Up at 2 am and not calling me: seems she found out it was the Condor deadline for getting an ad in the program book, and she sat up half the night putting a new format together, since what we could afford was a half page, and our regular flier isn’t formatted for that size.
This morning she thought she’d lost the file. And was so darned tired she couldn’t find it readily.
I’m laying the law down: she is not to do one more favor for one more person until she gets a chance to get her own files up. She’s done covers left and right; she’s done the lettering and cleanup on the covers I did; and when we get somebody complaining about this little glitch or that one on the site or in a file, she takes it personally to try to get it perfect. I started out doing the file formatting for all the books, but I was having a hard go finishing the Bren book, so she took over doing that temporarily, and then got all the messages from people with a problem with this format and that format, and started trying to fix all of those. Besides the fact she’s the one who’s done all the site artwork, and the research on the sales software, and Paypal, and so on, and then somebody (not on this site) writes that he doesn’t like the colors she used.
I’ve told her give me the formatting job back, for gosh sake, and show me the new things she’s learned since I last did it. She’s got several more formats debugged. We’re not perfect yet, but we’ll keep after it. She did get one nice note from a reader who said we’ve done the cleanest e-books she’s yet downloaded, but all three of us in Closed Circle are perfectionists in our own odd way, and right now she’s working herself into the ground trying to make it all work flawlessly: but 2 am designwork is over the top. And the night before that it was 2 am trying to make the site perfect.
So we get home from the rink this afternoon and get a call from a dear friend who’s having computer trouble. Could Jane fix it?
Thank you, Jane. Don’t know what I’d do without you. But get your own book finished. Please.
….okay….
Please add my please to your please; need I mention that my life will be blighted if I don’t get my hands on the book with the vampire and the cat?
And I am currently trying to work out the best way to buy another copy of Fortress in the Eye of Time so you get the most income. I’m in England, and would prefer not to buy from Amazon after the Macmillan fracas, but I’ll bite the bullet if I have to. Any suggestions would be gratefully received…
I fear Amazon or the publisher is it, and just—buy it as economically as possible and then spend the spare money buying other things from us! 😉
Yeah, you have to put blinders on for some of that stuff. Internet people can be pretty critical being anonymous as they are. When I was younger I had a fan page for a tv show and a visitor disagreed with some of my content and then made a hate page against my site and stalked me online for a while. Who has time like that? Anonymous internet people do. I think most of us here would prefer more writing and books than time spent color shifting graphics. 🙂
If you ever need any design help feel free to ask. The visitors here seem to have a variety of handy skills. I work at an ad agency and have the entire Adobe Master Collection at my disposal. If there is a need for fliers or web banners or stuff along those lines I am more than willing to help out.
For an non-Amazon new book retail site that ships in UK and US, try http://www.bookdepository.com
They ship to U.S. and U.K and mostly with free shipping.
I’m sure that if someone told Pablo Picasso or Jackson Pollock that they didn’t like the colors in the paintings, I’m sure Picasso would have turn away and ignored him as an ignorant loudmouth. Pollock, on the other hand, would have probably used the guy’s head for a paintbrush, after trimming it in the electric fan.
Jane doesn’t have to justify her color choice to anyone. It’s what SHE sees, not what some dimwit who probably can only tell the traffic signal is green by the position of the lighted circle. (In other words, narrow-minded and color blind, to boot.
I wasn’t asleep until almost 1:00AM this morning, woke up out of a sound sleep at 5:50AM, could not go back to sleep and with Sydney hogging the center of the bed, I wasn’t going to get comfortable enough to sleep. Now I don’t know if I’m going to get to sleep tonight, I’m trying to do my taxes and figure up the interest from my savings account, only to discover that I can’t find my passbook and the total wasn’t enough for them to send me a 1099INT. I’ll probably go down there tomorrow, well, no, I won’t because it’s snowing and very windy, so I’ll probably be drifted in again.
😀 😀 😀
Oh, boy…taxes. Talk about the thing that can keep your brain online all night. You have my sympathy.
@joekc6nix….I think we are getting your snow tomorrow.
CJ, Jane……take care…..ignore us when you need to…we aren’t going any where. 🙂 😀 😆
You guys are just too good for your own good(?)!
Jane there’s no accounting for some peoples taste
so please yourself. Also get some real sleep,aka
REST!!
They are predicting snow,snow and snow for the
Midwest and all parts east.
Before one of your faithful readers jumps to conclusions and Files Intent on the hapless soul with computer trouble:
It wasn’t me who phoned! It really wasn’t! All I’ve asked for this week was a sofa & blanket! 😉
😀 😀 😀 It was Joan. ;P Unfortunately, I couldn’t help her, but it was a great excuse for a drink and chat! Can’t wait til we’re all back on the ice regularly.
Joan,I understand that couch,blanket and pillow
fees are one (1) earring! For years I have worn
unpaired earrings because I liked to. It sounds like it may become a necessity for you!(?)
Yeah, I know the verb is wrong in the first sentence,I like it that way.
One hesitates to ask, since one doesn’t wear earrings, depending on the design you “lost”, can you have the posts changed over to threaded posts, so that the back screws on rather than relies on a pressure clip?
I just upgraded my computer to Windows 7, oh boy….. all of the things that USED to work on Vista no longer work on W7, like my scanner, my Palm desktop, and a bunch of stuff that I really hate to be without now. Fortunately, I still have the bookmarks in Firefox, so didn’t lose the sites I regularly visit.
OK Joe – Gotta jump in here. I know you are defending Jane here, and she should not have to be up at 2AM doing design changes… but there are those of us who sometimes *do* have to look at the position of the lights to tell which color it is supposed to be, and many times the color choices of various web designers make it somewhat difficult. I have links somewhere to some guidelines for color choices to avoid problems, but I’m at the wrong machine right now and don’t have them handy. No, I’m not the person who complained, nor have I had any problems with the sites, but my deuteranopia is rather mild, so your mileage may vary.
Spandrel, if you do find a text-background visibility problem of that nature on any of our sites, let us know—that’s something we can definitely and cheerfully fix.
Thanks, CJ – It’s not something that normally causes a problem for me, but I do know others for whom it’s a real difficulty. I know you would fix it without a problem (just don’t do it at 2AM!)
OSG usually wears the hook sort of earring, and there is a very simple little trick that will prevent losing them from the ear: they make a tiny, tiny little rubber sleeve that slips onto the end of the hook that prevents them being lost from the ear. Jane has those for her best earrings, but OSG has this habit of taking OFF her earrings when she lies down for a nap. She picked them up off the nearby bench to put them back on, dropped one, and it went into a black hole before it could hit the carpet. Since OSG’s earrings are often very, very small, it’s possible it bounced somewhere really creative.
Myself, I learned to sleep in earrings, at least the hoop sort, and often don’t take them out from one day to the other. I tend to wear the closed hoops, which actually fold up neatly against the ear when you lie down on them. I haven’t worn my jewelry in years, and now my rings are in a box awaiting a trip to the jeweler’s for repairs—I should reform my habits and at least start wearing the plain hoops again, and get my rings fixed.
Ooooh, I’m worried about this Win 7 equipment interface: but google “win 7 xp compatibility mode”…this (I hear) should let you run those items.
Replying to my own post – found some of the links on wiki.
http://colorschemedesigner.com/ (attempts to simulate color schemes for different kinds of color blindness – The ‘simulated’ deuteroanomolous results don’t look to me to be what *I* see, but I don’t know)
This graphic: http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2007/01/29/science/20070130_BEAR_GRAPHIC.html I cannot see *any* difference between the two colors used unless I focus on a pixel by pixel basis.
That’s really interesting. And the Bear Graphic is really, really hard for me to see—I had to look at the color key and realize that there WAS a color difference in there. Jane and I have held no few discussions (particularly on long drives) about how we actually see color, and I’m convinced that color vision is not about absolutes, but that color varies between individuals about like the individual taste for horseradish, vinegar, or broccoli. Some like a given variation, some can’t take it, and some find a very little goes a long, long way. Jane’s very good with color, and sees more colors than I do, I’m pretty sure. We’ll look at a mountain and try to describe our general impression of the predominant color, and we don’t see it the same, particularly very subtle reds and blues.
Which is a good example of how *difficult* communication can be…..we see by consensus….but do we really know how others see?
It’s snowing and the light is like pearls.
@Azureblu……I too have worn mismatched earrings for years…plus a scarab ear cuff…….earrings are the one type of jewelry that I can wear without worrying about getting caught in equipment……..and I always wear backs of some sort…….try going through a 5 gal. bucket of clay looking for an earring…….FUN!! 😉
BTW…..thanks for the snow, points west folks…..been snowing since 8:30 AM EST……not *supposed* to start until eleven…perhaps it’s moving faster? 🙂 😀 😆
PS…earring backs of all sorts can be purchased quite cheaply, by the bag full at A.C. Moore’s or Michael’s.
PPS….Just heard someone on the news refer to this storm as ‘Snowmageddin! ………….here in New England we call it………..WINTER!
Noah’s Original Storm is now headed inland from Seattle: it’s going to be over us today and rain for over 2 weeks. Those of you in cold areas, look out.
@spandrel, no offense intended, it was a slight to the person who complained about Jane’s choice of colors. For those people who have a genuine color perception deficiency, and I have a very obscure deficiency that precluded me from certain specialties in the military, none of which the Navy has, to my best knowledge. I still think that if I had been given sufficient time, I would have seen the differences in the shading of those dots.
There was a logic question I once read that asked if you were the chief of police in a small town, and a car thief was running around in a stolen car, how would you trap him? The answer was to reverse the colored lenses on the red and green lights, so that when the thief came to a signal, he’d stop when everyone else would continue on. That might not work in real life, since even though the majority of us read color, I think that I also key on the position of the illuminated light. I’ve also driven where the traffic signals were on the corners of the intersections, and were horizontally oriented, with red to the left.
So, no offense intended to anyone, and recalling that CJ said it was nobody on this board, I didn’t think anyone would be upset if I did defend Jane, although I’m sure she’s quite capable of doing so herself. Especially since the person who said it was not very polite in the way it was stated.
No offense taken, Joe. I get a bit sensitive about it sometimes (especially right after my morning caffeine:) I had no idea I had a deficiency until I took the ‘lantern’ test at the medical for entrance to the Air Force Academy when I was 18. I passed it the second time around by guesswork. (still didn’t pass the medical though – evidently 20/15 vision wasn’t good enough… but that’s another story). For anyone interested, a couple of online tests:
http://www.toledo-bend.com/colorblind/Ishihara.asp
or also
http://colorvisiontesting.com/online%20test.htm
(each monitor is different, so these aren’t ‘official’, but could point out a problem to be followed up with a professional)
The person in question also complained that the CC site is too ‘graphics-heavy’. Huh?
I found my passbook….whew! sweating bullets all night long…..it was in the car, fell between the back of the driver’s seat and the center console.
You just can’t please everyone. Even the late Rick Nelson knew that.