GBU stands for "The good, the bad and the ugly." I was thinking it'd be a good way to keep myself going during National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo). Every day (or at least on the days I can't think of anything better to write) I'll write about something good, something bad and something ugly that happened that day. I know there's more bad than good in there, but hey...who wants to read about sweetness and light all the time? BOring!
Today had a good helping of each, so it's a good day to get started:
The Good: Had brunch this morning with my folks, as usual on Sundays, but for a special treat today, my brother Ian and nephew Jonathan joined us for the first time. Jonathan has just started his first year of university at McGill in Montreal and it was interesting to hear him talk about what it's like there for him. It sounds like he's doing pretty well so far. I gave him a cap and t-shirt I'd gotten from a work friend for doing her a little favor...I think he liked them.
The Bad: Decided to go into the office for a few hours and get a bit of work done...maybe give myself a bit of a head start for the week.
The Ugly: UggggggLEEEE!!! I'm working on a telephone directory. Page after page after page of text. Nothing complicated, just lots of it. When I tried doing some of this on Friday, my computer was really, really slow. You would be too if you were processing 43,000 phone listings in one file!
I got all the listings formatted, looking good, all the type in the right font and size, tabs set, everything's beautiful. So when I was done (at 7pm on a Friday night, don't forget), I saved the file, closed it and then, just to be safe, I copied it onto a memory stick, just in case the unthinkable happened to my computer over the weekend.
I came in this afternoon, double-clicked on the file and the program tells me the file needs minor repairs. I've seen this before ...but never with a native Quark 6 file. Spidey senses twitched but didn't set off any alarms. I clicked "repair"...it was my only option...and the file started to open. It was slow, but that wasn't disturbing...it was 88, 11"x17", 4-column pages full of phone listings. Of course it's gonna take a while.
So what do I see when it finally opened up? All my text was there, BUT ALL MY FORMATTING WAS GONE!!!! It took me 4 hours to do that formatting!!!! I worked overtime on that formatting!!! Shit on a stick!!!!
After calming down (mostly), I decided I would start again, and just do 10 or so pages at a time. Keep the files smaller, right? Maybe Quark isn't getting enough RAM. So I did just the first three sections over again. That worked out okay. I shut the document and reopened it just to be sure it would be okay, and it was. I went on to the second document. Seemed to go okay, but when I tried to reopen it after I was done, I got the "file needs minor repairs" message again. Friggo. Sure enough, all the formatting was gone.
So I restart the computer and try again. No luck. I uninstall all my fonts, thinking maybe there's a font conflict. At first that seemed to work well. But then something screwy started happening with the way the text was displaying on the screen, and I realized the computer was, at that very moment, in the process of destroying the file. Sure enough, the formatting was gone when I reopened it.
I did everything I could think of except try to do the work on a different computer. I would have tried that too, but I was at the point where I was so frustrated I was ready to cry. I'd been in the office for five hours and MAYBE got a good hour's worth of successful, usable work out of it. And I'm still not confident the stuff will continue to be usable as I take it through the next couple of phases of production. I was pissed OFF!
So tomorrow, I'm going to try doing the work on the spare computer and see what happens. While I'm busy doing that, I'm going to have our IT department remove every trace of QuarkXPress from my computer and reinstall it from scratch. I simply cannot afford delays on this project. I have to go to press on Nov. 9, and I'm getting further and further behind every day.
Ugly indeed.
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