The ABC's of programming

This past Thursday/Friday started out quietly enough at the office.

We were short-handed this week, as the Fresh Prince of Data Services was on vacation. He-Whose-Name-Shall-Never-Be-Mentioned (HWNSNBM) therefore reassumed the mantle of command on Thursday night and guided the projects ("The Big Show") to fruition that the Fresh Prince normally has a major hand in.  For the first time in as long as I can remember, though, none of these projects was "HOT", and during our Friday morning impromptu turnover meeting, I informed both the Stig and the Princess that if they were not able to get to The Big Show, then HWNSNBM and I would take care of it on Friday night.

I worked late on Thursday, so I came in later on Friday night, which is pretty much the norm for our office. When I arrived, HWNSNBM and I had a brief meeting, and someone had done one production QC on the Big Show, and he had done one on all of the others. So, as I had also done one on Friday morning, this left me with two to complete, along with two other jobs. Friday night was shaping up to be quite uneventful.

It would have stayed that way except for printer drivers. Our I.T. department has been optimizing the drivers for one of our printers, and I've been doing some testing of these drivers. The easiest way to test them is to print out .pdf's. The results of a particular test were not great, so the Lurker suggested using a different printer.  I did this, and discovered that when the Man-With-Three-First-Names (MW3FN) created this particular file, he did not account for white space at the top of the document. Normally, this would not be an issue, but for this particular job we needed to do a type of duplexing, and although the program was set up correctly with the imaging falling in place nicely, the white space (~2.5", or 5cm) that had not been cropped off the top of the background overlapped when duplexed, causing 2.5" of the bottom of one page to be obscured by the top of the second page.

Bottom line: it took me close to 2 hours, but I finally got the background cropped properly and outputted acceptable proofs.

That's it for printers and Thursday night drama. Next up: taking a chance on programming.

As always, I an hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.