Idiot Printing

Last night I thought I’d print out some pictures for my office walls. I’ve just switched back to using my venerable HP inkjet as I think it prints better colours than the Canon one I got last year. And 7dayshop were doing a good deal on proper ink cartridges for it. So off I went. Of course, I’d forgotten how horrid HP printer drivers are, and coupled with the “quirkiness” of Photoshop Elements (I’m being very generous here) I had a much rougher time than I expected.

I discovered that if you are daft/clever enough to try and print with the preview enabled in the printer driver (which is one way I try to avoid wasting a quid's worth of paper and ink) the driver just hangs up, with no way of clearing the print job. You have to delete the printer and make a new one. Of course I didn’t find this out straight away, I had to waste half an hour doing reboots and trying lots of other things before I finally managed to get the thing to work.

And the printing looked horrid. There were awful smears showing through on the page. I stared (and this is true) at the page coming out of the printer for at least 30 seconds before it dawned on me what I’d done. I’d put an already printed page through the printer. I’d used some enormously expensive amount of ink ruining a perfectly good picture, which I’d popped into the paper box to stop it from getting creased.

Idiot.

bing in Quite Good Shock

Google is a verb. It means “to search for on the internet”. Perhaps one day it will also mean “to take over the world”. Perhaps not.

Anyhoo, like everyone else I’ve used Google for all my searching needs since forever. Today I had a go with the Microsoft competitor, bing. I’d heard nice things about it, and so I thought I’d give it a go. And the big surprise is that it is actually quite good. I’m not convinced it is as good as Google for everything, but it is certainly good enough to make make wish I had two search boxes on my browser toolbar, one for Google searching and another for Bing. The two actually complement each other quite nicely.

Bing is good for entertainment and travel, and displays its home page and the search results with a graphical pizzazz that Google lacks. Google is good for stuff a bit more off the beaten track and does maps better. But it is nice to see some proper competition in the search arena.

Imogen Heap – Ellipse

Imogen Heap is ace. We saw her live in York ages ago and she has gone from strength to strength since then. She has just (today) released a new album, Ellipse, which I downloaded first thing this morning before going to work. It is a wonderful thing this internets, you can go from wanting to having in a remarkably short time.

Anyhoo, on first hearing the album is nice and tuneful with some neat vocal touches and sound effects. I’ve not heard anything to top “The Moment I Said It” from her previous album “Speak For Yourself”, but that is actually quite a tall order and these things do grow on you.

Worth checking out.

…and we are done

That’s it. The notes for chapter 16 is now on their way off my system and I’m on my way to getting my life back.

Twitter Overrun

I’m suddenly being followed by loads of new people on Twitter. I can think of two possible explanations for this:

1. The world has suddenly woken up to the genius of my insightful and expressive Tweets (in spite of the fact I’ve tweeted nothing for over a fortnight).
2. This some cunning new internet scan or scamola.