Posts tagged Technology

Fonts

0
1125 days
by in Technology

I love fonts. When I use to have my graphic business, I would spend lots of money on fonts. These were the days when desktop publishing was getting started. I adore certain fonts and despise others. For example, I cannot stand “times” or its cousins, like “new times”. It is an ugly font. The case height is too small, so it is hard to read.

Yesterday in one of my RSS feeds, there was a mention of a documentary called, Helvetica. This font is used every day on our computers, we see it on street signs — and we take it for granted. The producer, Gary Hustwit’s unique documentary introduces Helvetica, whose readability has made it the most popular font in the world it is just over 50 years old.

I ran over over to netflicks to see if it was available, yep. Not only was it in the catalog, it was an “instant watch”. I loaded it in my instant watch queue and when I got home, I started to watch it. I have the RUKU box, so the instant watch is streamed to my HD TV. How cool is that.

helvetica

It’s Helvetica night in America, the 53-minute TV version of the film airs on PBS 1/6/9 (in some cities it’s on this weekend, check your local listings for Independent Lens, the series that it’s part of).

Starting Point

0
1270 days
by in Technology

When you talk about technology where do you start. For me, the starting point is where I am professionally. I work for an aerospace company that is large and I work on an aging program, (limits what new technology is used). I work with SGML/XML technologies and that focus is on large defense publications.

My experiences are based on the tools that I use. Below is a list, but they are the only the current list. I have experiences that go back in time, but I will not bore you with that trip down memory lane of old tools. Today, I work with:

  • PTC’s Arbortext Editor (SGML/XML editor) [work and home]
  • PTC’s IsoDraw (graphics editor) [work]
  • Adobe’s Illustrator 10 (graphics editor) [work and home]
  • Adobe’s Photoshop CS3 (photo/graphics editor) [work and home]
  • Adobe’s DreamWeaver CS3 (website editor) [work and home]
  • Adobe’s Lightroom 2 (photo workflow manager) [home]

Languages

  • Perl
  • Javascript
  • ACL (Arbortext)
  • Some Shell both Windows and Unix
  • HTML/XML/SGML

I plan to talk about my skills (or even the lack there of). I am 49 years old and been doing technology for a long time, but found that my skill are a bit aged. I decided to improve my skill set by doing blogs, working with web 2.0 technologies and sharing data with people like you. To be honest in my day job, I spend most of the my day mitigating defects, I do not get to spend much time coding. I have to leave the “heavy lifting” to my co-worker, Joe. He and I make up the software engineers in the department. Together, we do a lot of production. We have to spend more time than I like working on the “content”, but our jobs really about creating the “container”, or tool sets (DTDs, FOSIs, Scripts, Etc.). I use those two terms to describe how publications work. We build the “container” and the writers, fill it with “content”. I am not a technical writer, but I do work with them.

Most of the tools mentioned are about my day job, but I am not limiting it to that. Anything I like or dislike I will mention. I will share my tool-chains on how I organize my day or how I find cool stuff.

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