cinnabon... finally here...

Cinnabon finally opened an outlet here in Jakarta. It used to be my fav when I lived in Eugene, OR, 12 years ago. Oh.... that Moccalatta, and the cinnamon with extra frosting..... :d

2 weeks ago, they opened an outlet in Taman Anggrek Mall, 3rd Floor, next to the movie theatres, replacing Famous Amos (Bye bye.... I'll miss their chocalate cookies... :( )

Price is okay. 10k or so for a minibon, and around 14k for a regular roll. However, they are not freshly baked, as in 'fresh from the oven'.
Nevertheless, the roll is better than Saint's Cinnamon (also located in MTA). My wife prefers Saint's Cinnamon, because they got Cheese Roll.

The Quickest way to make a web page.

The Export department asked me to update the web with a new product line up. The site itself is quite old. I've been planning to upgrade this site, but always bumped away with daily routine such as broken computers, virus cleaning, internet connection lag, surfing, reading email... etc...

I got 15 pages brochures of the product from Export Department. What is the quickest and dirtiest way to put up this pages to website? At first, I asked for the designer of the pages for the Freehand files. Guess what. He didn't have the file. He trashed the file and didn't even archive it after the files was sent to the printer. Well...
He got only the original Photosop file of the image of the products. And each of the image is 25MB to 30MB in size.

So, I don't have much time, as Export Dept kept pushing this. So I'll just put up a quick and dirty pages first, before manually optimized those 25-30MB product images.

I scanned the pages. (One thing I regret is I scanned them using descreened option, which result the text to be blurry).



Scanned result was feed into Adobe Image Ready, increase the Contrast +40 around the black text area (to make the text crispier), slice the picture around each product+description, and save it as html+images.

then I open those images using Dreamweaver, apply a simple template consisting of navigation to the main page, previous page, and next page. Manually link each of the 'previous page' and 'next page'.

Connect to the server via FTP, and then upload.

Here there are.... a quick and dirty (or blurry to be precise) web pages. Times taken : 2-3 hours (mainly slow FTP transfer, because I live in a crappy country that has crappy connection).



Next week... I'll clean up and possibly redesign these pages..... if I have time....

Entourage X 2GB database file limit

entourage
Originally uploaded by magnor.

Yesterday, one of the staff hitted this limit. He was using Entourage X without any update at all (as I believe, if it aint broke, don't fix it).

Yesterday it broke. Everytime he launched Entourage, it gave "-40" error. Tried the typical and advance rebuild also didn't work.

So I downloaded the latest upgrade (10.1.6) from this site @ microsoft.

I applied the upgrade, and Entourage went back to normal. However it still have a limit of 4GB.

The user have to have to manage their email.

A side effect after applying this update is that everytime I relaunched Entourage or Word or Excel, it will ask for the CD Key.

Using "Remove Office" from Office X Cd, I removed ms office from his mac, and then reinstall the Office again. Enter the CD-Key, and it's all set. Never again asked for CD-Key.

This is why I love my bos...

This is my I love my Bos...

Yesterday, my Bos brought me a new iMac G5. (Currently I am using my beloved Cube, and still using it.... )
A couple of weeks ago, I was given a task to digitized a bunch of 8mm and hi8mm video cassete. My Cube was having a hard time when I tried to encode the captured video into DVD via iDVD.

It's a fine machine. Fast and quiet. Although the screen is a smaller than everybody thought it suppose to be from behind. It's a 17" wide screen. I wish it was a hi-res display. It's not quite far different in term of size from my 15" Studio Display.

Automatic user data migration (when you first turned on this new computer), didn't went smoothly.... it always stuck at "43 minutes left". Maybe my Cube's 20G hard disk is too crowded. I tried Repair Permission and Repair Disk several times using Disk Utility, and check and repair volume using TechTool Pro, but still it stuck at "43 minutes left".... (sometimes it's "45 minutes left"). Well, that wasted 1/2 of my days, so I decided to skip the process.

A few of my office mate drop by to see this iMac. They are PeeCee user, so they are quite amazed with it.... I was trying to find a way to show off this machine... and nothing came up... Apple should include a short movie of what this machine is capable of doing. A short 2-3 minutes movie will do.
I ran WorldBook instead... which wasn't very 'ohhh... ahhhh'. Neither is Nanosaurs.
Again, Apple should give some sampler or movies, at least for me to showoff this widescreen iMac.

So today, I bring a copy of Mission : Impossible - 2 DVD. Screen quality is okay, due to the scalling for full screen effect. If I watch it in normal mode, it will be too small, and the widescreen imac will be just a waste. Another 'minus' is the speaker. It's not powerful enough. My Cube's speaker is more powerful.... I might attached them to this iMac.

So the video project can wait... I'll 'test drive' this machine first. :)