I start the day with an electronic rooster crow alarm from my Android smart phone. I snooze it about three times. I often check Google Maps in the morning if my husband has to send a team of workers to a certain address that day; I'll preview the house they'll install gutters on using Street View and then print a map for him so he can check on his team later.
My Gmail account can be checked from my Android phone or from any browser. This morning I checked email from the phone, then got ready to head in to my publishing job. I only go to the office once every several months to prepare publications for reprint. As soon as my office helper is at the guttering office, I use the settings panel on the Android phone to forward all my calls to the office where she is. Now I can only be reached by email or SMS text, but since I have two jobs, she handles the calls that come to my business cell phone when she's at the office.
At my publishing job, I tried to open up trusty Adobe InDesign this morning, only to be greeted with an abnormal window demanding I enter the serial number and "personalize my software." This was a problem I needed to troubleshoot and solve quickly. I only had a babysitter for half a day! I found the original software box for CS2 and entered the serial number. Didn't work. I entered every number possible; none were accepted. I asked my boss if anything strange happened on that iMac this week.
"I clicked a button to update something a couple of days ago."
Since I knew that getting on the phone for support was not an option (Adobe support is notoriously either expensive or not helpful) I turned to my very favorite web site for InDesign support: indesignsecrets.com. I used their search field to type the keywords "serial number" and the first result was what I needed. Yes! This was a known bug that did have a fix.
Can you imagine how little of the population is running a Mac with OSX AND InDesignCS2 AND they clicked an update button from Adobe Acrobat? I'm in a small niche, here. This problem only affects people with my exact parameters, and the patch was linked from indesignsecrets.com to adobe.com support web pages. So, after 1 hour and 2 tries of applying the patch, I was successful and had control over InDesign again.
In case you haven't heard of it, InDesign is a powerful desktop publishing software that has granular control over every aspect of layout. Today I used it and Adobe Photoshop to update the images that would appear in a brochure style catalog. Once the layout looked right, I needed to convert the document to a "press ready" PDF. Something seemed corrupted in my document because after five tries and five failures to convert to PDF, I simply ran out of time and decided to submit the document in a packaged and zipped InDesign format. Again, I used the internet to upload my prepared file to the printshop in another state. They gave me an assigned folder number to upload to, then I left the office.
I had been called to do 2 guttering estimates by my office helper. I'm training her to take over doing the estimates, so I stopped at our guttering office and picked her up. (Luckily, another family member took over babysitting my 4 year old) She had already used Google Maps to plot out maps for our two destinations, but my navigator was missing (maybe my husband took it and never returned it). So, instead of using the Garmin navigator, I used my Android phone as a navigator, with the Google Maps Navigation app. Actually, it works better than the Garmin. It says street names and gives me more advanced notice before I have to make a turn.
Those 2 estimates in heavy rush hour traffic took us from 3 pm all the way until 6 pm. Back at the office, I used my HP all-in-one printer in conjunction with my laptop computer to print the photos I took at one of the estimates. I had used a Kodak digital camera with a removable memory card. I simply inserted the memory card into the slot provided right on the printer, and a wizard came up on the computer screen. I copied the photos from the card to the "my photos" folder, and set up a print job that combined 4 photos on one sheet of paper, thus saving both ink and paper. I stapled the estimate, map, and photos together, and left them for my helper to enter into Quickbooks tomorrow.
Back at home, I wanted to check on my Facebook, Twitter, Ning, and Gmail accounts, and then write this blog using Google's Blogger. Now it's 10 pm. My Android phone with always-on internet tells me I have new gmail, updates to apps, and snow on the way tomorrow.
Perhaps tomorrow I can get around to maintaining some of my other web sites using Dreamweaver. And with all this new-fangled gadgetry I use, I still have a combo TV so I can play my beloved VHS movies from decades ago, as well as DVD's and CD's.
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