Rants

Finally Got The Blues

A couple weeks ago a co-worker asked me to help out with his son’s science project. It was a simple job, print out the headings for his tri-fold display. They want some stuff that was longer than they could print on their home ink-jet. He brought me the PowerPoint presentations and asked if I could print out the headings in a nice dark blue, no problem, I thought. We have a nice big ol’ Hewlett-Packard DesignJet800 plotter that can print on 36″ wide paper and I guess maybe the whole 150′ length if you didn’t run out of ink.

When I printed out the first page, much to my surprise, it was a lovely shade of purple. I started testing other shades of blue and they all came out different shades of purple. The really dark blue-green came out with almost no purple, but it looked black or gray not blue at all. When I asked if purple was OK, he said yes with little enthusiasm, but what could we do? I ended up printing out everything for the science project because there was no way that they would be able to match my purple shade at home on their printer.

Yesterday I had to make up a sign for here at work and not thinking I choose a nice blue for some of the lettering. Of course I cussed loudly (to myself) when the blue printed as purple. After completing the sign project I made it a goal to find a fix. The internet knows all, so off I went in search of a solution. My first stop was at the HP support forums. I searched for “blue prints purple” in the DesignJet800 forum and was rewarded with seven hits. The first one says, “Latest firmware has new color maps to help with this.” Bingo.

I check my plotter and it says I have firmware A.02.09 installed and A.02.12 is available, so I download all 24Meg of it and put it on my desktop. The file is an executable, so I double click and it installs some maintenance software on my C: drive. After it installs, it automatically starts the program and promptly tells me it can’t find the printer?! I do a quick double check and the printer is listed as one of my printers.

I go back online to the page I downloaded the firmware upgrade from and scroll further down the page to where the troubleshooting section is. There is my problem, you can not do this over a network, you have to be directly connected to the printer or run the program from the server. I hunt down our local IT guy and ask if he would run this update from the server. Yes, but not today, ask tomorrow.

Fast forward to this morning. I copy the maintenance program file to a networked drive and follow him to the computer room. He logs on and has to map a drive to the directory I used, and then he double clicks on the application. The hourglass appears for a half a minute or so and then disappears. We wait. And wait. And wait. The natural reaction is to try again and sure enough, history repeats itself, nothing. We go to the task manager and there are 2 processes running and neither of them are using any CPU time. I tell him to go ahead and kill the processes and I’ll move to Plan B, direct connect.

I go see one of the assembly engineers to borrow a laptop. First I check and see if it has a USB port so I can load all 24Meg of the maintenance program to it. He hands me a power supply too, as the battery, like every laptop battery in the plant, is dead. I disconnect the printer cable from the net port and plug it into the back of the laptop and turn it on. The Windows98 start screen displays and I hope to myself it is at least 98SE. I get lucky, as it turns out the OS is 2nd Edition, so I can use the USB thumbdrive.

But first I need the drivers, so I go back over to my desktop to surf the net. My thumbdrive is made by a company called Wolverine, so my first couple of searches brings back a lot of hits for Marvel Comic’s X-Men and the University of Michigan football team. I finally find it, www.wolverinedata.com and down load the drivers. Seeing as I can’t use the thumbdrive yet, I have to transfer the drivers to, egad, a floppy disc. Rifling through my desk, I find a disk in the bottom of drawer #4. After loading the USB drivers on the laptop, I to plug in the thumbdrive and can’t. Nice design work Dell, the USB port is too close to the parallel port to accommodate both devices at the same time.

I unplug the printer and copy the maintenance program to the laptop. Double click and it loads right up. The program starts and it can’t find a printer, again. This time there is a good reason, its not plugged in. Unplug the USB drive and plug in the printer, still no joy. Of course you knucklehead, the DesignJet800 is not installed as a printer on the laptop, this is the first time they’ve seen each other. Back to my desktop PC and back to the internet to download the driver for the printer. It is of course 1.9Meg so Have to use the thumbdrive again.

Unplug the printer, plug in the USB drive, copy the drivers to the desktop, unplug the USB drive, hook up the printer and install the printer drivers. Whew. Run the maintenance program and it finds the printer. Yippee! It reports that an upgrade is available and I should not turn off the printer until it is finished. I click OK and watch as a process bar creeps along the screen installing file 1 of 3. It finished the first and starts the second when a BSOD pops up on the laptop! F%*k! I hope I haven’t screwed up the printer’s memory. I shut down the laptop and when the screen on the printer says, Turn off printer”, I do just that.

I start the printer again and boot up the laptop. The printer seems to start up normal, so that is a relief. I start the maintenance program again and when I click OK a progress bar creeps across the screen installing file 1 of 2. So at least it knows it finished the first file OK. After both files are loaded the laptop program says, “Success.” The printer shows an hourglass and then it transitions to a pictogram indicating I should unplug it, I do just that.

I unhook the laptop and turn the printer back on. The printer boots normally and I check the firmware screen and it says I have A.02.12 installed. Hook it back into the net port and return to my desktop PC to retry yesterday’s sign where the blue printed purple. After all that song and dance the blue still prints out as purple! Sh#t!

I go back to the HP forums to check out the other 6 hits from yesterday’s query. Response number 3 looks promising, it is from a moderator: “When loading the paper, be sure to scroll down all the way to the bottom of the paper list and select the enhanced color profiles. These selections, along with the current firmware, should get you up and printing blue in no time.” I trot over to the printer and select enhanced color profiles. The paper list I just scrolled through is repeated, but with an EC on the end of the paper name. I select the appropriate one and try printing the sign, one more time. Finally, I got blue.

1,988 Hours To Go

The light near the front stairs burnt out Monday night, so yesterday evening I replaced it with another one of those 2,000 hour bulbs my mother-in-law bought. I’ll be keeping track of how long this one lasts too. The one I put in earlier this month is still going and has 1,400 hours left before it burns out.

GMail

Last week some time I noticed the “Invite a Friend to Gmail” link was back at the top of the page when using Gmail. I ignored it.

Later in the week I noticed the “Invite” link was gone. Oh well, I figured if I wasn’t giving them away to “friends” fast enough, they were passing them along to those who would. Turns out they weren’t gone, just moved. The invite think has its own little block on the lower left of the Gmail page right below the labels menu. I have 50! to give away. Ha, I don’t have one single person to give a Gmail address too, let alone 50.

I have pestered everyone I know, I have offered them up free to strangers who have stumbled onto my blog via the Insane Giveaway Nights, I’ve tossed a few to fellow Miata.netters and I have even given them away philanthropically via gmailomatic, so how the heck am I to rid myself of these?

Even though it is against the Gmail Terms of Service I am going to sell them that’s how (what are they going to do, take away my account?) So if you want one of my Gmail Invites, just paypal $1,000.0 US to me at brian AT mr-miata DOT com. I figure if I sell enough of them I can buy one of those brand new next generation Miatas that they are going to introduce in about a week at the Geneva Auto Show.

I Hope You Laughed Your Ass Off

If not at the joke in the previous post, at least at the man who took over an hour to post it to his blog.

About mid-morning my email alert chimed and when I opened it I got a little joke from one of the usual suspects. I thought it was cute and I hadn’t blogged one in a while, so I went online and hit “new Entry.”

Because it came the way it did there was of course several right brackets and extra carriage returns to remove, so I cut and pasted into an empty txt file. After sprucing up I cut and pasted it into the Entry Body area and hit publish.

I was greeted with a 404. Huh? Back button, try again, 404. Maybe there is some sort of hidden escape character that I can’t see and the cutting and pasting is just inserting it, which makes the entry fail. So I open the txt file in word and save it as a word document. I close out Word and open it back up to the file. I then save it to a plain txt file again. Open the txt file, copy and paste that into the Entry area again and hit publish. 404. Dang.

Next I try and paste in each of the 3 paragraphs one at a time publishing after each one. First one goes fine, second one too, but number three is the culprit. So I try pasting it into the Extended Entry area to see if it would work there. Nope. Dang, Now I’ve got 2/3 a joke online and no punch line. I delete the post and rebuild the blog. I’ll try again when I get home, maybe something at work is causing it…

I forwarded the email to home and did the whole clean and prune exercise again before attempting the posting. All three paragraphs at once netted the same results, 404. (which reminds me, I need to make a custom 404 page for here) So I plugged in the first two paragraphs and published. I then started adding 3 or 4 words at a time from the punch paragraph until it failed. Which turned out to be right after the word python. I tried skipping the word weally when pasting and that didn’t work. I then tried typing in the word weally, nope. How about if I spell it correctly? Really didn’t do the trick either. So then I went back to my original txt file and pasted it in. That worked! There was a line break after the word python in that file, so I cleaned up the text file and I left the extra carriage return in after python and that worked too. The thing that I did to solve the problem and not have a misplaced carriage return was I placed a no breaking space in html code between python and weally.

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 30

With Character References Like These

OK, maybe Ed Bradley I can understand, Elizabeth Taylor is a stretch, but Kobe Bryant? We know Kobe has sex with the correct gender and of the proper age, but as to consensual, eh, maybe.

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 28

Should Have Recognized Them As Omens

On yesterday’s trip to Beaufort we started by looking for the Visitor’s Center. It is a touristy type town, so every little spot has a sign outside mentioning Tourist Info, but that is usually just to get you in the door. We stopped into one place that offered walking tours and he was helpful, gave us a map of the historic district and was helpful about a lunch spot, but didn’t know where the “official” Visitor?s Center was. Should have been an omen.

Donna asked a gift shop place and was directed around the corner and up a block, but that proved fruitless. We did find a bookstore where she asked again, only to be brought to a second individual who said the Visitor’s Center was about 10 blocks that away, but there is a smaller one back near where we parked. But the smaller one might not be there anymore, as there was talk of consolidating it with the bigger one. We risked the closer but uncertain one. When we arrived it turned out it was all gone (although there was still a sign offering visitor info outside the place.) An omen?

We walked the ten blocks. On arrival we went inside and poked around the place for a while, picked up some brochures and got a Beaufort phone book, before we decided to leave and walk back for some lunch. Because it was sunny and warm we thought a couple of bottled waters would make the trip back more pleasant. They had a soda cooler there in the front office and I grabbed a couple of cold ones and went up to the counter. There were two people behind it and 2 customers on this side. Both individuals were helping one person and another was waiting their turn, then me. The woman being helped was buying something too, so the woman behind the counter was refolding a map while the guy was running her credit card. The kid running her card was way to effervescent and acting loudly too cute to be enjoyable. The woman was having trouble folding that pesky map. This was taking way too long and who knew how long it was going to take the two to handle the woman in front of me, so I looked at Donna, and she looked back, we wordlessly decided we could make the walk without collapsing if we didn’t have the water. I put the bottles down and we left. Portend of things to come?

The first place we came to I pooh-poohed as it looked too new and crowded. We walked down a little alley to a place that had a signboard on the main drag. There was a nearly full outdoor dining area and some steps up to maybe a place to dine inside and a door underneath that looked like an entrance. We chose downstairs, but when we opened the door it was definitely a bar. Smokey and dark, with patrons startled by the bright light of the opened door, we knew in an instant this wasn?t for us. I just let it close with the both of us still outside. At restaurant #3 we opened the door, entered and stood there deciding what to do. There wasn’t any sign saying “Seat Yourself” or “Please wait to be Seated”, so we hesitated in the entranceway. Ah, here comes someone on the wait staff, she’ll help. Nope, she breezed on by without so much as a how do you do? We figured they didn’t want our business, so we left. We got a little closer at place number four. We were greeted at the door and shown to a table, menus were dispersed, but that was it. We sat at our table for the longest time, we made our choices, but no one stopped by the fill our water glasses, let alone take our order. By now we had pretty much decided to get in the car and drive out to the strip and eat fast food, but we spotted a sign across the street to a place we had seen a menu from at the Visitor’s Center. With a sigh we decided to give it one more try. We were greeted with a smile, seated at a table against the wall that held cloth napkins, given a menu and our blue, real glass, goblets filled with ice water. After taking our order our waitress disappeared. A little while later we see her grab her purse and head for the door. Oh, no. We’ve been here before, our waitress bails at the end of her shift and we never get served. The other waitress in the place is helping about three other tables and has so far not even looked our way. After about 15 minutes and Donna has rearranged her purse a couple times to entertain herself, we had just about decided to leave when our meal arrives. The salad was great and the flat bread pizza, while almost too over done, was tasty. Our new waitress was very attentive once we had our food and because we split the two items between us our bill, with tip, was only $16. Glad we didn’t end up at the Burger Doodle, but boy that was harder than it should have been.

This is not the first time we have gone through an ordeal while trying to get a meal while traveling, so you would have thought we would have caught on to all the omens thrown our way, but no we were blind to them. We had a previous good experience with Beaufort a decade or so ago, so this little snafu hasn?t totally soured us on the town. When we next visit I think the first thing we will do is find a lunch spot early before the crowds and the wait staff tires.