9/29/2007

This ‘N That

Uncle AndrewUncle Andrew
Filed under: @ 8:02 pm

I’ll be out of town for, if all goes well, a day. And if all goes to shit, two to three. I have to drive down to Eugene, Oregon to be present for a press check on our Fall catalog. I will try very hard not to let the bright lights of the big city draw me under their spell. 🙄

We do our catalog on a web offset press, which is very economical, but it also means that doing the full press run takes for fucking ever. I’m only showing up for the press check for the first signature, or set of pages; to be there for all six eight-page sigs would probably take three or four days, being called every fifteen hours or so–day or night–to come in and say, “Yep, that looks like a mushroom all right.” Most customers don’t come in for any press check whatsoever, but we’ve only been working with this company for about a year, so I want to be on hand. Web offset presses tend to have registration problems (the dots that make up the images on the paper tend to slip out of alignment with each other, causing fuzzy text, pictures that look “hairy” and, in really bad cases, the kind of bizarre 3D-glasses effect you occasionally see in bad press runs of the Sunday Funnies) and unless someone is looking for every little defect, it’s quite likely that some will slip by.

So I leave tomorrow around noon to drive about five hours down to Eugene, stay in a hotel overnight (a much better one than last time, I assure you) and get up Monday morning for a press check that, ostensibly, is set for 9 am. Of course, the press check last year started some nine hours late because of unforeseen complications with the print job scheduled before mine, so I don’t really know how long I’ll be down there.

Actually, though, the real reason I’m writing this is to let those members of Fragslist know that my Unreal Tournament server seems to be, if not down, then at least confused and irritable. I’m having a terrible time with the bots right now; they blink in and out of existence, even run through walls. I think it’s a networking issue, but I have yet to nail it down. Things like work and family keep getting in the way, dammit. 😛

Anywho, if you want to try it out, feel free, but I think you’re going to be disappointed. If anyone wants to offer up their educated guess as to the solution, feel free to chime in. I could use some reports as to people’s pings as well. Remember, the UT server is at 208.64.242.11. Mahalo Nui Loa for your kokua!


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