I’ve grown accustomed to blaming everything bad that happens during my ‘computing experience’ on Bill Gates. The etiology of this is that since SP2 I’ve experienced ‘loss of work’ because of Microsoft’s critical update strategy. An example would be picking out a few photos to work on from a days work just before bed, I didn’t really do anything to them, I just picked them out, but that takes time. In the morning I’d wake planning to get to work on the photos I’d selected and find that my selection work was for naught because a ‘critical update’ took place during the night and Bill had decided to restart my computer. Hmm.
Last evening the ‘Yellow Shield of Impending Lethargy’ or Microsoft’s update ‘nag’ appeared in the Windows XP tray. Having switched the setting to ‘ask me’ I gave it permission, ultimately what other choice is there? My only real choice is ‘when’. It did it’s download thing, then it did it’s install thing and then it did it’s restart thing.
That all seemed to go ok, my apologies come from later in last evening’s experience. Laurie was on the phone with a friend for about 93 minutes and I took that as an opportunity to prep some photos for our website. We keep a ‘batch’ of photographs called our ‘portfolio’ and as we shoot new photographs we add to this ‘batch’. Our ‘portfolio’ photos are all formatted as Photoshop documents and the web generation software I use needs to see ‘.jpg’ documents. No big deal as Photoshop has a ‘batch’ processing option that lets me point to all of those Photoshop documents and process them by resizing and resaving as .jpg’s.
Well, that’s what I did, I pointed to the source folder, the destination folder, defined the rename, defined the resize, defined the output file quality and fired away at the ‘ok’ button.
The first photo took around 20 minutes and the file size was like 38 megabytes. What?
So I cancelled and tried to process the first photo manually, and the file size was like 38 kilobytes. In my sleep deprived state I irrationally blamed Bill and his latest download, install and restart cycle. So I restarted and tried it again. Same thing. I was hot, I just wanted to take a shower and go to bed. I hated the idea of manually processing 100+ photographs.
I tried it one last time before shutting down.
My fault, the resize was set to ‘700′ which is what I intended for photograph width for our website, only the ‘devil is in the details’, it said ‘inches’ not ‘pixels’. I was making them 150 times bigger than they needed to be.
I started the batch process again and before I could say, “my next computer’s a PowerBook” Photoshop and accomplished the task.
Bill, my apologies.
But my next computer is still going to be a PowerBook.
