www.nickhodge.com

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

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 InDesign.

To Adobe InDes­ign team: thanks.

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.

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 the Toolbar:

If you select “with warp”, a new dia­log box appears:

By click­ing the “Pre­view” but­ton, off you go!

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 than I arrive.

Whilst I watched the SBS TV series on the mak­ing of the Crowded House album, Wood­face, there were much rev­els going on around me. It seemed to be a beer bash-come-stag party. So I turned up the TV with Neil Finn hope­fully calm­ing the din. Neil gets the impact of his music. The mer­cur­ial Finn brothers.

Up at 9am this morn­ing thanks to a fire alarm. I could smell the smoke, but thought it was someone smoking on a non-smoking floor.  By the time I got my import­ant items (pair of pants on, room key, wal­let, cam­era, phone — in that order) ready to stroll out — the fire­men were look­ing around for the smoking cul­prit. No one seemed ultra alarmed, so stayed put.

Today, it’s about plan­ning. To quote Uncle Mike: “Piss Poor Plan­ning Pre­cedes Poor Per­form­ance”. Check­ing the cam­era equip­ment comes first.

Hav­ing installed the new Adobe Pro­duc­tion Premium Suite, I tried out OnLoca­tion. And this piece of tech­no­logy Adobe pur­chased rocks. It essen­tially turns your Firewire/Laptop into a hard disk recorder and mon­it­or­ing sta­tion. No more cap­tur­ing slowly in post-production. Straight into Premiere, encode and you’re outta there.

Tomor­row it starts: danah boyd in Brisbane.

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 ret­ro­spect, prob­ably this was the root cause of my headache.

Hav­ing installed my new Pro­duc­tion Premium on my Vista laptop; Setup.exe brings up a notice that Sound­Booth CS3 could not be installed as I had pre­vi­ously used a Beta. OK, using the Adobe sup­plied WinCS3Clean script (writ­ten in Python, BTW), I de-installed everything and attemp­ted to install a fresh.

No go. None of the applic­a­tions that make up the Suite would install. “Com­pon­ents Failed to Install“

Read­ing the installer help sup­port files sug­gests using msconfig.exe to restart without star­tup applic­a­tions; no go. Restart in safe mode (F8 at star­tup) and install. No go. Move the installer DVDs (4x) onto the hard drive and install from this image. No go.

This time, it is my usual prac­tise has been to “blame the OS” (note: even the install notes for Cre­at­ive Suite CS3 on MacOS X runs to 23 indi­vidual points!) . Launch the Setup.exe as Admin­is­trator. No go. Run WinCS3Clean as Admin­is­trator, and use the Win­dows Install Clean Up. No go. Log into the Microsoft net­work just in case there is some weird Group Policy thing on my account. No go. 

Finally, I stumble across this on the Adobe sup­port site: “License has Expired” . Right; my serial num­ber has already been recor­ded and the apps can­not be installed again. Whilst not the exact error I was see­ing, it seemed to be where I was ulti­mately at as the next step.

It worked.

What the? I notice that there are a couple of steps prior to remov­ing this file. Re-installing onto another PC “as a test” and most prob­ably re-installing your whole OS . If I hadn’t removed this cache file, I may have resor­ted to a com­plete OS re-install step.

The prob­lem ulti­mately was Adobe’s dra­conian and flawed install pro­cess. Not the OS. I want my 24 hours of lost pro­ductiv­ity back, please.

If I had rein­stalled the OS, yes the prob­lem would have been fixed. But it’s like open­ing an almond nut with a H2 Hum­mer going at 100. It will surely solve the prob­lem; but lesser force and bet­ter inform­a­tion earlier can open the nut, too. And save lots of time and a bar­rell or two of oil.

Oh, and as a part of my near scorch the earth clean up, I de-installed Acrobat 8 Pro­fes­sional. Hav­ing not used Pro­fes­sional for any­thing apart from read­ing PDFs in the last 6 months, I am not going to re-install it.  Using the .xps format print­ing out stuff I need to keep is great.

How does someone who doesn’t have a day to install soft­ware nav­ig­ate this? How does someone who hasn’t been installing Win­dows and Adobe applic­a­tions for 10+ years get through this?

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 Adobe / Microsoft world.

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 out over com­ing weeks.

NOTE: Sil­ver­light 1.1 is alpha-release!

Work­flow (all on Vista Ultimate):

• Edited foot­age in Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0
• Export Sequence from Premiere Pro using Adobe Media Encoder 960×720 WMV9/WMA9, very light compression.
• Import into Microsoft Expres­sion Media Encoder (May preview)
• Export foot­age as VC-1 Web Server High Speed (using a nor­mal web server). This set­ting is 640×480. Obvi­ously, I could com­press this more.
• Edit the Default.html to cor­rectly ref­er­ence EmePlayer.js (note: this got me for an hour. Linux web serv­ers are case-sensitive, and the Default.html points to emeplayer.js. 404! Bug reported)
• FTP files to dir­ect­ory onto nickhodge.com (could have used Expres­sion Web, but I was debug­ging the prob­lem with upper/lower case file nam­ing above)

Thoughts? Com­ments?  I only have Sil­ver­light 1.1 alpha installed. I’ve tested in Win­dows IE/FireFox and MacOS X 10.4 Safari/Firefox. The Mac’s audio might be out-of-sync. Again, this is reported.

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 com­bin­a­tion is used to delete items on the page.

Thanks Adobe InDes­ign engin­eers for teach­ing us that humour is OK in the work­place; and remind­ing us being funny is subversive.

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 25^th April 2006 I woke up, and my face felt funny. Droopy, and numb. Hav­ing had a sinus infec­tion for the pre­vi­ous few days, I thought it was just a side effect. The 25^th of April is a hol­i­day in Aus­tralia (ANZAC day) so rest­ing was easy.

Tech­nic­ally, I was on sick leave from Adobe for a few days at the end of a 2 week hol­i­day. There was some­thing inside that said I really didn’t want to go back to work.

By the mid-afternoon, I was slur­ring my speech, and my left hand side of my face ached like noth­ing else, whilst also being numb. I couldn’t taste on the left side of my tongue, and there was a loud ringing in my left ear. Oh, and I was drool­ing from the left side of my mouth.

Avril saw me in the after­noon and was not happy. The first thought, espe­cially with slurred speech is “stroke”. For some reason, I was in a haze of pain and had not really thought through what was going on.

A quick “home stroke test” showed that whatever it was, I hadn’t popped a brain vein. Yet. We went off to our local Doctor’s clinic, see­ing the locum who was work­ing on the pub­lic hol­i­day. All I remem­ber of that visit was “thanks for com­ing, you’ve made my day as Bell’s Palsy isn’t all that common.”

A quick course of Cortisone tab­lets on the 25^th were admin­istered to “shock” the body into recov­ery. Cortisone causes the adren­aline gland to go into over­drive. A nasty side effect is that it doesn’t cure the pain, just makes you stay awake to feel it. From memory, I slept for 4–6 hours in total over a 4–5 day period. sid­e­note: JFK was repor­ted to have mul­tiple cortisone injec­tions per day, as he had Addison’s dis­ease. How he got through daily, I do not know. This drug’s side effects are not good!

Fur­ther invest­ig­a­tions with the Doc­tor on the 26^th with a CAT scan showed that (a) I do have a brain and (b) no blood vein damage/clots could be found. So, no stroke.

The dia­gnosis is by a pro­cess of elim­in­a­tion. The pain on the side of my face indic­ated Bell’s Palsy.

Pic­ture: taken 26^th April 2006 by Liam. This is me attempt­ing to smile nor­mally, you will notice that your right (my left) is not mov­ing up normally.

Bell’s Palsy

Bell’s Palsy is an infec­tion of the Sev­enth nerve of the face. This nerve runs from the top of your cra­nium into your ear and across your cheek bone end­ing in your eye­lids, nose, lips, tongue and chin.

Side effects from Bell’s Palsy are numer­ous: ringing in the ears, soreness/aching of the face, loss of sense of taste, loss of sense of feel­ing on the face, watery eye (can­not fully close the eye), inab­il­ity to con­trol the effected side of your mouth (you drool over yourself)

To oth­ers, the most vis­ible side effect is the droop­i­ness and “unbal­anced­ness” of the face: your face drops on one side as the muscles no longer get instruc­tions from that 7th nerve.

Now hav­ing suffered this, I look at faces much closer and can see the dif­fer­ence left-to-right of people’s face. Bell’s is more com­mon in older people. A fam­ous suf­ferer was George Clooney. Repeated ques­tion­ing of med­ical pro­fes­sion­als indic­ated I would not look like George after Bell’s. Bummer.

Bell’s Palsy and a bit of his­tory is at the link. Well worth reading

Bell’s Palsy is the effect of a weak­en­ing on the VII (7^th) Cra­nial Nerve. The most com­mon to least com­mon: viral infec­tion of the nerve, and in my case it was a simple infec­tion that “appeared” sooner with the pain at the top of my skull: which was thought to be a simple sinus infection.

It looks like there is going to be resid­ual pain for some time: which is manageable.

Get­ting Better.

The best cure for Bell’s is com­plete rest. No stress, no work. And that’s what I did. It took 3 weeks for the phys­ical vis­ible side effects to go away — that is, my face muscles moved nor­mally; my eye could shut and I could talk without slur­ring my speech.

How­ever, the long term effects of Bell’s are still with me today: aching left-hand cheek and ringing in the left-hand ear. Over the past 12 months, these side effects have lessened to a point where I can live and work with them com­fort­ably — and know the best way to man­age the reduced energy levels that accom­pany the pain. The muscles on the left hand side of my face are wired dif­fer­ently. It takes a dif­fer­ent “con­trol” to smile nor­mally, so I just smirk from the right side as it takes less effort. You can­not explain to people how its changed, it just has.

I returned to work in early June, hav­ing not been at work for April and May 2006. By mid-May, Avril and I had decided that to fully recover, decom­press and not have fur­ther valves go “bang” in my body — it would be best to make a mid-life course correction.

Tak­ing the Bell’s as an indic­ator of inner body health has prob­ably added mul­tiple years to the end of my life. Stress, a much used work, shows itself in funny ways. Essen­tially, I was a work-aholic in a job that I hated. Double bad.

The Work Thing

Not sleep­ing much dur­ing this epis­ode, I had plenty of time to think. Think­ing and time are a dan­ger­ous combination.

I was not happy with the job, pos­i­tion, stresses and many other things as Chan­nel Sales Man­ager at Adobe. Even more dan­ger­ous, I wasn’t hungry enough — or had the energy level to do what needed to be done. I was out of juice. The company’s local cul­ture was chan­ging; and it just didn’t suit me.

Return­ing to work part-time, I offered Adobe my pos­i­tion back, and asked for a Leave of Absence for at least 6 months, unpaid and with no bene­fits so I could fully men­tally and phys­ic­ally recover. Also, I would use this time to “re-educate” myself to go back to what I really loved: doing tech­nical stuff with end-user cus­tom­ers.

Due to vari­ous “shenanigans” with Adobe HR, the Mac­ro­media ‘mer­ger’ and other legal guid­ance it was recom­men­ded that I resign. It was easier for Adobe this way.

So I resigned.

That felt so good.

Recov­ery

I didn’t feel 100% until mid-September-ish. That is, I could do a full-day without get­ting too tired. Now, if I go too hard for too many days — I get the same aches in the face; but know how to man­age the pain and the asso­ci­ated tiredness.  Essen­tially, when I am not tired I work at 125+% to be 100% pro­duct­ive. Find­ing an appro­pri­ate, and less-stressed and prob­ably less fin­an­cially bene­fi­cial job was my goal.

By this time, Adobe had noth­ing on the plate for me full­time, so I star­ted look­ing else­where for stuff to do. A small gig for Adobe came, I took that and com­pleted that contract.

What you will read in my posts of that time: I knew what I wanted to do with the rest of my work­ing life.

This “Enthu­si­ast Evan­gel­ist” job at Microsoft appeared. Know­ing Frank Arrigo through Mike Sey­fang, thanks to http://linkedin.com, I applied and the rest is now his­tory. It’s the first job that I saw that I really felt I wanted, and would be at >100% at.

So, that’s the story of the last 12 months. Some people heard that I was “ser­i­ously ill” and just exper­i­enced me not being at work all of a sud­den. Speak­ing to these people since, it was if I had fallen off the face of the earth.

Not quite, just my face had fallen, that’s all.

I hope this post helps someone else in the future. There is life after, and with Bell’s. It will just be all different.

Update 2^nd June 2007: strange cramp in the left-hand side of my neck/face today. Res­ul­ted in a slight dip­ping of the nerves around my mouth and sore­ness. The muscles seem out-of-place and aching along my cheek-bone.