May 2004 Archives

Remember my recent grimmacings about the increase in workplace breath fumes? Well check out what I just spotted in the newspaper: "The malodorous phenomenon of Atkins-induced halitosis is plaguing low-carbers across the nation." AHAH! That made the pieces start to fall in place. :: starts ticking off list of known Atkinsers & related flinch quotients ::

And what causes it? "The body normally converts glucose for energy, but in a low-carb diet, it charges up by burning fats. In the process, it produces keto acids, which are released through urine and the breath. A telltale sign of ketone breath is a sickly sweet odor. But what really makes Atkins breath offensive is that 75 percent of Americans have gum disease....When [gum disease] is combined with atkins, the effect can be similar to rotten eggs....It's horrible." I see. Is there any hope? "Although improving oral hygiene can help a normal halitosis patient, Atkins breath is much harder to eliminate. With Atkins, 'even if you have good oral hygiene, the odor won't go away,'....'You can always tell people on Atkins,' said Nowak. 'Especially at the health club, when they're breathing heavy.' " ¹

So there you have it. That wet-gutter-hot-dog odor that's making your head twitch? That's the sweet smell of weight loss.

As if I have room to talk. "Do you think you could put a few hundred less onions on that salad, Perez?" :: chomp chomp ::

1. Source: Chicago Tribune, Julie Deardorff

We're going to drive down to Phoenix today to get together with some of my aunts, uncles and cousins. I haven't seen some of them in years. I've been really excited about it. So you know what happens, right?

She's been building up for the past 3 days. I've been hitting it with zit ointments. But it's no good. Fortunately, it hasn't developed any concentric rings yet.

This morning I indulged myself in a once-a-week cholesterol enriched breakfast.

1. Sautee red bell pepper, poblano pepper, red onion, mushroom, garlic, cumin, and salt & pepper in BUTTER.

2. Add scramblified eggs and WHOLE MILK.

3. Add just a bit of shredded COLBY-JACK and serve with salsa and warm tortillas...except when you're out of tortillas, and have to use toast instead.

I know. This is like posting pictures of how I made a bowl of Fruit Loops, but as a novice cooker, I like it.

And here is a picture of Giselle playing 'guess what it says on the other side of the card' while I consume my victuals.

I was checking my site statistics and ran across some poor sap from Russia who visited based on a link from this page. Just do a find for "droppings" and there it is about 3/4 of the way down the page. Figures.

Sometimes I catch a break. Today was a 'Good Hair' day for me. Which is to say, I managed to sculpt my combover into a tidy beret profile with just a few easy swoops of the comb. Snappy!

Meatloaf. Dashboard Lights. Playing on the radio right now. Horrible horrible interminable song.

You might want to skip the rest of this if computer jabber puts you in a coma.

At work, we've been making the switch from Quark XPress to Adobe InDesign for our document layout software. It is very cool. I've been using Quark for 7 years. Before that, it was 7 years of PageMaker. I had just started working at AlphaGraphics in 1989 when Larry Furlong held a class for anyone who was interested to learn PageMaker. I remember when he showed us how to use the tab ruler--oh man. Once you learned the tab ruler, BAM, you were THERE. The wheels were off the ground, and plane was clearing the power lines. Using spaces to set up hanging indents was so...icky.

But after a few years, I started to develop Quark-shame. Because that's what the 'pros' used. If you wanted tight typography and good separations, you didn't use PageMaker, you used Quark, and you tilted your nose a little higher. So around '93 I decided to start practicing with Quark because, you know, some day I was going to be a pro, right? But it hurt. Bad. I knuckled down and did my first newsletter and it gave me that 'you eat your vegetables, young man!" feeling. It was so wireframey and different, and slowed me down so much that I couldn't make myself switch over. When we moved to Flagstaff in '94 and I started working at Kwik Kopy, I started messing with it a little more. But when I got hired at Gore in '97, I was forced to hit it 100%. It burned. But just like the dvorak thing, it felt natural after a few months.

In '99, Adobe introduced InDesign. It was going to be 'PageMaker done right.'--'The Quark Killer.' But it took them a few years to work out the kinks, and to gather a following. I won't go into a 101 Things I Do and Don't Like About Quark, but there are a couple things that bugged me more than others. Quark had a stranglehold on the industry, and if you didn't like the way they were doing things, well too bad. Where else were you going to go? I love that attitude in a company. It makes me feel warm and fuzzy. And then Mac OS X came out and do you think they were going to take their sweet time migrating to the new OS? You betcha. Meanwhile InDesign was gathering steam, and it got itself OS X native without a whole lot of suspense.

Well, we upgraded our Macs last year, and were forced to move to OS X (which is good). So by that point, Quark was dragging us down. And I was getting itchy to check out Adobe's baby. But by some miracle, Quark came out with an OS X version a few months later. So we upgraded Quark and had some time to play around with it, since nobody would accept the files yet. At this point, we found out it was going to give us trouble with non-roman typefaces like Greek, and Cyrillic, and Central European. It's a huge pain to describe all the nuts and bolts of the problem, other than to say it was going to drive us bonkers.

So we got gutsy and downloaded the InDesign demo and started testing it. And you could almost hear a choir saying "aaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh". This program is just awesome. I know that some of it is the whole 'grass is greener on the other side' syndrome, but there were things I didn't realize I was missing. Not only is it OpenType compatible for non-roman font goodness, but it previews imported graphics in crystal clarity. I can actually line up an eps diagram with other layout graphics and not have to guess where it will really end up. If there is a font substitution problem, it shows me exactly where the problem is. Besides all the sweet, refined PageMaker deja vu moments, the tabbed-interface is really really comprehensive, and sleek at the same time. I can preview separations, live on-screen--I don't have to run a bunch separation prints to find out if I screwed any colors up. It doesn't freak out if an inline graphic is too wide for the column. Did I mention the graphic previews are high-res? Right. And it is like THIS :: makes crossed fingers :: with PDF files. PDF format (Acrobat) is what we use for document review and more and more what we use to submit files to vendors and clients. It's just too easy now. I'm getting all misty-eyed...I mean, no...but almost.

So after a bunch of logistics and research, we got the program for everybody, and we're starting to migrate our layouts. Now if only it would make sandwiches for the kids, automatically pay my bills, and kite checks when I need it to :-/