microsoft, munging and on being a mercurial iconoclastic professional geek.

• Home
• About
• General Melchett
• LOLs-n-Stuff
• Photos
• Shared News Items

Find Stuff

Meta

• Register
• Log in
• WordPress

About Me

Nick Hodge is a Professional Geek for Microsoft Australia. More info lives underneath the About Box...

-33.831416, 151.222526

MrCell+61.417.212181

Work:

1 Epping Road

North Ryde, NSW 2113

Australia

Stuff

• AU Web Thinkers

  • Cameron Reilly’s G’Day World
  • Des Walsh
  • Duncan Riley
  • Jo White
  • Kate Carruthers
  • Laurel Papworth
  • Mark Pesce
  • Mick Liubinskas
  • Stephen Collins
  • Steve Noble
  • Stilgherrian

• Ego Links

  • basketweaving for the mind
  • Last.fm Music List
  • Live Spaces sand-pit
  • My blip.tv Videos
  • My Youtubes
  • Nick’s Flickr Photos
  • RSS: Nick Hodge: The Complete Feed
  • Slides Shared to the World
  • The Geek Stories; on10.net
  • Twitter
  • Viddler videos

• Friends

  • Mark Szulc
  • Nick Hodge, Excel MVP

• Geek Gods

  • Gary Barber
  • Jed White
  • Lachlan Hardy
  • Myles Eftos
  • Paul Stovell
  • Tatham Oddie
  • Tim Lucas

• Microsoft Peeps

  • Andrew Coates
  • Andrew Parsons
  • Catherine Eibner
  • Frank Arrigo
  • Jeff Alexander
  • Jorke Odolphi
  • Michael Kordahi
  • Nic Fillingham
  • Paul Foster
  • Roger Lawrence
  • Shane Morris

adobe

Adobe and Windows 64-bit ness

It is great to see Adobe embrace 64-bit. And clearly point out why: lots of memory for those bit munging-intensive apps.
Go have a read

CS4 Oddity">Adobe InDesign CS4 Oddity

As far as I am aware, Gary Cosimini and Mike Zahorik are still employed by Adobe.
Whereas I am no longer an employee (share­holder, yes)
Strange hon­our to be in the cred­its. If any­one from Microsoft man­age­ment is look­ing: no, I am not moon­light­ing for Adobe.
This might just get me enthralled to do some real-world stuff with script­ing and […]

A Journey That Began 10 Years ago…

http://quarkvsindesign.com/articles/a1/features/2008/quark-quitting-desktop/
Wow. August 1998 I began work at Adobe. One of the things that was talked about was “K2” — a product that even­tu­ally became InDes­ign.
Don’t know how I feel about Quark chan­ging tack. It is inter­est­ing how the world turns.
Thanks for the link, Andrew.

CS3">Warping Text using Illustrator CS3

Strangely, the most hit page dur­ing the most recent week has been my “how-to” warp text with Adobe Illus­trator 10.
Adobe, in Illus­trator 11, 12 and 13 (aka CS, CS2 and CS3) have dra­mat­ic­ally sim­pli­fied the pro­cess of warp­ing text:
Firstly, you have some text in a Text Frame:

Whilst the frame is selec­ted, there is a new but­ton on […]

On Location

The above is the sunset-view from my room. To the left is the hin­ter­land, and to the right is the beach itself.
On Loc­a­tion, at the Gold Coast pre­par­ing for a busy, edu­ca­tional week at Microsoft TechEd. Being my first TechEd, any­thing could and prob­ably will hap­pen. I do know I will leave more educated […]

Let’s just Blame Windows.

Adobe Premiere and Pho­toshop are a crit­ical part of the applic­a­tion set I use daily to pro­duce videos and online content. Therefore, I (actu­ally Microsoft) owns an Adobe Pro­duc­tion Premium to edit and cre­ate all my thegeekstories.com
Some months ago, I installed a beta of Adobe Sound­booth CS3. And a beta of Adobe Premiere Pro CS3. In […]

PDF via OpenXML, PowerShell…">Generating PDF via OpenXML, PowerShell…

Col­league in crime, and fel­low Aus­sie (well, at least he’s nat­ur­al­ised now), Dave Glover has a post that crosses some old ter­rit­or­ies of mine.
Using Power­shell, .Net, OpenXML and some code that I barely under­stand because it’s not Python; he’s been able to gen­er­ate 60 to 70 doc­u­ments per second.
Link­ing it here as it inter­sects the […]

AUReMIX07 Silverlight Video

Watch the video here of Frank Arrigo and Monique Eagles here. Yes, you will need to install Sil­ver­light.
This is my first exper­i­ment with Sil­ver­light and the Microsoft Expres­sion set of tools. Using the inbuilt play­ers in Media Encoder saved many days/hours of hand cod­ing; yet I am sure there is more in there that will tickle […]

On Butterflies, Aliens and Mountains

InDes­ign CS3 has a pretty neat Easter Egg: a good friend and InDes­ign Evan­gel­ist, Tim Cole, details the inner details of this easter egg.
The allu­sion to InDes­ign 1.0 through CS2 “But­ter­fly” motif, and the moun­tains to InDesign’s pre­vi­ous code names themes (K2, Annapurna, Carib­iner).
The alien is related to QuarkX­press’ alien that appeared when a cer­tain key […]

Falling Off the Face of the World

Sub­titled: my year with Bell’s Palsy
366 days ago today, my body reminded me of who is in con­trol. I’ve told close friends. fam­ily and employ­ers of what occurred; but I think its time to “go large”.
Slurred Speech
On the 25th April 2006 I woke up, and my face felt funny. Droopy, and numb. Hav­ing had a sinus […]