Oh, Liese, that's kind of endearing. While at the same time being nefarious.

I am a bad person. Someone sent My Nemesis a request for information, which information would be much easier for me to compile than for her. It is, in essence, within the scope of my responsibility.

My Nemesis, instead of forwarding the request to me, printed out the email. Which I found on the printer, which is how I know about it.

I took the printout, because I am evil. Now I'm just going to wait to see if she comes to me for the information, since she pretty much has to.

Office politics make me so damned petty.

We did the shakeout drill in the jury room. Why wont this day end?

We had to do a drop and cover drill on my day in the jury room--and it wasn't shakeout shit. They have an obsession.

Ah, stupid cheating. I am guilty of having fudged a survey I was doing for the radio station in college, but it got too depressing to keep calling up people who had never heard of our radio station. So I filled out the rest of the surveys, but I put hte majority of them down as having no clue about us, then added in some nifty outliers like the rock-loving granny and the easy listening devotee teenager along with a few listeners from the middle demographic.

As opposed to the other person who cheated on the survey by filling out 30 sheets by checking straight down the middle of hte page. I didn't feel bad for cheating--I felt smug for being so much better at it.

I have eaten a good 2/3 of the tub of hummus I bought this morning. At least I've gotten a lot of protein today?

It is totally both endearing and nefarious! But just wait, because one of her classmates, a year younger than her and with two fewer years of lessons under his belt, is about to pass her. He is less talented, but methodical about his learning, and relentless in his willingness to repeat a song until he gets it right. His first year, it was all we could do to keep him in the chair. This year, he is going to surpass his entire class.

Man, you guys go in for realism in your drills, huh?

In elementary school we postponed an earthquake drill until after the spelling quiz. Earthquake midway through. Unpredictable.

Timelies all!

Went to the Weird Al concert last night, so I'm just now catching up.

We head off to OVFF tomorrow, so I need to pack.

So we need a simple, non-technical way to explain that print publications need more pixels than web graphics. It's driving me mad.

Are you ok with saying that pictures on the internet appear blurry when printed and leave it at that or are you being asked "why?"

We're being asked "why," often in a really belligerent way, and then they say the line that makes me want to reach through the computer and get slappy, "But it looks good on MY SCREEN!"

Also, maybe you could have an example PDF on hand to send to them -- Ask them to view the PDF on their computer, and then print it out, so they can see for themselves what you're talking about.

What happens is we use the shitty image they gave us, send them a PDF galley to review, and they print the PDF and then call to ask why the image is shitty.

They also have this cute trick of sending a story in a Word file or an e-mail with the images embedded and don't understand why I can't just use them as-is.

When they're embedded in Word, we have given up on trying to get the art files from the authors. ("What's an 'art file'?" being a common question.) (And all I want to do is scream "How the FUCK did you write your article?!? You know the pretty picture in it? Did it get in there BY MAGIC??? That's a fucking ART FILE.")

Instead we save that one page of Word as a PDF and then export the PDF as a 1200-dpi tiff and then tinker from there. It usually works, unless the art was shitty to begin with. If you take a 72-dpi image off a website and embed it in Word, our weird end-run to make it into a usable art file still won't make it look good. You can't add pixels, god damn it.

This is a cool gank of Pantone.

of course I read that as "Pantene."