Workitty Work Work

Much progress made on pouches over the weekend.

It was too [expletive] hot on Saturday to do much more than hide in the air-conditioned bedroom, and although yesterday was cooling off to almost-comfortable temperatures, we still spent a fair amount of time hiding in the cool room.

However, I did find the various pouch parts that were scattered around the house.  I set up a synchronization rule to keep Otter’s books up to date on my laptop (they’ve been living on Ron’s desktop the last couple years), and checked inventory.  Fortunately, before I started cutting much out, I found a stash of finished but not into the inventory spreadsheet pouches.  Revise list of what I need to make.

Cut out about a dozen soft pouches, or pieces thereof, and got a half-dozen to the point where the lacing is the only thing left to do.  I also made a bunch of belt loops, since my stash is hiding (glares around the room waiting for them to slink out and show themselves).  I probably did too much, my wrists and hands are grumbling at me today.

I failed to find the belt frogs that are in various stages of completion.  I wasn’t particularly looking for them when I was rooting around the dining room, so another pass through should bring them to light.

I need to check the weather forecast and see when it’s likely to be cool enough to get the pot of wax out and work on the stash of hard pouches I’ve got – a good half dozen of those.  

Haven’t checked the belt inventory yet, but IIRC it should be in reasonable shape.  Also need to check on where we are with book covers, checkbooks, etc.  

Is this thing still on?

Umm . . . rather a long hiatus, eh?  Since mid-April . . .

(Writing this in bits and pieces through the day, to be posted
tonight, since blogger doesn't play nice with my iPhone and I haven't
migrated to WordPress - a painless process, but I haven't poked at my
personal blog to figure out customizing colors, etc.)

Well, Otter has been napping since then.  Suffice it to say that
MuseCon ate my brain, and Ron's.  Ron was convention chair, I did
publications, signage, and (theoretically, anyway), public relations.
MuseCon Zero was this past weekend, August 6th through 8th.  I'm
recovering.

At some point in the last month or so I'd started to feel guilty about
neglecting the business, but realized there was no hope until after
MuseCon.  So I decided that I'd wake Otter back up once MuseCon was
over.  I've succeeded so far, yesterday morning I dug out some soft
pouches in progress and finished not one, but two; they're just the
half-soft size, and one already had the flap done, but I'm pleased
with myself.

We'd done a presentation about "Leather for Costuming" at MuseCon,
which had helped the waking-up, because I had to root around and find
a selection of tools and materials, so I knew where to look for the
bits I didn't take to the convention.  Last night I dug out the rest
of the soft pouches in progress, tonight I may see what I've got going
on with hard pouches. And I may see if I can get a couple more soft
pouches ready for assembly - I've got three or four cut out, but no
farther.  Heat and humidity provided, or by moving up to the
air-conditioned bedroom.

A month from now is the Fox Hunt and Ayreton Investiture event - most
of the greater-Chicago-area groups are amalgamating into a Barony, and
that event is the official investiture.  I figure it should be a good
event - Fox Hunt is usually decent, and there should be plenty of
extra people for the investiture.  Plus it's a bit south-ish
(Earlsville, IL), a direction we only go lately for Fox Hunt.

The problem is, on the way home from MuseCon Monday morning the
Durango had a close encounter of the crunchy kind with a semi truck.
Specifically, the rear end of the durango and the nose of the semi did
not successfully share space/time.  The passenger side rear quarter of
the Durango is a mess.  A big mess.  Hopefully the frame is not.  No
humans were damaged, only the semi, the Durango, a cooler, and a
cardboard box.  We are very happy with that state of affairs, as it
could have been much, much worse.

If this was a small fender-bender I wouldn't be worried about getting
the Durange back in time for Fox Hunt. As it is, I have concerns.
Yesterday I checked on the list prices of cargo vans from Enterprise
(where we've currently got a rental car from) and U-Haul.  $200-$225.
Unless we can swap out the rental car for a van for that weekend, or
otherwise get the rental of a van covered, I don't forsee doing Fox
Hunt.  But I'm trying to wait and see what we hear from the shop (had
the Durango dropped off by lunchtime Monday - no point in waiting) and
the trucking company's insurance company.

Going through my Weaver catalog I've found a couple new hardware bits
I'm drooling over - a 1-3/4" strap keeper, and a T-junction piece used
in creating the ear loops on bridles.  Both are the fancy engraved
stainless steel with black accents like some rings and buckles I get
from them.  The T piece is caaalling to me, I need to figure out
something to do with it.  There's also some very inexpensive harness
bellies on the odd lot list that I'm trying to ignore, that would be
great for pouches, if they have any left.  But I have to at least wait
until payday, probably best to wait until September.  But I don't
wanna!  Want to shop and play with new bits and pieces!

More Grumblies

We've got a "contact us" form on the website.  It's supposed to be set up so that just hitting the "submit" button on a blank form doesn't do anything, but blank e-mails keep coming through.  I suspect some automated annoy-a-tron is filling in spaces or something.  Although heaven knows why, there's no "respond-to" address attached to them.

Today, however, I got one with an e-mail address and this message:

"We are interested to increase traffic to your website, please get back to us in order to discuss the possibility in further detail."

Riiiiight.  I know there's some interesting little quirks between UK and US English, such as the construction "difference to" being normal on the other side of the big pond.  However, I don't think the above "interested to" construction is one of those quirks. 

I am tempted to respond that I'm not interested in hiring someone to promote my website who doesn't have a firm grasp of English grammar.  I am also reminding myself that responding to spammers just confirms your e-mail address is valid. 

Credit Card Grumbles

Saturday night I decided that accepting credit cards was more expensive than it was worth:  at minimum it costs $280/year, and I don't think being able to accept credit cards has brought in that much in additional sales, much less profit. 

Growf.  It's only been two years since I started taking them (seems more like three).  My contract has a three-year term, with a $295 early-termination fee.  I was thinking it was two years, but the paperwork says three.  And the salescritter that assured me that insufficient sales to support the cost would be an adequate reason for early termination of the contract was apparently incorrect.  My bad for not getting it in writing.  At least I think I don't have that in writing, I do have to dig out my notes and double-check.  But I'm pretty sure it's only in my scribbled notes. 

The customer rep. I talked to did offer to take back my terminal in lieu of the early termination fee.  That's a possibility.

There is one possible out, which I need to the paper copies refer to my latest statements about - last year about this time I argued my way out of an extra $100/year fee for security hoo-ha.  If they try to push that one through again, I will be canceling, I was thiiis far from canceling over it last year (as in, I told them to cancel my account, and they managed to get me exempted so I wouldn't).

Event Schedule

Yeah, I know, there isn't much of an event schedule. I was looking through my e-mail for a couple invitations I'd gotten to SCA events, and it turns out both are on the same day, which is also the same day as the April MuseCon meeting. Which is also the day of Robin's 2nd-degree Black Belt test.

It's been several years since Robin last tested, and it's pretty certain Master Villari will be there. You can guess which we're going to. :)

New Website Branch - Under Construction

I think I've finally figured out what I want to do when I grow up. Is there a problem with the fact that it took me until age 43 to do so? Hope not.

Anyway, my current day-job is not it. I want to Design Things. I'm not, I'm reviewing other engineers' work. I suppose I could try to break out of my rut and jump over to the design side of Civil Engineering, buuuuut . . . I'm so not up on Structural issues. I wouldn't know a Finite Element if it walked up and bit me on the backside. I haven't cracked open a design code book since I graduated. Yadda yadda yadda.

So, helloooo typography. Hello publications design. I like you. You're fun. I like putting words and stuff on a page and making them look good. And maybe someday Otter Necessities Design Services will actually generate some money.

Except that the page looks like carp. I can do page-layout for print, why is website design so hard? It's still just words, I don't get it . . .

Backup Options

Last week the Drobo not only lost one of its drive (the first batch we bought for it turned out to be a set of lemons, although they did make it out of warranty). It should have been able to recover gracefully onto the other three drives, except that the power supply went wonky, making it look, for a while, like it was losing a second drive, power cycle, and otherwise lose its marbles.

No problem, we thought, we backed all the important stuff from the Drobo to an on-line backup service.

Sunday Ron ordered the DVD restore. It didn't arrive until today, and Ron has started the movement of data back onto the Drobo.

If/when we determine we have actually got our data back in usable form, I'll vent some more. It hasn't been a pretty process.

At this point, I suspect our new backup scheme will be a pair of external drives to be sneaker-net rotated between home and one of our mundane offices.

Taxing Taxes Taxonomy Tacks Tachs Techs Tacky Tackle

Why yes, I am babbling. On top of less than 4 hours sleep for the period of time known as Saturday night/Sunday morning and still being tired yesterday, after cleaning up some of my mess around my end of the couch, I closed out the books and did taxes yesterday.

I still do the Otter's taxes "by hand" since Otter Necessities is a partnership, and if you want a version of TurboTax that has the partnership forms you have to pay for the expensive business version. Most of the work in filling out the partnership forms for us is filling in zeroes in all the not-applicable boxes, so paying for the software to walk me through that is just not worth the cost. And fill-in-able PDFs, simplify it a bit more than writing all those zeroes by hand.

I did have some cursing and swearing about trying to save the completed PDFs in Preview, Mac's native PDF application. The fix was to take over Ron's machine to do them, while he installed Acrobat on my iFruit.

The other problem I ran into was in TurboTax. Ran error-check and audit check, etc. Federal e-file is now free, but it would be $19.95 to send it via Intuit. I decided lazy trumped cheap for that one, and followed all the prompts to pay Intuit. Only after that did TurboTax say "oops, sorry, you can't e-file an IL return where your state tax withheld is over X% of your state taxable pay, please fix this." I contacted them, a refund of my fees should be in the pipeline.

Capricon

We are not dealers at Capricon this year, we decided the other time-commitments we have Saturday and Sunday were going to make trying to be dealers on top be a gross over-commitment.

Saturday, you see, is the kickoff party for MuseCon! 8:00 pm until midnight or so. Room 1514. Look for the "Follow the Muses" signs. Full color signs. Pretty pretty signs. And bookmarks. Pretty pretty bookmarks. Admire the signs and bookmarks...

Why yes, I *am* doing Public Relations & Publications for MuseCon.

Sunday, 10:00 am until 2-ish we'll be at the MuseCon sale table.

Still More FAIL

Bad photoshop in a graphic design book (see previous post for book details).

Headdesk, headdesk, headdesk.

Author/Illustrator/Editor FAIL

Apropos of the previous "Design Fail" post,

The Rockwell typeface: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockwell_%28typeface%29 is a serif font. (Serifs being the little sticky-outy bits on various letters in fonts like Times New Roman and, say . . . ROCKWELL) No wishy-washy maybe-serifs about this one, those are big chunky ones.

But "Graphic Design for Non-Designers", Tony Seddon & Jane Waterhouse, illustratons by Rick Landers, 2009, Chronicle Books, ISBN: 978-0-8118-6831-0 calls it a sans-serif.

Design Fail

I followed a link from a humor website I enjoy to a site about web design, and then a link from there to another web design site. IIRC both sites were touting themselves as social-networking resources for web designers, and also sources of great ideas, inspiration, tutorials, etc.

You might think that I'd have found them interesting and bookmarked them. Nope.

Cool design is one thing, but if the content is lame, no amount of design fripperies will save the site. And I'm sorry to say that these sites failed on the content side of the equation in very very basic ways.

* Grammar
* Spelling
* Punctuation (and spacing)
* Capitalization

Look guys, if you can't get the basics right, I'm not trusting you on the in-depth stuff. I'll forgive the odd typo (Murphy's Law should ensure there's at least one in this post), but chronic disregard of or disinterest in the basics is not cool, revolutionary, or visionary. Why should I trust your tutorial if the introductory blurb is a mess?

Print vs. Electronic Print

Over on a particularly geeky list, I put my two cents in on a conversation about the new iPad, ePub format for e-books, etc. It started when a couple people said, paraphrasing:

"The relevant Wikepidia article includes a statement that ePub isn't very good for content that uses "fancier" layouts and fiddly bits of formatting. Presumably that means newspapers, magazines, comics, technical journals, computer books and so on are going to be really hard to crowbar into the ePub standard." and another poster stated that they doubt all those really require than degree of control in layout.

I don't think they do, either. I'll put down my reasons why, since I've been cruising through all those layout books in the last few months.

Newspapers and magazines have multi-column layouts in large part because a column that's narrower than their full pages is easier to read, in that it's easier for your eyes to jump over to the beginning of the next page. If you're engaged with reading the item for a while, like a hardback book, you can do a longer line. If you're skimming, or reading short bits, a shorter line works better. Plus, short newspaper paragraphs and stories would both look silly on a wide column, and with lots of short paragraphs, a narrower column is actually more efficient.

I learned that one for myself when doing the DucKon program book. If you have lots of short lines or paragraphs, you can get more information onto your page if you have multiple/narrower columns. The experts probably have guidelines for the optimum column width given this type size and that typical paragraph length and whatnot, but that's neither here nor there. Look at print fiction books - I suspect the usual size of a hardback evolved partly because that's about a maximum comfortable line length.

If you look at (older) newspapers and professional journals that have very few illustrations, they still use multiple columns. It isn't something that's done solely to allow incorporation of illustrations, etc.

Now, for items like PDAs, E-readers, netbooks, and such, the screen itself isn't very wide, so you get away from the need for multiple columns in order to get a comfortable line length. And even on wider-screen displays, like a larger laptop or big desktop monitor, you can re-size your window to give you a comfortable line length - I do this if I'm reading something from Gutenberg on my laptop or desktop.

One of the other reasons for fancier layouts is, of course, getting multiple headlines "above the fold" in newspaper parlance. On the initial screen without scrolling, in web-blather. With hypertext(-ish) links, you can get a similar effect by having a list of headlines possibly with snippets so that you can jump to the rest of the story you're interested in. An RSS feed of the BBC news page would be an example.

Adding illustrations in increases the complexity. If you have something like a newspaper or magazine article where the illustration is relevant to the article as a whole, but you don't need to have a relevant bit of text and the illustration in useful proximity, you can put the articles in-line, at a convenient place like a chapter,
section, or paragraph break - I've got several E-books, I think mostly in ePub format, that do exactly that, and I think it works pretty well. It's like non-fiction print books that put photos or other illustrations in one section for production-cost reasons.

I think a lot of it is going to be the layout and design people adjusting their thinking to work with the single-column paradigm. Things that don't seem to be amenable to it now, like newspapers and magazines, probably will evolve and adapt. I expect they already are, IIRC some papers have on-line versions optimized for mobile, ie: small-screen, browsers.

Where I agree that ePub, and probably most e-book formats, are weak are the things like computer books and other technical publications, and probably some textbooks, where you need this bit of text and this illustration, formula, or whatever, and you need to be able to look at both at the same time. That's tougher to do when you don't can't control screen/page breaks, etc.

I also find electronic publications less useful for things where I use them by flipping around or back and forth a lot, not reading from start to finish, even with linking. That's why I like software that comes with paper, not just electronic, manuals. (although that's kind of a lost fight) It's why I can see e-books working for some textbooks, but not others: an example being my son's math textbook, where he's going back and forth between the problems he's working and the examples.

Hey, Where'd my InDesign Post Go?!?

I could have sworn that I posted last night about fun with InDesign. But here it isn't. Grumble.

Last week I finished up a sample Program Book, laid out landscape format, left-bound, 8.5 x 11"-ish pages (so a spread is 22" wide). Part of the reason for that layout is that most people have their computer monitors in landscape mode, which is more condusive to landscape pages. I'm fairly happy with how it came out.

Then I decided to make something smaller. I decided to go with folded letter-size pages, and waffled between doing landscape layout with a top binding, or a normal (ie: boring) left-binding. I decided to go with the boring choice, for several reasons (not necessarily in order):

• If you view it as a PDF as spreads, it'll match most monitors.
• I don't have to make the decision for a top-bound book of having "up" always be toward the spine, or have it set up like a calendar, so everything on one spread is up.
• Easier to wrap my head around arranging the pages correctly for printing, if I couldn't figure out how to get InDesign to do it.
  

I couldn't leave well enough alone, so I messed around with my style set for the new small book. Not sure which set of fonts I like better.

But I did cut and paste of content over from the big sample book. No, I couldn't just use the usual "Lorem Ipsum" filler text, I went and made up lots of silly content, or scavenged from things like my "Moose Hunt" SCA event ad from my "Writing Event Ads" article, and role-playing game backgrounds/characters.

Meanwhile, Ron converted some artwork he'd made for me to greyscale.

The next trick was printing. So far, I've only printed individual single-sided pages to fake book layouts, or I've shipped things off to professional printers who invoke technology to go from pages in numerical order to actual print layouts. I knew InDesign could do said magic, but I wasn't sure if a plug-in would be required.

Poking around, we figured out that it wasn't possible from my first method of creating the book (separate documents assembled into an InDesign "book"). Probably because that method is really meant for big long real books that you would send to a professional printer, not little short documents that you would actually consider printing as a booklet.

Cut-and-paste and manual entry of some items I'd made gratuitous use of technology to automate resulted in converting it to one document. Test booklet printing to a PDF and VOILA!

So cool! The software sliced and diced and put my pages back together on sheets of (virtual) paper in the right order! I was seriously amused by it, yes.

Today's task, poking around to see if there are any free/cheap InDesign plug-ins to do printing from an InDesign book document package.

Ron, who has access to a printer that can do double-sided printing, confirms my suspicion that I need to fiddle a bit with margins and page number locations.

Hey, one advantage of losing last night's post, this one is longer and probably makes more sense.

Drat, Boar's Head Cancellation

I think both Ron and I have the flu. So last night we called the merchant coordinator for Boar's Head and cancelled. I didn't wait until tonight, because she'd sent e-mail a week or so ago with various useful information, and mentioned she had a waiting list. So I'll give somebody else a chance - I've been the beneficiary of waiting-list-dom a couple times, so I'd rather do unto others. And it's highly unlikely I'll suddenly wake up bright and perky tomorrow morning.

Oh heck, who am I kidding. I *never* wake up bright and perky. What a revolting state of being for first thing in the morning. Shudder.

Anyhoo, I'm also neck-deep in design geekery, as detailed over here: http://lonotter.livejournal.com

Sudden Website Progress!

Yay! The new re-built from the ground-up website went live tonight!

Ron had gotten it to the point where I needed to do final proofreading and data-entry months ago, and then other stuff interrupted, and there it sat.

And sat.

And sat.

I stayed home from work today, cold (I thought . . . now I'm starting to wonder if it's the F-word) and recovering from an outpatient surgical procedure. Not exactly motivational conditions, you'd think, but apparently it was.

I sat down and slogged through all the pages, spending more or less time checking and updating. Also deciding that the color scheme needed a major change. There's probably a bunch of stuff I missed, I'll start looking at it again in a week or so for fiddly stuff.

And there's new stuff to add, once we get pictures. It never really ends...

Art Show Semi-Success

We didn't do spectacularly well at the Windycon Art Show, but it wasn't really that bad. Although I had hopes, I didn't rationally expect to sell the Sam Browne belt - it had a somewhat narrow range of sizes it would fit, after all.

But, I did have hopes for the wrist-rockets in particular, as well as the map case and the pouches. Unfortunately, the only thing to sell was the small shell carrier with empty brass. But even though it went for the opening bid price, it was still profitable enough to cover all the entry fees (a whole whopping $4.50).

And I forgot business cards (headdesk headdesk headdesk), but I did give contact information to two different people who may order, one of whom sounds like I'll hear from shortly.

Progress, and Frustration

One, just one, of the things we made for the Steampunk Project, has disappeared. If you go back to the March 4th "Steampunk Prototype Pictures" post, the bottom one shows two sets of shell holders. The one for the big red .50 caliber BMG shells has vanished.

We've been hunting it for almost a week now. Since I have the day off, I (re-) checked some of the bins in the dining room, which Robin cleaned for me a while back. No go. Robin and I are out of ideas where to look. I was starting to wonder if we'd been planning to make it but hadn't actually gotten around to it, so I went back through the Steampunk Project pictures here, and found the one referred to above. So it really does exist.

Ron has suggested a couple more places to check more thoroughly, once Robin finishes his homework.

The Mark II Wrist-Rockets are still on hold while I work on the map case. There may be progress on them today. And maybe I'll remake the 50 loops, dammit. I've figured out prices for everything, just need to fill out the Art Show forms.
The fun lengthwise seam on the map case cap is done, and all the holes are in on the body, off to sew...

Pictures!

First, the repaired off-center pouch from a couple weeks ago. Yay me!


And this is all the parts, except for two end caps, for the map case, which is what I've spent a good chunk of the afternoon/evening working on. All the stitching holes have been punched for attaching the various pieces, and on the cap piece. Still have lots and lots to do down the two sides of the body section - that's tomorrow's job, after other parts are stitched on.

Making new stuff is hard during the week, for some reason - I can work on doing almost anything for pouches during the week, because I've done it all so many times. Stitching, punching holes that are already marked, no problem. But by the time I get home from work my brain is kinda mushy and its harder to get rolling on major work on new things.

That's why although I had all the parts figured out, I hadn't actually done much on the map case this week. The only major decisions made today were on lining (not totally, just put a lip on one edge), and Ron suggested a snazzy way to attach the shoulder straps.

Finished the Sam Brown belt, officially and completely, this morning. Ron identified a couple more errors I made with proportions and dimensions, but if I don't say what they are, I don't think anybody is going to notice (insert evil laughter here).

We've figured out a better way to do multi-sizing for wrist rockets than multiple rows of snaps, so I may try to get those started tomorrow, too. (see comments above re: what I can do on weeknights vs. weekends) I have Wednesday off for Veteran's day, which means I can get set up tomorrow for weeknights and Wednesday busy-ness.

On to the Map Case

I've ruminated on the map case design for a couple days, and tonight I started something like work - laying out the pattern for the one non-rectangular or circular piece I decided I needed. Tomorrow I can continue cutting leather (so far I have shoulder straps and a the main body partially cut. Still debating if I'm going to line the whole thing or not.

Since we started doing the lampworking, we've been competing for the Black & Decker Workmate 225 I got to hold up my leatherworking anvil, but turns out to work quite well as a small workbench. The local Ace Hardware didn't have one in stock, so we ordered one, and it arrived today. So once I'm done here I'll clean off this plastic folding table, which is good for supporting things like dinner and laptops, and spreading tools and parts all over, but isn't as stiff and stable as I'd like for cutting-out-type work.