Intrigue Graphics – Design and Print (and Cool Apple Mac Stuff)

Lean Times

Unless you’ve been hiding in a cave for the last few months, you are very much aware of the financial turmoil affecting every corner of the globe. It seems like every day there is breaking news of another economic disaster somewhere or talk of some well-known organization folding up its tent – usually the ones that had previously been viewed as being impervious to financial difficulties. Either that, or major league frauds are being revealed on a constant basis. The list keeps growing. None of it is pretty. It’s going from bad to worse to…

Printing Problems

This is a topic that is a periodic thorn in my side – solving printing issues. At Intrigue, we do a lot of color laser proofs in-house so we can check our layouts. Seeing it onscreen and seeing it on paper are very different experiences. Whether verifying the color or graphics, there’s always something about seeing the design on paper that is more appealing than viewing it onscreen. And it makes proofreading a bit easier as well.

However, if you print as much or as often as we do, inevitably problems will occur. It’s just the nature of printing – something will get out of whack over time. It’s just a matter of what the problem is and how serious it is to fix.

iPhone Deprived

Am I the only one? With all of the hype and hoopla surrounding the electronic gadget of the century (aka, Apple’s iPhone), you’d think that everyone in the world had one by now. Just not including me.

It’s been out a couple of years now and it seems like everywhere you go, somebody is using an iPhone. Sure, there have been popular gadgets that have come and gone over the years – the Sony Walkman being a perfect example.

I remember those days (back in the ’80s) very well. Being a gadget fanatic, I watched how this one little device changed how people listen to their music. But I didn’t jump on the bandwagon when it was catching on “fire”. No, I waited a bit – I just didn’t see the rush to be on the cutting edge.

Web Statistics

This morning, I decided to check out the www.intriguegraphics.com web statistics. It has been a while since I last looked at them, so I figured it would be worth my while to see where we’re at. I logged in to the web stat thingie on our website control panel and ran reports. The first one was a summary for the complete 2008 year. The second one was a summary for 2009, which is just January and a little over half of February.

Even though there’s just a month and a half worth of data for 2009, it was immediately clear that there is still some very useful data in that report. I don’t think the total numbers are all that important. What I was looking for was to spot any kind of trend. Yes, indeed, there is a definite trend happening.

Bag of Tricks

As the “tech support guy” for Intrigue, I do a lot of maintenance on the workstations for the art department. By no means should this imply that we have considerable downtime. Rather it’s mostly proactive or preventative maintenance that is intended to PREVENT downtime.

My philosophy from a system support perspective is to stay on top of things BEFORE molehills turn into mountains. This applies to whatever brand or type of equipment that might be at hand. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a Windows box or the latest and greatest Mac. They will all develop issues over time that will need to be addressed and fixed. It’s like normal wear and tear that comes from driving a car. Over time, a car will get nicks, scratches and dings – that’s to be expected if it gets driven on a daily basis. Oil does need to be changed at regular intervals to prevent having the engine fry itself.

Same thing with computers. Just by running them on a daily basis for hours on end, they WILL develop a problem or two (or three) over time.

Can’t Find Files in Finder with “Find File”

Just going to vent a little about a minor frustration regarding a feature of the new (to me) Leopard OS on the Mac. What’s bugging me is the fact that finding files is something that should be a “no brainer” for the ubiquitous application “Finder”, right? In the old days of the Macintosh, that was [...]