The Independent Stitch

Computer problems: Much better than a toothache

Still no pictures here.

Computer saga, with perspective

As Buddhist monk and simply wise-person-in-many-dimensions Thich Nhat Hanh observes, the good thing about a toothache is that it teaches us how nice it is not to have a toothache. I extend this teaching to the understanding that a mess of computer problems is also much less painful than a toothache, and working computers are much more convenient than malfunctioning computers.

To recap, with some updates:

• The original computer (code name A3) that was doing strange things was sent back to the manufacturer (after many days of online and phone contact with tech support and many drastic actions here). I've received an e-mail saying it will be back some time in the middle of next week, although no human communication to indicate what the problem might have been. The assumption is that the problem has been fixed. This computer will now become my daughter's, thus improving and speeding up her work with the Nomad Press images (she is using a nine-year-old P3, 448MHz, maxed out at 768MB RAM, code D1; she will have a two-year-old P4, 3.0GHz, 4MB RAM, that being A3).
• The replacement computer (A5) I ordered for myself arrived and after six days (including many drastic actions like restoring factory defaults three times) was shipped back to the source. I don't know whether that particular machine is a lemon or whether some of the non-essential software was interfering with the installation of the software I need to run, but PCConnection graciously agreed that it was time to give up on it.
• The exchange computer (H6) that I ordered was listed as "ships in 2+ weeks," which was really bad news but after another day of research it looked so much like the best alternative that I figured I'd just have to tough it out for another two weeks. The great news here is that my call to one of the manufacturers to ask questions about my specific needs connected me to a young woman named Cressida in the sales department. I said, "I do print publishing. I tend to have InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator open simultaneously, and I put together large files that may contain as many as 600 linked images." Cressida said, "Ah, I know your problem. I'm a graphic designer." ! She steered me away from both computers I was considering and toward another, saying, "THIS is what you need." It's no more expensive than the ones on my list. So I ordered it, thinking that I'd limp through the waiting period by installing the most essential programs temporarily on the laptop, which is a Linux machine but does have a small XP (Home) partition on it.
• However, the laptop (T4) has only 256MB of RAM (it was bought to run Linux, after all; it didn't need much RAM . . . which puts me in mind of my first computer, which did very nicely with 64KB of RAM, although of course it didn't multitask). Adobe Creative Suite 2 requires a minimum of 384MB to install. There are ways to force the Adobe installer to work with less RAM (as little as 100MB), but even if I did that it's not like I could then open an InDesign file for a heavily illustrated book. The laptop is upgradeable. The RAM for it, ordered at 3:30 on Thursday afternoon for overnight delivery (extra cost), will, through the peculiarities of order handling and shipping, arrive by overnight standard delivery by 3 p.m. on Monday. Oddly, if I'd chosen regular shipping (USPS, probably Priority Mail) it would most likely be here now. Oh, well. (According to the tracking number, it arrived in town at 5 this morning, but it's not like FedEx would let me drive out to the depot and pick it up. The depot is closed.)

I have written in my head, but not gotten onto this blog, several posts on how it's a miracle that any small business survives. This is just one of many of the amazing types of hurdles that small businesses deal with every day.

Taxes are due in ten days, too.

Knitting helps

So yesterday I left town. Sometimes it's good to just change the view completely.

I went to Denver for three other errands, listening to Thich Nhat Hanh while I drove.

Along the way, I got to visit A Knitted Peace for the first time, and there was a Habu trunk show going on. Very cool stuff, including two pieces I might even wear . . . although I don't get dressed up enough that I'd use them more than once a year.

I learned about String too late for a visit. Next time.

After my errands, I ended up at the Tattered Cover on the way-south-end of the metropolitan area for Stephanie Pearl-McPhee's road tour appearance. I sat near the back, next to Erynn and and Isaac and Isaiah, whose photos are on Stephanie's blog, as well as two Wyoming folks who'd driven 4.5 hours to be there (one of whom I knew from Cyndi Lee's knitting circles at the Yoga Journal conference in Estes Park . . . nice to see, and visit at length with, someone I knew!). I also got to briefly see Amy Clarke Moore and her daughter Hannah, a child whom I had only previously seen in photos. If there were a cutest kid contest and Hannah was in it, the other kids would all be very worried and might even go home, no matter how cute they were.

Stephanie is, of course, very talented both on the page and in person, putting together excellent humor and thoughtful content, and I brought home a copy of her new book, Things I Learned from Knitting (Whether I Wanted to or Not), which will be very sanity-inducing to read while I am waiting for my current band-aid computer (D2) to load Firefox (4 minutes), move an e-mail message to a folder (30 seconds to 2 minutes) or pick up mail (20 minutes or more, although I usually leave the room during mail pick-ups).

During the Yarn Harlot event, I finished the hand-dyed rayon Landscape Shawl variation (based on Evelyn Clark's pattern), with 1.5 inches (3.75 cm) of yarn to spare. Photos when possible.

I have also finished my acupuncturist's cotton chenille cardigan. When I left for Denver, it was drying on a towel after its initial washing.

Sometimes knitting progresses when other things don't.

Shifting sands in the publishing world

In another development this week, Amazon is attempting to force authors and publishers who use print-on-demand (POD) printing technology to use the printing service that Amazon owns to produce copies sold through Amazon. If the publishers and authors don't agree to this change, their books' "buy" buttons on Amazon will be disabled. Amazon is also setting the pricing and discount structures for the sale of these copies. Although Nomad Press doesn't produce its books with this technology and is not affected by this move, we have been vulnerable to other Amazon policy changes. "Amazon is attempting" means, essentially, "Amazon is doing this." They do hold nearly all the cards in the game they're playing.

Some very good news conveyed by e-mail

My copy of Stephanie's book is unsigned. The south-end Tattered Cover is very far from my home, so I left without waiting in line, although I sent hello-and-hang-in-there-on-the-tour-blitz messages to her with friends. I got home before 11:30 p.m. but didn't turn on my computer. It would have taken most of an hour to retrieve e-mail.

When I fired up the old machine (D2) this morning, I discovered the following lovely message from my stalwart primary contact in the technical solutions (I think "solutions" is much better than "support") department at PCConnection, with reference to the "ships in 2+ weeks" exchange computer that was plugged into their ordering system for me late on Thursday:

• "Deb, The units are due in today. John"

! ! ! !

I think that counts as a miracle, right up there with completing the shawl and the cardigan within inches of the last of their yarns.

Adventures in TechLemonLand

I still have no pictures. I continue to limp along with the help of a seven-year-old computer that wobbles frequently but has not (knock on wood) completely lost its mind. Unlike the new system.

____

No news on the original problematical machine, the one that started all of this.

I've just restored the new, replacement computer to factory defaults for the second time and am about to power it down and put it back in its original packaging, with all original papers and other bits and pieces, and ship it back to its source.

One should not have to be messing with the Windows registry just to install software. Or not more than just a very little bit.

After six days of full-time effort, a new computer should have on it at least one packet of owner data, or one user document. This machine did have a small handful of my actual files over the weekend, when I thought I was making progress even if by devious means, but they were eradicated when I restored the factory defaults the first time. This has been far too reminiscent of the days of CP/M operating systems and the need to know about hex codes to install a printer.

Note: I have bought a number of pieces of equipment from PCConnection over the years and have always been happy with the service. That's true in this case, too. The folks there have been very helpful, even though they've been as baffled as I have been by the weird goings-on with this machine.

A couple of days ago one of the tech support people (Mike) e-mailed me some ideas about how to manage the corrupt registry, and he included this quote at the end:

• As Henry David Thoreau once said, "Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end."

It has helped preserve my sanity.

And last night, John at PCConnection sent me this wonderful message:

• "I think we, meaning mostly you, have tried just about every reasonable step to resolve this problem. I own a [computer name] that has given me very little trouble but that does not mean they can't have problems. . . . If you have a complete unit down to the packaging we can work on exchanging this system."

I have a complete unit. I even have the tiny screw that was rattling around inside the tower when the shipment arrived, and the plastic bag the box was wrapped in.

And now I have an RMA number!

_____

Other progress, in the cracks between computer-wrangling sessions:

1. Once I realized that appropriate computer channels would not be available to set up a freight shipment, I figured out how to do it through other means. Some time today Yellow Transportation will show up. I hope my daughter is here (i.e., has finished her shift at the bookstore) and will be able to help me move, stack, and shrinkwrap the 1800 pounds of books I've got organized and labeled in the garage. (We will both be glad to be able to open the freezer door again without raising the garage door and moving our two bikes out onto the driveway.)

2. I have almost finished the cotton chenille sweater for my acupuncturist! Can't wait to take photos of that. It looks pretty good.

3. I am making forward progress again on the shawl that is an invention on Evelyn Clark's Landscape Shawl concept (I'm making a shawl, but putting on the shaped ends of the scarf, and customizing the size and configuration to the amount of yarn I have . . . which I slightly miscalculated, thus the pleasure at making forward progress after some backward regression).
____

Okay, I have a computer to put back into a box, and a bunch of other stuff that's running behind to catch up on because of that computer.

Computer yes, computing no

Much silence here. I ordered, and have received, a replacement computer with the necessary operating system (the computer that went back to the mothership is still there; no news). However, I can't install several chunks of critical software, including the Adobe Creative Suite that lets me produce books. I am attempting installations, failing, and spending time on the phone with tech support.

Oh, and knitting. But I ripped the knitting back and have started over on that because I was about 5 yards shy of what I needed to complete the project. I'll have pictures some day.

Time to try another installation workaround. Hope everyone else's days are being more obviously productive right now than mine are.

Creativity and equipment failure

As I wrote the last two posts on the increasingly severe and frequent computer problems I've been having, I clicked the "creativity" category in addition to "publishing" and "web/tech." I knew it felt right to consider this discussion part of "creativity," although obviously I haven't been talking directly about creativity at all. Yet the critical topic for me is creativity: access to the tools that I need to do the work I have planned, on the one hand, and the need to use creative muscle to get through the logjams, on the other.

Faced with equipment failure or health challenges (or both, as I have been), I could shift directions and be creative in other ways, of course; that would involve abandoning massive amounts of work already done and commitments to other people. My preference is to stay the course.

We need materials and tools, and sometimes we are tied to deadlines and a change of activities will result in major consequences down the road.

I've just ordered a new computer. In terms of cash flow, the timing leaves a whole lot to be desired. In terms of work flow, the timing of not having access to adequate equipment is worse. Fortunately, I just need the box. I've got the monitor and all the other peripherals in place.

I spent some time online and found a computer that was in stock ("ships in 24 hours"), was just a box (i.e., did not require me to buy a whole system), has the appropriate capacity now and some expansion headroom for the future, runs the operating system that I need (no small matter in the current market and not available locally), and, while not budgeted for, was quite a good deal, looked at from a long-term perspective. While it's true that my secondary, not-quite-seven-year-old computer gives me access to e-mail and the web and some basic programs, it's also true that I click on Eudora to pick up my mail in the morning and then go do yoga and have breakfast and read the paper and it might have displayed the messages by the time I get back.

Running an independent publishing company and being a writer are challenging enough. Attempting to do these things without a fundamental set of tools, even for two weeks, is foolish. When the other computer returns, hopefully with all its so-called brain cells intact, it will be moved to a new role, upgrading the image-processing aspect of Nomad Press . . . i.e., it will replace my daughter's nine-year-old desktop with one that's only two years old and still under warranty.

One thought that came up during this overly extended ordeal was that I'd love to take a week or two and make a couple of artist's books. I'll need to keep that idea on the back burner . . . well, maybe in the pantry, to be pulled out later. Right now, I have deadlines. But I should be able to progress with plan-B work options for a few days and then . . . oh, start loading software and fonts again. But onto a different machine.

Meanwhile, I'm looking forward to being able to process photos again. . . .

Computer returns to mothership

There are no pictures today. I don't know when there will be pictures again, although the camera is fine.

The primary business computer has just been boxed up and sent back to the manufacturer. I have learned what on-site tech support means: if the problem can be diagnosed from a distance and requires that an "expert" wield the screwdriver (e.g., replacement of motherboard), then an "expert" with a screwdriver will come here with the part and do that piece of work. If the problem cannot be diagnosed from a distance through the phone support system, the computer has to be shipped across the country for diagnostics. It travels ground and will likely be gone between 10 and 14 days.

I am not exactly sure how to run a business in the interim. I do have the old computer still hooked up—it regularly handles mail and web access—but it cannot manage the business-specific software. That's why I bought the other computer.

The problem at this point may be with:

1. video card
2. processor
3. motherboard
4. voltage issue

Today, working with two different phone support people, Harold and Nancy, I ran it through Stress Prime 2004 (again). It's called a "torture test" for the CPU. It can also test RAM, although we didn't use that version. Harold also had me download a program from Microsoft's web site and burn it to CD, and said when I called back we'd do something with it, but Nancy didn't know about that. I think that was supposed to test the RAM, but we've swapped RAM in and out since October, with no change in the erratic behavior.

The computer did come up with a few new tricks today. I still can't package a document in InDesign. However, in setting up to attempt to do that again I re-installed the font management software and prepared a set of fonts pertinent to the book I'm working on. Font management software is for people who keep many, many fonts on their machines. It lets us activate and deactivate fonts as we need them, so they're not using up system resources.

Anyway, there were 21 fonts in this set, which is a working set, not a final (it also doesn't include fonts that I keep activated because I use them very frequently). The fonts were things like:

    Arrows: Right, Left, Up, Down   
    Dingbats
    FFDingbests
    Gill Sans Standard: Regular, Italic, Bold, Bold Italic
    LTC Goudy Sans: Hairline, Regular, Italic, Bold, Light, Light Italic
    LTC Vine Leaves
    Okey Dokey NF
    P22 Chai Tea Pro
    P22 Tulda OT
    TF Neue Neuland Ornaments

When I opened the InDesign file, the system found the fonts it needed but could not locate the links (the images). So I spent about an hour fixing the link problems. I tried to package; the program failed. This forces it to close.

Next time I opened the document, it couldn't find the fonts OR the links. I fixed the links (not the fonts) and tried to package. Nope.

I forget exactly when in here I took a look at the font management software to do something other than just check that my set was activated. I went and looked at the fonts in the set. They were now things like:

    Bauhaus Light
    Bauhaus Bold
    Adobe Janson: Regular, Italic, Bold, Bold Italic
    . . . .

They were still fonts, but they had no relationship to what I'd selected. It was a random collection, and none of the fonts is used in any of my current projects (although yes, they are loaded on the computer in case I want to use them). And none of them was a font that was used in the document I was testing.

At this point, the malfunctioning software on this system included:

•     Adobe InDesign
•     Adobe Illustrator
•     Microsoft Word
•     ACT! 2008
•     Windows Updater
•     Bounceback Professional
•     FontAgent Pro

And the tech support person came back on the line after consulting someone elsewhere (several consultations today with someone elsewhere) and said, "We have other customers who have problems with InDesign and Microsoft Vista. Have you contacted Adobe about this issue?"

Me:"I'm not running Vista. I'm running XP Pro. The problem is not only with InDesign. I am using InDesign to test the system because it's the most important of my tools. All of this software has worked in the past. There is something seriously wrong here and the problem is not with the application software."

(Even though they have been performing a "torture test" on the owner and operator for five full days, I did not raise my voice. I think that's rather remarkable. The CPU didn't overheat and shut down while undergoing Stress Prime 2004, and I didn't overheat and explode while undergoing Stress Subprime 2008.)

After consulting again, they decided they needed to look at the computer. In Miami.

Good things:

1. The manufacturer is paying the shipping both ways. (It's not paying for packing, and of course I don't have the enormous original box any more.)
2. When I almost dropped the machine as I transported it to FedEx Kinko's for packing and shipment and the wind whipped the prepaid label out of my hand and toward six lanes of traffic, a woman coming out of Kinko's stabilized the computer while I chased the label. (Not working = their problem. Broken = my problem.)
3. When Kinko's didn't have the appropriate box (which they had described to me when I called ahead), one of the staffers helped me carry the computer back out to the car so I could take it to another Kinko's that they had called to be sure the right box was there. (The wind tried to remove the prepaid label AGAIN and take it out into the same six lanes of traffic . . . there has been a lot of gusty wind today.)
4. Although the other Kinko's is in a construction zone that has limited most access routes, it was possible to get there.
5. At the other Kinko's, another customer offered to hold the door for me when I carried the machine inside, so I didn't have to hit the handicapped access button with my foot as the staff suggested, and even closed the back of my car for me.
6. The computer is no longer in my office and I trust that I will not be spending the next five days either on the phone with tech support or doing things to the computer so we can test the next thing during the next call.

These are all very good things.

Now. Can I get done what I need to get done in the next almost-two-weeks with a seven-year-old computer onto which I can't load my most important software? Or can I figure out how to get a substitute computer in here and properly configured?

Things I will have to do without until I answer those questions:

•     Adobe InDesign CS2
•     Adobe Photoshop CS2
•     Adobe Illustrator CS2
•     Adobe Acrobat CS2
•     Quickbooks Pro
•     AnyBook (publishing order- and inventory-management software)

I can probably install on the old computer:

•     Remote-access software and security keys for checking distributor's inventory
•     Sweater Wizard
•     Knit Visualizer
•     Old version of Photoshop (ah! there's a cheerful thought! I still have the old version . . . maybe I can do pictures! . . . I have GIMP, but I don't find it easy to use for my routine tasks)

The old machine already runs Microsoft Office 2003, so I haven't lost that. I'll need to move the laser printer back onto to the old system, though.

Anybody who has an IT department that does its job well, this is what those folks are saving you from. You might want to bring them flowers or chocolate or something.

I look forward to being able to talk about knitting and publishing and fun things again.

THUD.

Well, I did not slow down and rest soon enough, much as I was trying to. I've been down with a cold for more than a week. A few things have gotten done; I did meet a deadline, but the work was 99 percent complete, and that was extremely fortunate because I only had to do stuff I can do with a mild, persistent headache and no oomph. I've read a bunch of books, which I'll talk about when I can process photos again (computer problems), and have watched at least one excellent movie.

The documentary Murderball was recommended to me almost exactly a year ago by, as I recall, Richard Cabe, who carves stone into wonderful forms, and Susan Tweit, who writes magically. Susan and Richard have restored a bit of industrial wasteland, making it into a bit of heaven that I got to visit last year when Donna Druchunas and I drove up into the mountains to give a presentation in a library (both of us), a workshop (Donna), and a couple of appearances in some high school classes (me). If it wasn't St. Patrick's Day weekend, it was just before or after. My calendar's not accessible right now.

My daughter has not wanted to watch Murderball . . . there's always another movie she'd rather see. So I asked her to bring it from the library for me when I knew she'd be out teaching fencing and I'd be home working on getting well instead of working at my desk. Her interest has been piqued now that I've seen it and told her more about it.

 Murderball is about quad rugby—a sport played by quadriplegics in specially constructed wheelchairs—but it's not a sports movie. It's a people movie. Well, yeah, it's a sports movie, But as Roger Ebert said in his 2005 review, linked above, "Although the sports scenes are filled with passion and harrowing wheelchair duels, the heart of the movie is off the court." It would be good preparation for the 2008 Paralympics. (Turns out there's also wheelchair fencing in the Paralympics. . . .)

As I've regained some energy, I've been working to resolve the ongoing computer problems, in large part because now the software refuses to prep a book file to go to press, which means the whole system is useless for an absolutely critical task. It's a good thing I haven't needed to send anything to press recently, but because I'm a publisher that's a rare and unusual situation and not one that can be counted on to last long. In this case, all I wanted to do was get a complete, neat, and tidy backup. In InDesign, which is usually my favorite piece of software, you can do that by "packaging" the document, which is one of the critical things that you do (in addition to preparing a set of specialized PDF files) when it's time to send a project to press.

But the software wouldn't package the book. It hasn't been willing to package a book since some time last fall. I can put together backups manually, and have been doing so since mid-December, but "will not package a document" is not a problem I can afford to have in a month or so. In fact, it's amazing I've made it this far with a tool of this magnitude—the layout software—broken to this extent.

Finally it occurred to me that the problem might not be with the layout software, even though I certainly thought it was and have had similar problems in the past and have noodled my way around them.

Yet if, over the course of about six months, you've experienced problems, from tiny to massive, that have affected at least four major application programs from a variety of sources, it might occur to you, while lying in bed looking at the ceiling and spending hours pitching compressed tissues at a wastebasket, that the problems could be the fault of something other than the individual pieces of application software just behaving bizarrely all independently.

In Illustrator, I sometimes lose (and cannot regain) the ability to alt-drag a symbol to duplicate it . . . which is really, really important to be able to do if you are making knitting charts. This has been happening since late last summer. I've been working around it, grumbling.

During October, InDesign began to have trouble displaying the laid-out pages. I thought this was because I'd begun using Illustrator files for the charts. I mean, the message I got said "out of memory." I thought that was what it was. I increased the RAM, and this helped somewhat, but not as much as it should have.

Yet since at least December, InDesign, as I mentioned, has not been able to package a document. It starts, but it never gets beyond about 20 percent on checking the links.

In mid-January, ACT! quit working and I totally lost the ability to open and use my address-book database. Gone, all access to phone numbers, addresses, and other pretty important information.

In February, I discovered that in Word, I can put highlighting on text, but I cannot remove it. And I can't access the "insert symbol" function.

Now in March I've been experiencing all of these problems, and I've tried everything I can think of. I've installed even more RAM in an attempt to get the packaging process to work (RAM capacity now maxed). I've uninstalled and reinstalled the application software, created new files, removed all extraneous data, and broken down big files into collections of small files, to see whether a smaller file would not invoke the problem or whether I might be able to isolate an offending image or other link that might be causing the hang-up. I've mostly done this type of experimentation with ACT! and InDesign, since those have been the places I've seen the biggest (although not necessarily the most annoying) glitches.

____

Possibilities, according to tech support:

1. RAM failure. (Already changed RAM. Problem persists.)
2. Corruption in operating system.
3. Incipient hard-drive failure.

Below is one of the exciting views that you will get to enjoy for quite a long time if you choose to wipe everything off your hard drive and reformat it (that's what's happening here . . . thrillingly entertaining) in preparation for re-installing the operating system from scratch:

So I did that. EVERYTHING gone from the hard drive: operating system (OS), applications, documents. Total brain-wipe. Reformat. Twice, for reasons I am currently forgetting. This took a while, and several bouts of booting from the Windows recovery CD while hitting the F10 key repeatedly (several times a second for multiple minutes) while the files were loading in order to access some menu that apparently can't be reached another way, or reliably that way.

Then I installed the OS. Then I installed the most basic drivers, the ones for things like the chipset and the graphics card. Then I ran checkdisk (CHKDSK) to see if the hard drive is okay (apparently yes). Then I installed more drivers, for things like the printer and the Wacom tablet. Then I started installing the application software again.

It takes a long time to re-install major software programs. After you install each of them from the original CDs, the newly installed stuff insists on retrieving massive update files from the web and letting them install (which repeatedly requires restarting the computer). Getting the operating system, Microsoft Office, and Adobe Creative Suite reinstalled and correctly updated (with security patches and bug fixes) takes a very, very long time. These incremental updates happen about once a week under normal operation and they're not a big deal. When you start back from the baseline again, they are a big deal.

It's also necessary for the operator to re-register each piece of software (look up long strings of characters and digits and key them in, then wait for the computer to connect to the net and confirm that yes, this entity still has a legal right to use this software). Fortunately, I've got a good organizing process for software and hardware additions to the system, and I have no problem actually finding the original installation disks and the registration codes. That's a blessing.

Late this afternoon, when I hadn't quite gotten to the point of reinstalling the fonts (fortunately backed up in a way that makes them relatively easy to put back in place), and definitely before I'd even begun to think about getting any real work done. . . .

The system started hanging again.

On attempting to install a piece of software, I was stuck for more than ten minutes with a message that said "checking space requirements." (I have to look at the screen during these reinstalls because most of them won't proceed if unattended. They keep wanting minimal but essential operator input. Windows open that you have to click buttons in or the whole process stops. I can knit a little bit on something simple. I can't read or do anything else.) When I tried to close down the installation with "cancel," nothing changed. When I opened Windows task manager and chose "end task," it wouldn't. Some additional auxiliary program I'd never heard of also wouldn't shut down with "end task," although about twenty minutes after the request it did, suddenly (I'd gone off to have dinner). And then the regular shutdown screen with "saving your settings" appeared but it sure took a lot of time for the setting-saving . . . .after a good thirty minutes of no change. . . .

I decided that enough was enough. Time for emergency action. I held down the power button until the system shut down and the screen went black.

And I drove to a coffeehouse and ordered a mug of green tea. I could fix myself tea at home, but I needed to be elsewhere. There's 24-hour phone tech support for the computer, which is still under warranty with on-site service (although I have no idea what good this is), and the folks I've talked with this week have spoken pretty good, if accented, English (Daniel, Stephanie, and Eric), but sometimes it's good not to call while you still feel like dropping the computer in a frozen lake.

A night's sleep may help . . . if it doesn't help the computer, it might at least help the person who juggles the CDs and pitches wadded-up tissues and just wants to get back to doing something that feels productive, like real work.

Maybe the next book I'll publish will be hand-lettered with India ink, and there will only be one copy, bound with handspun silk thread with marbled endpapers and a hand-embroidered cover.

And now I am thinking of Annie Tremmel Wilcox's A Degree of Mastery: A Journey through Book Arts Apprenticeship, which is a far better thing to be occupying my brain with than a recalcitrant computer.

Powering down for today.

Score one for the little guys: copyright infringement

We just received an e-mail communication that relates to my post of February 14. It was written by someone for whom this is already Wednesday, February 20, but just barely. It says:

Date: Wed, 20 Feb 2008 02:43:53 -0000
From: "Picasa Support"
Subject: Re: [#242066335] Picasa DMCA Complaint processed
Hi,

We have completed processing your infringement complaint dated 2/14/08 in accordance with our Copyright Complaint procedure. We have removed from Picasa Web Albums the image(s) that formerly appeared at: [URL removed]

Please let us know if we can assist you further.

Regards,
The Google Team

Not only was the scan of our book taken down, but the other forty-nine books, magazines, and pattern collections formerly at that URL have also been removed.

Many items are still publicly posted at other locations nearby, and it's highly likely that our book has been picked up by other people and may be posted elsewhere.

The person who had put up these linked albums had 290 books, magazines, and collections illegally posted. She now has 240. A number of knitting authors and publishers will be filing complaints about the illegal posting of their material. (The complaints have to be filed by the copyright holder or that person's authorized agent).

Maybe we can make a dent in the practice.

Undercutting designers, publishers, libraries, and booksellers could truly damage the flow of creative ideas into and through the knitting and crochet community. In the short run, posting the books may look like a fantastic way to make great information widely available. In the long run, stolen material distributed free means that people who write and design lose the ability (and desire) to develop and share their work with other folks.

Special thanks to one blog reader in particular who helped enormously by tracking down the person who was posting this material, and other people with similar ideas. Now I know a whole lot about this person, who is probably not the scanner . . . which I can say in part because it wouldn't be possible to knit as much work as is being shown on the poster's blog and also scan as many books as are being posted.

The person who helped me out—someone who, by the way, I've known in the virtual and sometimes real world since the internet didn't have a web and electronic communication occurred through green or amber text on a black screen—showed me in new ways how small the globe is and how much tracking can be done through internet clues. Quite amazing. And alarming, of course.

The issue of copyright is enormously complicated and profoundly important. There are no easy answers.

But just now there's a bit of success to celebrate in protecting the work of a few creative souls. At least for today. And maybe, since the note from the Picasa team was written tomorrow, for a little while into the future, too. Every scrap helps.

Copyright infringement and other threats to independent designing, writing, and publishing

The post that I was going to publish tonight will be released tomorrow morning, except for this section that I've pulled out. This was going to be just a small portion of one of my usual multi-topic posts, but it's too important.

Item 1 under "minuses" is a matter of vital importance not only to me and to the authors whose fine work I publish but to a lot of other people as well. It is serious enough to threaten the creative survival of the good and visionary and hard-working people who provide energy and ideas to so many other people through their designs and publications.

I stay pretty mellow most of the time. Sometimes someone steps so far over the line that. . . . Well, read Minus #1. The rest is just business as usual. Minus #1 is not.

On the independent publishing (Nomad Press) front:

MINUSES:

1. Shortly after I woke up this morning, I learned that someone has gone to the trouble of scanning every page of one of the books published by Nomad Press (that's me, working in my basement in a room that only has a plug-in space heater) and posted the results on the internet. I'm all for freedom of information, but the author and I also like to pay our bills (maybe, some day, install a heating duct in the office, stuff like that). I don't know anyone who is doing creative work in textiles who is not hanging on by a thread and doing without stuff other people take for granted. The author invested a number of years in envisioning, researching, and writing the book. I invested several years and put my so-called retirement at risk to design, produce, and publish it.

It was a lot of work to scan the book—probably as much work as we put into doing the rough scans for the preliminary layout. It is also illegal (and, worse, immoral) to post the scans.

Clueless? Cruel?

The author and I have taken the appropriate steps with the hosting site to have the scans removed, but wow, I shouldn't have to do this! The material has been up since last August. When I wrote an account of this discovery at the start of the day, I said I could only hope that it's inspired people to buy the book, at the same time that I was working to protect the author's and my ability to earn a bit of income for the years of labor that went into developing this book.

This evening, near the end of a normal fifteen-hour work day, I learned that this person has also scanned and posted on the internet—also in their entirety—many other books and magazines on knitting and crochet.

I can't think of a more effective way to cut off the trickle of lifeblood that returns to the designers and writers and publishers in these crafts. Believe me, it's not a river of support that they dip into, and creative people have to eat, require shelter, even occasionally need to visit a doctor or dentist.

This person's activities in making our work available free on the web are definitely heartless, whether intentional or not.

[ADDED 2/16/08: Thanks to several friends, we have traced the person who is doing this. I suspect she is not aware that her behavior is causing great harm to other knitters who are doing their best to make a partial living by publishing their research and designs. She appears to be an excellent craftworker who appreciates the designs to which she has access because we are publishing them. If she chose to simply say that she likes our work and then suggest that other people purchase the books in question or borrow them from libraries—she obtained our book from a library; the classification label is visible on the cover of her scan—that would be extremely helpful to us. People throughout the world can buy our books through Amazon's various channels. Libraries are often happy to purchase books when patrons request them. And then we would be able to continue creating more books that she, and others, could enjoy. But not scan and post on the web, please.]

2. All of the shipping companies have just raised their rates (due to gas prices). Because cover prices on books have already been set and distribution terms cannot be easily changed, this is extremely hard on publishers, especially the independents who don't have a lot of flexibility to develop compensating income streams.

3. Almost all of the people we sell our books to are prompt and efficient about paying for the cartons we ship out. Some are late, but that's because they forgot or were out of town or the cat ate the invoice. They pay. Right now I'm having to deal again, however, with a re-billing of someone who was a new account, for whom I made a special trip to Kinko's to ship out a carton of books so it would arrive in time for an event, and whose payment is now four months overdue. I've mailed statements, e-mailed reminders, and left voice mail messages.

Blecch.

PLUSSES:

1.The fall title is coming along. It's in one of its nit-picky phases, so things are going slowly, but they'll get done.

2. I heard recently from an author of a much-anticipated future title that she may be completing the manuscript soon.

3. One of the wholesalers ordered four cartons of books yesterday. I packed them up and my daughter helped me drop them off at the package service on the way to a doctor's appointment.

4. Spinning in the Old Way just went back on press for the fourth time. A new print run of Ethnic Knitting Discovery has just been delivered, shortly after a new print run of Knitting in the Old Way.

5. I have plenty of freelance work right now, the stuff that helps support me while I do all the publishing work. I just need three of me to stay on top of all the deadlines and schedules!

And I always do my best to end thinking of the plusses.

_____

To support that habit, I'm going to go read some more in the issue of PieceWork that will be the primary topic of the next post.

An empty inbox, not entirely intentionally

This isn't a photogenic post, although I'm tempted to take a picture.

As of this morning, my e-mail inbox is empty. This has been a goal of mine for a while, although getting it accomplished required a bit of serendipity, or error. Eudora has been slowing down for quite a while because both my inbox and my outbox are overloaded . . . despite a complex and well-tended array of filters that have quit functioning very well.

I think the complexities of my life have exceeded the capacity of Eudora's filters.

Today, Margaret McDonald, who writes an excellent column on communication every Friday in our local paper, talked about empty inboxes. (Margaret's column is one of the reasons I put up with the paper. Another reason is "For Better or For Worse," which I know I could read online but I'm old-fashioned about comics. I'm linking to Margaret's website and the page where she has some of her past "Miss Communications" columns; the newspaper's column for today won't be available free for very long, so if you read this soon you can see what she said directly and if not you can see some of her past columns, if you'd like.)

Her discussion today reminded me of the reading I've been doing over the past several months in resources like Bit Literacy by Mark Hurst, Zen Habits, and 43 Folders (which I look over, although there's no way I'm adding 43 folders to my life, even if they're the ONLY 43 folders). Lots of the other suggestions from these sources were already part of my life or I've incorporated them over the past few months (for example, I've added Bit Literacy's to-do list process and the idea of filing e-mails in a handful of archive folders).

My e-mail in- and outboxes have been getting worse by the day (minute, actually). And I have known there were e-mails that I've been meaning to respond to and haven't, because they got so far down the list I didn't have a visible reminder.

I have whacked away at the messages: deleting, organizing, looking for zero. I use "delete" a lot. (I remember very clearly, and with some nostalgia, the Time Before E-mail; I also remember when computers were not everywhere and fax machines didn't exist and telegrams did. I don't remember dinosaurs.)

My pruning efforts haven't been anywhere near adequate.

So this morning I was waiting for a message I wanted to read to display and it was taking a long time (as it does, because no inbox should have more than 500 messages in it and no outbox should have more than 1000, and I know that, but even with daily attention I haven't been able to shovel the messages out fast enough). And then it appeared that everything in the inbox was suddenly, for no explicable reason, located in the trash folder.

And I thought, prodded in part by Margaret's column, "Hmm. What if. . . ."

And I figured that if everything in my inbox suddenly vanished, the earth would probably continue to rotate, the sun would likely still rise and set, the stars would remain in the sky, and so on.

I did flip through and rescue less than a dozen messages that I knew I wanted to keep, maybe even finally respond to. I put those in an "archive" or "action" or "hold" folder (Bit Literacy's suggestions), depending.

I right-clicked and selected "empty trash."

WOW.

It took a few minutes, but they did all go away.

I still have to deal with the outbox, and by the time I get home from the library there will be messages in my inbox again, but I'll be interested to see how much faster the mail program works. My brain feels lighter, perhaps better able to focus on the tasks at hand (cleaning the desk? nah). I do hope to keep my delete-key reflex operating quickly.

Electronic overload: it creeps up. Sometimes it makes the old text-based, amber- or green-and-black displays seem appealing. It makes actual letters seem wonderful, if slow.

I wouldn't want to give up access to the web. I'm spoiled by being able to find books that are out of print, and to check references online, and to communicate with folks I might not otherwise know. I like this blog, and I like the other blogs (more especially the bloggers and commenters) that are now part of my life.

But I am very grateful for that momentary BLANK inbox.

My little act of either rebellion or reassertion of control doesn't change the number of tasks that I need to accomplish. I do feel like I'm hauling less clutter around while I do what I had to do anyway.

And the sun is still shining in the sky.

Maybe tomorrow I'll figure out how to deal with my outbox.

Out of memory (not me this time)

We've used a number of methods to create the charts that go in the knitting books that Nomad Press has published so far.

For the revised edition of Knitting in the Old Way, we had access to Priscilla Gibson-Roberts' original ink drawings, and she was able to draw most of the new charts and sweaters that she wanted to add (there were a lot: twenty new ones after we thought we were all done!). So we scanned Priscilla's drawings and then spent literally hundreds of hours tweaking them in Photoshop (mostly cleaning the scans and removing anomalies) so they'd reproduce beautifully. They did.

This photo's taken of a printed book, in low light at night, with no flash, so it doesn't do the chart justice, but you may be able to see the hand-drawn quality as well as the clarity.

For Donna Druchunas' Arctic Lace and her just-released Ethnic Knitting Discovery, Donna gave us the charts already set up in David Xenakis' Knitter's Font. We moved them from Word to InDesign and kept going. For Ethnic Knitting Discovery, we did move them out to Illustrator and converted them to outlines when we were nearly done with the book.

I wrote a post on that process!

We've been working on the charts for a revised edition of Priscilla Gibson-Roberts' Salish Indian Sweaters: A Pacific Northwest Tradition for several years. We thought we'd have been done (and the new book published) long ago. Not yet. The charts have been one big stumbling block.

The originals were no longer available. We scanned the charts as they were printed in the first edition, but discovered that the grid lines were irregularly crooked and there were a whole lot of other problems that would have been nearly impossible to fix.

Plus, of course, Priscilla had a pile of new designs to add. This is a random selection of the new stuff, some of which is traditional and some of which is Priscilla's original designs, using her own images in Cowichan style (like the cat right in the middle).

My office floor isn't big enough to include all of the new chart sketches, even though I've set these out so they're overlapped three deep in a few places. As I look at this snapshot, I don't even see the biggest of the two new enormous eagles . . . the "smaller" one is at the middle of the left edge. . . .

If we used had scans from the originals to "build" the new charts, it would have been insanely tedious and time-consuming. Actually, we put quite a bit of energy into doing just that. We decided to scrap all the work we'd done and start over.

But first we needed to learn enough about how to use Illustrator to pull off an entirely different approach. (Building these charts in the Knitter's Font would also have been prohibitively difficult.)

This past summer was, among other things, dedicated to adding just the right Illustrator skills to the Nomad Press repertoire. I took Jill Wolcott's online course. And Cat Bordhi generously shared not only tips but a working template that I was able to modify (using stuff Jill taught me) to do the job.

Then I started putting together a reference file of the charts that I was completing. And this started to happen:

That's the computer screen re-drawing SOOOO SLOOOOOWWWLLLYYYY that I could stop and take a picture between when I moved the cursor and when it managed to give me a clear new image of the page.

If I moved the cursor too far, for whole minutes at a time (possibly until I forced the computer to power down), the pages might look like this:

When this is what they were supposed to look like (this next image I got by exporting a PDF and converting it to a JPG to show the difference):

And too often the monitor looked like this:

Okay. What choice do I have?

After reducing the sizes of all files by eliminating any reference layers or other useful but nonessential data and changing the display characteristics without producing better results, the choice is "get more system memory."

 

So I tried this (new stuff is green, old stuff is black with silver clips):

And this (the modules have swapped positions):

And every other imaginable combination. Shifting modules, powering up, powering down, and so on took big chunks of three days, plus two sessions of live chat (Jon and Beckie) and four phone support calls, one to the computer manufacturer and three to the memory supplier (Jeff 1, Jeff 2, Enrique, and Jeff 1 again).

And we came to this:

. . . although there is hope at the other end because this return merchandise authorization represents a swap for RAM modules of the same description but different density (we can't tell the density of the originals because they're encased in steel . . . those silver clips hold it in place, and I'm not about to rip them apart to look).

So it was nice that we could spend the rest of the day pretending computers haven't been invented yet, but dogs have.

Ah, Halloween!