I do love typing on the newer keyboards, though. The "touch" of the keys is fantastic. I'm old enough that I had learned to type on a manual (yep, not electric, but the strictly mechanical kind) typewriter. It took me years to learn not to pound the daylights out of my computer keyboards. Didn't really stop until I got these new ones. I got lucky and upgraded before they went to the mini keyboards. I hate the missing number pad, but love typing on them.

I've been warned that cs6 displays all spot colors with the LAB profiles, not cmyk, which has caused problems with soft-proofing and a few color-proofers as well. As for fonts, I've been cursing nearly all of the versions of Creative Suite, because each version seems to "see" the font names of loaded/used fonts slightly different from each other. So if I open a file made in the previous version, I have to manually go and tell it to use the same blasted fonts that have remained loaded the entire time because it's too stupid to be consistent.

I still say that my favorite "tool" is my two-handed Viking War Axe. The handle is 4 feet long, and the blade of the axe is 14 inches. For some reason when I had a picture of me on my wall at work in full Viking war-gear holding that axe people were reluctant to interrupt me...

I can't remember where I saw it (alas) but I can recall advice for an old OS-X upgrade (probably 10.0 to 10.1 upgrade but don't quote me on that one) that recommended disconnecting ALL peripherals completely before backing up, much less installing. I've tried to follow that as closely as possible, given that most backups are out of necessity going to an external of some sort. What I noticed along the way is that during boot-up if there's anything it's connecting to the system seems to be unable to advance if it doesn't get some kind of reply from devices it thinks are hooked up. I've even gotten to the point where I will disconnect from my network because I've had reboots stall until I pulled the network cable from the blasted socket. Don't know why the system does that, but it's maddening.

It's been a few years since I've dealt with a Fiery RIP for a digital machine, but I seem to recall there's an option either buried in the print command or possibly on the RIP itself that lets you specify using your own color separation-values. When I needed to do that I had to print separations to the RIP, with a setting that said "combine separations" enabled.

What I have liked about Photo$hop is that a .psd file is a .psd, and almost all versions of Photo$hop will at least "try" to open it. If it's InDe$ign you're screwed. Illu$trator? Screwed again, but at least this time with lube. Why they have that "InDe$ign Markup" crap so that you can save it down is beyond me. I always feel like they are reaming me when I run into that adventure. Worse still: InDe$ign only exports down one version at a time. So you have to have several versions available if you want to go down more than one level. That's inexcusable. At least Photo$hop hasn't been doing that (yet) to me.

Crazy as it sounds I have a question: have you done a "repair permissions" after the install/update? It's strange how many problems that solves, but I now run that bugger after every install or update, no matter how minor it may have been.

I have a pretty ruthless policy of adding the domain names of folks like that to my "trash this immediately" ruleset. I figure I learn enough about what the borg, I mean Adobe etc. are doing anyway so I don't need their "newsletters" to add to the overload.

You're probably right, because we've used it frequently with excellent results. I didn't notice if it was .doc or .docx, though.

On a somewhat-related theme, I recently learned that MS-Word .doc files are actually using a gussied-up version of .zip compression. If you change the filename suffix from .doc to .zip you can unzip it and get whatever pictures, etc. they've embedded in the document, in its original size, etc.

Our shop was real slow last week, and first half of this week. Today's the first day I've been kept busy all day in weeks. Of course, at 5:30 our CSR's dumped more work on the prepres dept. than the rest of the day combined, too.

That's why they've been trying to push that "SOPA" act, which would basically allow them to take a massive hammer to the internets whenever and wherever, with no proof and no right to challenge. Both RIAA and MPAA sure seem to want their enemies to unite.

Most switches allow you to specify the speed at the switch itself, but you may need to double-check the networking settings on the server. It's in one of their control settings, but I'm not up on the newer Windoze servers.

I have to say that the print market just seems weird to me right now.
There are companies like Moo.com that offer surprisingly-good full color printing in low quantities for a very low price, it seems like quality printing tools have never been cheaper and more accessible, yet the print industry is getting butchered as so much is going to internet and tablets. What printing will survive will likely be concentrated in a smaller number of shops, instead of the many mom&pop operations we used to have.

Yeah, that line alone should automatically close the site as a crime against humanity.