Connie's Ramblings

There were some rumours last night that we might get some high winds from the bands of “Bill” heading by so I had Jon close up the umbrella on the back of the deck. This afternoon, after no rain or high winds, I decided to have him open it back up so it would shade the back door.

Shortly after going out he came running back in: “Mom, you have to see this! There’s a bat in our umbrella!” Sure enough, a Little Brown Myotis was trying to take a nap. Here are a couple shots. Click on the images for larger versions.

I’ve been a user of Extensis’ Suitcase software to manage my fonts for many years and was a bit disappointed when I upgraded to Adobe CS4 and the auto activate plug in for Illustrator and InDesign was not upgraded in Suitcase 11.

Yesterday’s Layers Tip of the Day mentioned that Suitcase Fusion 2 has a new auto-active plug ins for CS4 and was very pleased to find that it is available for Windows users too! (Extensis Website)

Suitcase Fusion 2 requires that you uninstall Suitcase 11 before installing. It also does not automatically retrieve the Suitcase 11 database.. You can load the Suitcase 11 database by going to Tools > Import Suitcase for Windows Data

Note: Fusion 2’s default settings move all added fonts to a "font vault" within Local, Application Data of your C:/ drive. If you are like me with a lot of fonts, duplicating all of those somewhere else on your system is a bit crazy – I have all of mine stored in F:/fonts/ the items in the F drive do not change very often so it doesn’t have to backed up as frequently – rather convenient for my work flow. To change this setting go to: Edit > Preferences and under Font Vault Options change to "Add fonts leaving them in place." I also changed the Activations Options adding a check into "Notify if a conflict occurs."

That said – it seems that if you ‘Import Suitcase for Windows Data’ it goes to the vault vice leaving them so I ended up creating new sets. Something new and coinvent with Fusion 2 is you can "export sets" which are mini database files… to save sets/back them up.

You can also have multiple libraries… I now have a library for my standard fonts and another for various free fonts…

Other cool features include the ability to create popup boxes of fonts you are considering and being able to move fonts to sets from the preview window..

All in all a great upgrade… that took too long in the making!

I bought these flowers last weekend so they are well past their prime but I liked how several of the flowers were floating on the top of the water in the vase. While shooting, a full flower fell and that is the 2nd shot which I also posted as my photo for the day on pBase

I wanted to spread some awareness on a new email going around. This morning I got the lovely email from a ‘malware provider’ claiming to be MS. Basically saying, “Microsoft has released an update for Microsoft Outlook / Outlook Express. This update is critical and provides you with the latest version of the Microsoft Outlook / Outlook Express and offers the highest levels of stability and security.” First message I got had the ‘fix’ attached the other two have links… If you get one, don’t open it. Despite the fact that they do look real they are not – MS will never send you a link or the actual fix in an email, they will push it via Microsoft Updates. You can read more about it on SophosLabs Blog  but main point is to be aware of it and don’t open it or any others that look like it.

Off of the email topic and on to snail mail topic… really snail mail… you see back in January of 2007 I ordered a drying rack to dry hand washable etc. I watch the tracking progress and was puzzled when it said ‘delivered’ and I never got it! So I called the company and they did a search on it and couldn’t find it either so they sent me a 2nd one. Well today our mail lady showed up and mentioned she had a big package for me. I was really shocked because I haven’t ordered anything big. She opened up the back of the truck and when I saw it I started wondering if it was the long lost drying rack. Sure enough, I opened up the packing slip and it was shipped January 30, 2007. It arrived today, 2.5 years later… apparently it was sitting in a back storage room at the post office and the postmaster had someone clean it out this week.