Thursday, May 15, 2008

Stone Knives and Bearskins

"I am endeavoring, ma'am, to construct a mnemonic circuit using stone knives and bearskins."- Mr. Spock, City on the Edge of Forever

Technology sucks.

To wit: This is a small representation of the absolutely brilliant marketing campaign I've come up with for the company a series of posters that we will give to our customers to advertise using our product with their customers, the contractors presently engaged in rebuilding our city...
Great, right? It conveys our commitment to the region while showing that we know our stuff, and asking that people think about buying locally. Anyway, the V.P. of sales loves it and wants to make up a bunch of full sized posters (22" x 28") to distribute to all of our customers by Wednesday.

"No problem!" I optimistically think to myself as I activate photoshop. "All I have to do is make a larger image, with better resolution, and turn it into a PDF file that our local Kinko's can turn into postery goodness.

HAH! How naive I was. I put it all together, asked the computer to turn it into a PDF, and the machine bogs down; processing my request for TWO HOURS only to tell me that it can't do it.

Computers suck. They suck hard.

Now, I know that there are friends of mine out there saying "But Rob, why didn't you just use Pagemaker to do it?" I did on the rough draft I gave to my boss to display in his office. the problem is that in incorporating the JOVAL logo and artwork into Pagemaker, I wind up with a little eggshell white box printed around the two logos because Pagemaker doesn't recognize transparencies in an image file.

Sometimes I long for the simplicity of a drafting board and glue stick.

2 comments:

angie. said...

Three words: Creative Suite 3

They love you over there, Rob. I'm sure they would gladly fork over the $1200 it would be for it 'cuz it would be sooo worth it. You would have smooth operation moving and importing between the programs. Quick summary, CS3 kicks azz!

Melinda said...

OMG.. There's a solution for that, but I don't remember what it is. Crap! I'm wracking my brain b/c I encountered the same problem when I was working at the mag with their mix and match software. Oh well, I don't have to worry about that now... I have access to the full Adobe suite through the Web Team. bwahahahahaha! Toys!