momusradar

Bill Wolfe was surprised to read the New Jersey Environmental Federation endorsed Republican candidate Chris Christie for Governor:

So to get a little understanding, I just went to the Christie website, watched the 1½ minute Christie video, and read his “entire plan” –

At a fundamental level, Christie feels that DEP has become “too intertwined with business life” in NJ (his words) and needs to shrink and disengage on the regulatory front. This language should set off all sorts of alarm bells for those who follow environmental affairs – it represents a sort of kinder and gentler (yet actually more conservative) “Open for Business” mantra.

This endorsement by New Jersey’s largest environmental group may be an asset for Christie. But as Wolfe outlines in his post, Christie’s policy declarations are seriously flawed. Combine this with the concern regarding his insubstantial plans for the state’s finances and it seems pretty clear that Christie is a poor choice for Governor.

InDesign Secrets’ comment on Adobe’s open letter:

I do have one niggling complaint. The PDF was created with Microsoft Word, not InDesign. What gives?

Right. Nor was it distilled with Acrobat Pro. Perhaps Adobe should apologize for this as well.

The scenario: You need to send a PDF of the project so you select Export from the File menu—or use the keyboard shortcut ⌘+E—and InDesign CS3 unexpectedly quits.

The reason: It most likely is an issue with Leopard’s Navigation Services (NavSvcs) as noted at Tim Cole’s InDesign BackChannel.

The workaround: Before attempting the export, select Print from the File menu (⌘+P) and click on the Printer… button at the bottom of InDesign’s print dialog box to invoke the OS’s printer dialog box.

Select Save as PostScript from the PDF drop-down button, enter a name in the following dialog box, navigate to a desired location, and hit Save. I usually save the PostScript file to my Desktop and name it blah.ps. This will return you to InDesign’s print dialog box where you can then select Print to complete the Save as PostScript process.

Now you should be able to Export without getting an unexpected quit.

The caveat: This workaround is only good for the session. You will have to do a Save as PostScript every time you start ID CS3.

The credit: It must go to Dennis Quant who posted the workaround at indesignsecrets.com

addendum July 12, 2008

Apple’s Mac OS X 10.5.4 update addresses the NavSvcs crash issue, as noted at Tim Cole’s InDesign BackChannel:

…contains more fixes for the Nav Services crash problem that manifests itself most frequently in InDesign. It also contains a fix for the file corruption problem that occurs when saving files to a remote server.

Tim also heeded that if InDesign continues to crash after applying the 10.5.4 update:

… please continue to send [Adobe] crash logs. Adobe also recommends the following workaround:

• Before opening an existing document, open a new document (initializing the open/new dialog for the app)
• Invoke the Place dialog (initializing this dialog with no contents to resolve), then cancel out of it

The Progressive brings to light the not-so-secret cooperative between the F.B.I., Homeland Security, and more than 23,000 representatives of private industry. Called InfraGard, this cabal of critical infrastructure members is to surveil over society and report aberrant events in return for “a heads-up… about any threatening information related to infrastructure disruption or terrorism.”

Then they said when—not if—martial law is declared, it was our responsibility to protect our portion of the infrastructure, and if we had to use deadly force to protect it, we couldn’t be prosecuted.—anonymous InfraGard member

From Steve Jobs’ open letter to ‘early’ iPhone adopters:

We want to do the right thing for our valued iPhone customers. We apologize for disappointing some of you, and we are doing our best to live up to your high expectations of Apple.

Woah, woah. Slow down there, Steve. If they didn’t think it was worth it the first time around then they shouldn’t have bought it.

Now give me the $7.80 store credit you owe me for not fully supporting the platinum G3 with Panther.

Mattel is to recall over three-quarter of a million Fisher-Price toys and Barbie brand playsets due to continued concerns of their containing lead paint. CEO Bob Eckert said,

I apologise [sic] to everyone involved. No-one likes to have recalls. But the fact is the safety of children is the most important thing here. So we want to inform the public of our new standards.

What he meant was, “Damn it! We don’t give a rat’s ass about your little ankle biters. If we did, we would have been monitoring the quality of the products all along. But that crap costs money we didn’t want to spend. It’s all about profits you know. So now, in order to punish you all for caring, we will suggest that quality checks are in place and raise our prices. And you will just roll over and accept this because you know damn well you wouldn’t want to deprive little Billy and Sally of our toys. You wouldn’t want them to be the lame kids for not having our cool toys. Right? I didn’t think so. Now eat, stupid.”

On the 29th of June I simply posted without comment, “iPhone—Not a whole widget.”

The new iPod touch, on the other hand, is a whole widget since it doesn’t require a crappy mobile service.

Added thought: musical ringtones are lame; paying to make your own musical ringtone for the iPhone is even more lame.