Archive for January, 2010

Private (Vomit) Practice

0
743 days
by in art, hot and spicy, inspiration, process, time management, workflow, writing

Get out that big imagination paintbrush in your brain:

As I write this, I’m laying in bed with my girlfriend. Naturally, I am building a database and naturally and she is watching Private Practice. It’s her guilty pleasure – a stress relieving wind-down before bed. All of the sudden I hear a familiar voice – the voice of Mark Sloan. Yes, Mark Sloan of Grey’s Anatomy fame. Now, I know what you must be thinking. You recognize his voice? What a doofus.

But, yes. Yes I do recognize his voice. You know why? Because. Because there have been many nights that while I was working, she was watching Grey’s anatomy – enough so that I’ve loosely become familiar with the shows.

So fuck me in the ear: what the fuck is Sloan (McSteamy that is, not his daughter – whose first name is Sloan but last name is Riley) doing on Private Practice? I shit a brick. A huge brick. I turn and ask, “Why is McSteamy on Private Practice? That is his nickname, right? And the other one is McDreamy?” She tells me I’m right, after which I pull open the elastic of the oversized women’s basketball sweatpants I’m wearing and vomit into my underwear.

Fake doctor shows have cross-over episodes. Holy fuck. What is the world coming to? I’d rather vomit on my balls than deal with this nightmare.

So, I write this, and relocate to the dining room table.

Windows 7 Task Manager and Fixing Taskbar Auto-Hide Glitch

2
749 days
by in windows 7, workflow

It seems as though Windows 7′s taskbar auto-hide feature doesn’t work from time to time. Whether it be because:

  1. heavens, a new program was installed
    —or—
  2. blast! your computer has been on for a few hours

that still-clunky response to the OS X dock is, well, still clunky. To enable auto-hide to begin with:

  1. Right-click on the taskbar and select Properties
  2. In the Taskbar tab, uncheck “Lock the taskbar” and check “Auto-hide the taskbar”.
  3. press Apply/OK et voilà.

If no “et voilà”, here’s a quick fix that tends to fix any Microsoft OS GUI (at least they’re consistent)—but please, save all important working files before doing this (I am not responsible for your machine or data losses!):

  1. Run the task manager. You could do the old shortcut (alt+ctrl+del), or jump straight to it with ctrl+shift+esc.

    You get bonus nerd points for doing it with two fingers.

  2. Stop the explorer process! There may be multiple explorers running—order them by memory usage, and stop the largest one. Alternatively, just stop them all.
  3. With task manager open, go to File>New Task(Run…) and type: 
    C:\Windows\explorer.exe

    or, wherever your explorer executable is. Unless you’re a super dork and had a reason to move it, it should be here.

  4. Your taskbar should now work appropriately. If not, yell: “THANKS BILL” and shake your nerd-fist.

Simple Solar Energy Unit Conversion

0
754 days
by in Uncategorized

A useful conversion for (solar) energy:

1 kWh/m2/day = 317.1 Btu/ft2/day

Using this to determine solar energy production feasibility, based on data from:

  1. http://rredc.nrel.gov/solar/calculators/PVWATTS/version2/readmefirst.html
  2. http://www.nrel.gov/docs/legosti/old/7904.pdf

Saving Illustrator CS4 Preferences

0
761 days
by in Adobe, design, Illustrator, organization, process, time management, tools, workflow

While Adobe products are industry standards, they are still not without serious workflow issues.

One of my major gripes is Illustrator’s inability to save and load preferences from within the program. This would come in handy when working in different units, as I regularly do; The 10px grid I use for web work isn’t compatible with an imperial or metric grid for print work, and vice versa. Luckily, I’ve devised a workaround.

  1. First, you’ll need to find your Ai preferences file. For Windows 7, it can be found in a hidden folder:C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Adobe Illustrator CS4 Settings\en_USFrom your explorer window, drag the en_US folder to your start menu and Pin it there. In OS X, you can similarly make a link to the folder and keep it in your Dock, desktop, or wherever you fancy. The file we’ll be renaming later is named AIPrefs (no extension)- we’ll deal with that soon enough. If you don’t have hidden folders visible, here’s how. If you’re on a different OS, or using a different version of Illustrator, have a look here, or search the nets.
  2. Open Illustrator, start a blank document, and set your preferences. The document type doesn’t matter.
  3. Close Illustrator.
  4. Open the folder you linked in step 1, copy and rename your preferences file to something descriptive like AIPrefs[web]. It’s crucial to copy so we don’t accidentally modify or delete our manually defined preferences.
  5. Repeat steps 2-4 for each grid-setup or preferences variation you need.
  6. Now you’re ready to use your custom preferences. Before you reopen Illustrator, delete the current AIPrefs file.
  7. Copy the preferences file you want to use and rename it to AIPrefs.
  8. Start Illustrator and behold the glory.

Obviously, if the last thing you worked on is for web, and the current thing you worked on is for web, you don’t have to change the AIPrefs file, so it might be helpful to keep a note of which file is currently active. You can also search the AIPrefs file to see how Illustrator is modifying the contents. It’s for the most part readable alpha-numeric content. If anyone knows of a better way to do this, please let me know. Ciao.

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