yet, and 2, this is the second time in less than a month that my internet has been down for an extended period of time. Last time, they had a maintenance guy working on the hubs out on the street, and he unplugged my connection and plugged it back into the wrong slot. I called within 10 minutes of my internet dropping (and we know about the hub maintenance because my boyfriend saw the guy outside and asked what was going on) and it took them 7 hours to send somebody to fix it. It took him 2 minutes. You know, I’m pretty sure the guy that broke it in the first place was still there when I called, and yet I had no internet for my entire work day.

Verizon.. seriously? I kind of hate you. I expect to be prorated for these internet-less days.

Don’t even get me started on what I think of the cell phone they sold me and the issues I’ve had with my mobile services; then I’ll never stop.
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Update: 3:30pm 07/09/09

After spending an hour on the phone troubleshooting stuff, my ticket got escalated and all they figured out was that there was some weird DNS issue going on (which is what Vista’s network diagnostic has been saying all along) and they have no idea why. Somebody will call me “eventually”.

So I cheated and manually set my DNS configurations to “somewhere else” after I got off the phone, and now I have internet. No thanks to Verizon.

So, I decided that I wanted to play with the Windows 7 beta, but that I didn’t want to overwrite my operating system on either computer.

I started with Bob 1.0, my poor sweet 5 year old computer with Windows XP on it. I used GParted off of a CD-Boot of Ubuntu to shrink the partition on my main drive and then partition the new, un-partitioned space left by the shrink process. Windows 7 took ages to install, and ran a little slow on Bob 1, but certainly ran much faster than I expected it to run in the first place. I half-way didn’t expect it to install at all.

So last night I decided to shrink the partition on my storage drive in Bob 2.0 (my much newer computer) and poke around on that. I have no idea why, but the process didn’t go NEARLY as smoothly on this computer. Some of you may have seen my panicked Tweets about it. Oh, then then to make it worse, I discovered that Vista has tools to do this built in, well after the fact

So anyway, I guess when Windows Vista first partitioned the drive, it left blank space at the very beginning of the drive. When I went to shrink the partition, it decided that it wanted to move the partition to the left. So it took 2 hours to read my partition (why?!) and another 2 and a half to move it and create the new partition.

So I cleaned my bathroom while I waited, since I’m moving in a couple of weeks and have to clean it at some point anyway. I kid you not, that bathroom is positively SPOTLESS. Even the crazy muddy parts of the bathtub where Xoie puts her paws. I had a lot of time to kill.

Anyway, 4.5 hours later when I could use my computer again, I went to get some pictures of my camera (The bathroom only killed about an hour) and Lightroom started freaking out at me. “ZOMG I can’t find your catalog!” ... well, said catalog is stored on my storage drive that I just manipulated the partitions on. So I go to My Computer, and while I could see the new G: partition.. the original partition was nowhere to be found. I just about died. I panicked and mourned my lost data, then started wondering “well.. if the data is gone… where the heck is the 350 gigs of space?!”

So i went into the drive manager, and found my data partition! Yay! Windows had arbitrarily reassinged drive letters and changed it from Z: to F: which made it get lost, because F belongs to one of my removable devices (I think it’s my Rebel, IIRC). So I changed the drive letter back to Z and I could access all my data and Lightroom stopped spazzing out.

So I did my photo stuff and set Windows 7 installing and went to bed, cause it was about 1 in the morning at that point.

So yet again, I haven’t gotten a chance to really poke around with Windows 7 but it looks pretty sweet from what I’ve done so far. I’ll be playing with it and will likely write a post about it in the nearish future.

So, with the impending release of The Sims 3, I’ve been carefully scrutinizing the hardware in my computer, and have come to realize that while it was sufficient a year and a half ago when I bought it (read: “good enough”), I am quickly outgrowing the system.

Which leaves me in a slightly uncomfortable position, having bought a pre-built Dell computer. They don’t exactly make changing hardware the easiest thing sometimes. However, it’s not under warranty or anything like that, so I’m just going to trust my previous hands on experience and have at it. Worst case scenario, my computer blows up. (.... wait, that would suck. umm…)

Anyway, I’ve already added more memory, an extra hard drive and added a FireWire port, which was easy.

Now I’m looking to replace the processor (mine doesn’t even meet the system requirements), which makes me nervous. Lots of little pins and stuff… if I have to replace the motherboard I might as well just build a new computer (which, I can’t, as much as I would love to). I’m looking to get the Intel E8400 (3.0 ghz dual core that runs circles around my current 1.7 dual core). It’s"cheap” but still good.

While I was looking at that, my buddy Shawn pointed out that my video card sucks. This is lower on my priority list (despite his protests) because while yes, it’s not the greatest video card on earth, it *is* on the list of supported video cards for Sims 3, while my processor is lacking in ghz. I do, however, want a new one because mine wasn’t that good when I bought it, so now it’s really subpar. I haven’t started looking too much at those yet; any suggestions? (nothing too fancy though; I do, after all, work a mediocre job )

These upgrades will also make the video-editing process not suck so much, and I may actually make more frequent use of my video camera

So now, mostly I’m crossing my fingers that the IRS is good to me and brings me a decent refund when I file my taxes. W-2’s take too long. /waits impatiently.

Over my (very lovely) 4 day weekend, I rediscovered my Nintendo DS. I blame Cynthia for it; she was playing Animal Crossing and didn’t have all the fruit trees, so I offered to let her raid my town to take a couple pieces of fruit (she later raided it while I wasn’t looking and stole all my fruit! rawr haha).

It was all downhill from there.

A few days later, my town is free of weeds (Cynthia helped!), I have way more Pokemon than I had before (I play Diamond), I now have both Harvest Moon games (and haven’t beat either haha), and unlocked all the Cooking Mama II recipes (though I haven’t gotten gold on all of them yet).

Addicted much? Nah!

So, people with a DS.. what games do you play? Any of them that go online? If so we should totally hook up via wi-fi and do whatever happens in whatever game we both have

So, my contract with T-Mobile just ended, and I switched over to Verizon.

Blackberry’s are a bit spendier on every other carrier, so I decided I wasn’t going to get one this time. I am testing The BlackBerry Theory (“once you go BlackBerry, you never go back”). I gotta say… I miss it already. But, that’s not what this entry is about.

I got an LG Dare, and so far, I have to say… I am not at all impressed. Maybe it’s just that I’ve been spoiled. But the point is…. I’m not impressed.

Section One: The Touch Screen
I’ve been spoiled by competent touch screen technology. The boyfriend has an iPhone that I play with from time to time, and I’ve got an iPod touch that I regularly access the internet and type on. I barely have to touch it to get it to register my keys. On the Dare… not so much. It’s slowed down my typing speed considerably to have to go back and hitting keys that it didn’t register that I hit.

Dragging leaves a bit to be desired as well. More often than not, the phone things I selected some option that is on the screen while I am trying to drag, instead of dragging. It’s a little counterproductive one may say.

Section Two: The Other Features
The “full feature” browser is a sad excuse for an HTML browser. I think I would have preferred a normal mobile browser, as navigating and using this one is a pain in the neck. Bah.

Uhm. So, I know there were other things I didn’t like about it but since I took the phone back a couple days ago, I’ve already forgotten about it. I started writing this on Friday and took the Dare back on Saturday.

I traded it in for a Voyager, and oddly enough, the Voyager (which has a full QWERTY keyboard on the inside) has a more responsive touch screen. The browser still sucks, but I like this phone a lot better.

Though, I just saw that RIM put out a touchscreen BlackBerry, and omg, I want it.

So, I downloaded the Google Chrome browser today.. I’ve only had a limited amount of time to play with it, but so far, I’d just like to say, wow. This thing is BLAZING fast. *love*

It’s a very simple, minimal looking browser. It’s kind of boring but in a good way I think.

The install was quick and painless, though I don’t recall it giving an option of choosing where to install.. the import features worked well and it grabbed all my stuff from Firefox, though it was kind of annoying that it made me close Firefox to do so.

The blank page shows a list of most visted sites, which is handy. Also, I like how the domain is black, and the rest of the URL is a lighter grey… minimize the spoof!

All in all, there are some features that I’d like to see added, but it’s a pretty solid beta, and I rather enjoy it.

So, Apple put out the 10.5.3 update for OS X yesterday. I’m a little apprehensive about installing it. Why? Well, because I seem to be Katie, The Mac Killer, that’s why.

Let me tell you about my Mac’s. I only use them here at work, cause nobody has bought me a macbook yet.

So on my first day, in my defense, the first one I had just never turned on. I don’t think I can be held responsible for that one haha. So then they gave me a new one. That one worked fine and dandy for a couple of weeks until I realized it didn’t have the .2 update. So, I installed it and restarted the computer like a normal person would do, and when it came up… it flashed the Finder icon with a question mark on it for 20 minutes until my IT guy came. Then he looked at it and was like, “WTF did you do to this thing!?” as he carted it off and brought me a new one. That one lasted for a few weeks… then it started powering off for no good reason. Like.. I’d be using it and it would just pfffffft die. That got really annoying, really fast. So Larry brought me a spare that had a dying fan and promised to replace it. Well, after about a week and a half of listening to this stupid fan, I was going crazy. Then! One of the guys in my cubicle quit and left his shiny G5 behind (because, you know, it wasn’t really his). So, I smiled very sweetly and was like, “.... Larry can I have the G5?” (and it was totally a joke cause I didn’t think it would actually work!) and Larry was like “Yeah sure, why not!” “.....really? Sweet!”

So I’m on what is technically my 5th Mac in under 3 months.

We’re taking on office pool on whether or not I kill the G5 installing this latest update. I think I’ll wait until the end of the day to do it.

I have seen the light and I am never going back.

Let’s briefly talk about what they both are. I’m sure you have an idea but I’m gonna throw it out there anyway. The RAW format is not really standardized, but in a nutshell, it’s minimally processed data from an image sensor, such as the one in a camera. It’s something like a digital photo negative… it contains the information needed to make an image. Then there’s a JPEG, which is more like the final printed picture. It’s an image that you can look at. A final product, persay.

Many cameras (well, maybe not the point-and-shoots so much, but most of the digital SLRs) give you the option to shoot in JPEG, RAW, or both in some cases. I admit, I shot in JPEG for a long time. But for people that edit their photos (much like how film photographers used different methods when developing their film for different effects), RAW is the way to go. Allow me to show you some visual examples.

Here’s a flower photo I took today.

It’s a decent picture, but a little boring and the colors don’t look nearly as vibrant or natural as they actually are. So, I spruced up the RAW file a bit.

Now that’s better. Yay better! But, just for curiosity’s sake.. let’s see what happens if I apply the same exact changes to a JPEG version of the original image that I applied to the RAW version of it.

Yes. Not so good, right? That’s because RAW files store more information than a JPEG. The RAW file doesn’t have a set white balance, and it hasn’t had saturation or contrast levels forced on it, or anything like that, so it can be changed in ways that a JPEG can’t, because the JPEG only kept the information that was visible at the time, instead of the information that could have been used to make adjustments. RAW is also 16 bit data as opposed to 8 bit, so it has 65,536 levels to work with instead of just 256 like the JPEG. It’s a little hard to explain what the difference is between the information.. but basically, there are not nearly as many things set in stone in a RAW file, so you have more control over the editing.

Another good example is in how you can edit the exposure. Today when I was out shooting, I had forgotten to adjust the manual settings on my camera when I went outside after shooting inside. This, of course, led to a painfully over exposed picture. Had I only been shooting in JPEG, the image would have been ruined forever, because you just can’t turn a white blur into something that makes sense. The RAW image however, stored more information about what the image looked like before it crossed the line to overexposed. So I was able to pop the image into Lightroom and turn the exposure down to rescue it. Allow me to show you what happened when I took the overexposed image and edited the RAW, and the JPEG versions of it.

So as you can see, there are many benefits to shooting in RAW. The only downside is that they take longer to write, and they are large files. They also require special software to read them. Lightroom is a great program for it. If you don’t do any post-processing on your photos, then it won’t be worth it to shoot in RAW. But if you do… try it out. I think you’ll like the amount of control you get with a RAW file over the JPEG.

So today, as I was browsing the front page of the database we use to get all our “super secret troubleshooting secrets”, I found a link titled “CS2 asks to register everytime I load it (Vista)” or something very similar to it and I was like “...ZOMG I HAVE THAT SAME EXACT PROBLEM!!!11eleventy-one~” because well, I do. It’s annoying having to close the register screen everytime no matter how many times I tell it never register.

Anyway I clicked the link and it told me how to fix it and I am happy cause now I don’t get that screen anymore. I knew there was a reason I took this job haha.

So, I installed Sim City Societies today. Here are my initial thoughts.

One: It’s nice that getting power to my city isn’t so god damn annoying. My biggest turnoff about the older versions is I had to actually pay attention to where I was putting water pipes and power lines. Not my thing. I just want to generate power and assume it knows where it’s going. bam! Place some windmills, produce power, go start building.

Two: ... you know, I didn’t really get much further than that because the game crashes every five-ten minutes. Seriously. I didn’t even get to finish the tutorial. Lame to the MAX. The patch says it fixed the random crash bug. Yeah, it lied. Screw you patch!

Three: From what I could tell, it looks like it’d be fun.

I know a lot of people are complaining about how it’s fundamentally different from the traditional Sim City games, but since I was never overly fond of the other ones, I think that’s probably going to prove to be a good thing, for me at least. I just wish i could actually play it.

So, I installed some updates last night, right?

Five minutes ago I went to play The Sims, and my DVD drive no longer exists. Uhm, WTF?!

So, I recently bought a new computer, and like the goober that I am, I didn’t notice that I had the option of having XP installed on it. So, I got a computer with Windows Vista. Now, let me say, Vista is very pretty. Very.

However.

My webcam is not compatible with it. Firefox crashes if I have too many tabs open. iTunes won’t run on it (it worked for about an hour, and crashed, and I haven’t been able to get it open since then). If I turn off User Access Control (which is the most ANNOYING thing on fricken earth, it asks if it’s ok to run something every single time I open a program that it doesn’t like), my software for syncing my cell phone doesn’t work. You have to reboot to turn that feature on and off by the way. It’s insanely slow. My music skips every time I open a full sized photo from my camera. And so on and so forth

I am, to say the least, annoyed.

So Frankie Duex and I went to the Apple Store and talked to the guy at the Genius Bar. Dude looked at my iPod and raised an eyebrow. Then he said that if I bought the $40 AppleCare extended warrenty thing, he’d give me a replacement. Falling is still not covered by warranty but I think he felt bad cause I only had it for 2 months. So, I got a new iPod for $40. Not too shabby!

Bob 2.0 has shipped! Oh, did I fail to say? I ordered a new computer because mine is dying, and I would probably wither up and die without my Bob. I almost feel like a sellout because I bought a pre-made computer for the first time in my life but… well… sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. I don’t have time to piece together a whole one by myself.

What else… uhhhm. Well, my camera is awesome. Yay camera! My new Blackberry hasn’t broken yet, yay phone! I think that’s about it.

And in the un-electronic side of things, my truck is running somewhat better, I got to see my cousin and her new baby, my tragus is starting to heal better now that I started having the piercer clean it once a day, Tom and I got back together, Silverchair is coming to town (I haven’t bought tickets yet but I will soon!) and work is driving me nuts. That is all.

So like I said before, Vinz chewed through my network cable pretty much immediately after getting here. I didn’t want to get another one because I figured he’d chew through that one too. So I went the wireless route.

A couple days ago, my roommate gave me a wireless network card he had laying around. Popped it in, used my ninja skills to secure a driver for it (you know your awesome when you can get drivers when you have no internet haha), and set it up. All was fine and dandy until I turned winamp on. Then my computer started freezing. Sucky. Then the next day, it started randomly rebooting itself. More sucky. Poor Bob.

So today I went down to Office Depot and picked up the cheapest USB wireless adapter I could find. Brought it home, plugged it in.. found every wireless network in range except for mine haha. Nice. So 20 minutes later after moving the adapter about 100 times, it finally located my network and took my key and I have happily been connected with an excellent 54 mbps connection since.

And I’ve been running winamp with no crashes! Bob and I are happy now.

So for the longest time I thought photo caller-id was rad… until I really started playing with the custom ring tones. My old phone was a pain in the neck to set up, but my new phone makes it a breeze.

So now I can tell without even picking up the phone if I want to answer it

When I hear:

I go “ZOMG IT IS SONIA!” and drop whatever I am doing to answer.

When I hear:

I go “.. oh, it’s Jeffrey. Do I want to answer? Hmmmm…” and then I usually do

When I hear:

I go “YAY TOM! ♥” and answer. This one is really loud on my phone, I need to figure something out to make it quieter.

When I hear:

I go “Sheet sheet, who ze foock is shooting us?!” (... if you’ve ever seen End of the World then you’ll understand the quote) and debate if I want to reach over and grab the phone. I suppose I need a separate ringer for my mother, to make the Default Ring Mystery a little easier to solve haha, and one for Friend Tom (the OG Tom and my Partner in Crime). I think his needs to be “it’s the end of the world as we know it! it’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine!!!”

That is all.

I broke down yesterday and ordered a pink DS from evilBay. My impatience cost me about.. $30 or so. Not too bad actually, for $30 I get my DS today or tomorrow instead of… two weeks from now is what the estimates were saying. The entire universe is still sold out of the things. And hello, it’s PINK! Yay. I bought Final Fantasy III yesterday. Does anybody have Animal Crossing? Did I ask that already? Anyway, if you have it and wi-fi, give me your friend code so I can visit your town I’ll post mine later, it’s gonna change when I get my DS and give the one I’m borrowing back. Also, those of you that don’t have Cooking Mama need to get it, it is the second most stupidly-fun game on earth (the first of course, being Katamari Damacy).

Anyhow.

I don’t have any New Year’s plans made yet. I think I’m going to go with Sonia‘s offer of “I don’t know what I’m doing yet but you should come with me!” hehe I bought something to wear. It’s gonna be rad. Pictures coming after New Year’s.  And yay 3 day weekend!

You know you have a beautifully complex phone when you’re sitting on hold for tech support less than 24 hours after recieving the thing. I rock.

They better not tell me RTFM

My MMS option is nowhere to be found, and I don’t have the options that I need to add people to my Blackberry Messagner Contacts, and uhm, I have a little note on the top of my phone that says “Data Connection Refused”.

Ok. So apparantly I can’t send photo messages (or use the IM’s) without paying the extra $20/mo for the blackberry features. I love how nobody bothered to tell me that. On my old phone, IM’s and SMS and MMS messages were all part of my basic text message plan. And I have to keep my $10 text messaging package if I don’t want to be charged 25 cents each. How nice. *le sigh* But I suppose I can’t have such a nice phone without running all the avaliable options. I’m gonna go to the poor house for my toys. I’m gonna have to put ads on the moblog and start a donation drive. KEEP KSF ONLINE!

I’m only slightly annoyed, cause I was eventually planning on getting those features.. but not yet! Maybe I should cancel my internets at home.

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!

My new cellphone came. WOOOT!!! ♥
*plays with it*

Job? What work?