2008-02-11

[Future Boy]

QotD: Not rocking a mp3 player lately. Prolly the thing I have the most of on my desktop is Air.

[Märk]

drc: I made the cute girl at work burst out laughing today. She had just finished taking her WHMIS (Workplace Hazardous Material Information System, pronounced "wimmis") certification, and I said "Hey, I've got a great slogan for WHMIS to use- Whutchoo talkin' bout, WHMIS?!"

Yeah. I guess you had to be there.

QotD: If you mean in terms of most songs from a single artist, it would have to be Anal Cunt. I mean, I have like 400 of their songs on my iPod, but most of the songs are only 30-45 seconds long.

[sausage boy]

I should have taken a sickie... there is just way too much work. I don't feel like learning how to integrate database listings into an indesign layout using macros. I feel like sitting on my arse and shooting aliens.

I used Applescript (well, Frontier script technically) to automate the flow of hundreds of database elements onto Quark pages, marrying corporate pricing data with product images and graphics. This was in the early 90s. I'm thinking Adobe should have fixed their element reference structure to do this eloquently by now, no? Macros would suck at this. Frontieris free I believe, and was awesome for that stuff, since it could make SQL calls, COM calls, Applescripts calls, and whatever.

What sucks is that there probably IS a much better way of doing this, but the powers-that-be for this publication have a mindset that only allows for it to be done the same way it has been done for the last 15 years. Does that sentence even make sense?

Basically, I am fighting an uphill battle. Against armoured troops in a defended position. And all I have to fight them with is a licorice strap.

[roymond]

I don't know about AppleScript bindings but Adobe has basically put ActionScript and full DOM access methods into EVERYTHING now, so that'd be a pretty good place to start. (And really, ActionScript is a much better language than AppleScript.)

Yeah, I'm sure everything's been updated. This was 15 years ago. Frontier extended Applescript a great deal. It used the Applescript handles that many programs implemented (and has since implemented DOM but I didn't deal with that world), so that you could address every element in a document (that was addressed by the application) as well as most of the host application actions, then built a superior object-oriented language environment around it.

Adobe at the time was consumed with making PDF the dominant force in everything from newsletters to Mercedes transmissions to Mars rovers to sheep cloning.

Basically, I am fighting an uphill battle. Against armoured troops in a defended position. And all I have to fight them with is a licorice strap.

That's when you solve their problems against their will but on their time. Then, when they wake up and say "oh...", you get a job where they appreciate you.

[blue]

if you work for any company that uses fifteen year old computer anything, get. the. fuck. out.

[roymond]

I think he's talking about the process through which things are done, not the tools. It's manual, and they resist automating. You can use big ass machines and the latest versions of whatever, but if you're still manually placing content on the page it's as bad as using 15 year computer anything. Except, in publishing, 15 year old automation tools would still blow away what many places are doing today.

[sausage boy]

Yes, the process, not the machines, is 15 years old, but it runs in conjunction with a few scripts that were written ages ago. I would hazard changing it, but that kind of thing is not rewarded here (though they say it is). Getting the fuck out is on the cards for later in the year.

[fluffy]

Having worked on technology which was intended to make life easier for the publishing industry, I totally know the sort of thing sausage boy is going through.

Hey, take pretty much any book and open up to the copyright page. You may notice a string of numbers, "1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10." Ever wonder what that's for? It's actually for the edition number. Back in the good old days of plate-based printing, when they needed to update a book to a new edition, they wouldn't cast new plates for the whole book, they would only replace the plates which needed changing. Except for the copyright page - they would update the edition number by buffing out the lowest number.

Even though books haven't been printed in that way for years, because the copyright page has a well-known and established convention, the publishing industry doesn't want to change the format.

(Smaller presses just go ahead and make a new copyright page instead, but the publishers with hundreds of years of legacy tend to not like changing very much.)

[Rabid Garfunkel]

if you work for any company that uses fifteen year old computer anything, get. the. fuck. out.

My place of employment (printer) finally scrapped the manual plate stripping process a couple of years ago, much to my relief. "Paper" cuts with metal plates suck balls. Dead fermented balls.

But yeah, there is a point where entropy becomes a cancerous stagnation.

Plate buffing, Fluffy? Sounds like something Caravan Ray would be into Did like the deletion pens for the toxic high that dry-erase pens used to have.

[The Weakest Suit]

among other things, my puny 1 gig sansa has:
song fragment ideas for FAWM
completed FAWM songs
current songfights
yoko kanno (solo cd)
yuki kajiura (.hack 2, fiction)
maaya sakamoto (2 singles collections)
the pillows (latest cd and singles)
and the 1 cd that never leaves my player
SUPERCAR - HIGHVISION
this reminds me of a japanese "ok computer". not that i love ok computer, but this album is a masterpiece that transcends many genres.

[HeuristicsInc]

yoko kanno (solo cd)

How does that compare to the Cowboy Bebop stuff?
-bill

[fluffy]

Her Macross Plus stuff was kick-ass as well.

[The Weakest Suit]

yoko kanno (solo cd)

How does that compare to the Cowboy Bebop stuff?
-bill

her solo cd came out before that suff, i think.
the seatbelts (the bebop band) partially got back together to record the ghost in the shell stand alone complex stuff, which is more rock/techno instead of blues/jazz (5 cds), and for wolf's rain, which is more gloomy, and slow (2 cds).
i'm also a fan of her more celtic/classical soundtracks like the vision of escaflowne and turn 'A' gundam (there are 5 or 6 cds for each of these series including movie soundtracks for each).
based on the body of her work that i have heard (probably arould half of what she has released), i feel that she is one of the most creative people on the planet (and a major suck on my credit card).