Adding Understanding

Recently getting into job looking mode has led me to brush off the Automator routines for combining PDF documents into one document. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be working in OS X 10.5 (or 10.5.1). A Apple Discussion Forum post suggests I'm not the only one encountering the problem.

When you run the action in Automator it works like a charm. When running the action as a plug-in in the Finder the action swirls for a moment and then nothing happens. From my testing it does not seem to matter what is done with the output of "Combine PDF Pages" nothing happens from there on.

We're hard at work on some new projects. Here is a teaser for one of them.

Photo by Cheryl Tadin.

Doing a little live blogging from the Democratic Presidential Debate at UNLV tonight. Senator Biden is clearly coming out as the winner in the first half of the debate. Senator Clinton said at the opening of the debate that she was wearing an asbestos pant suit. That pant suit certainly got a workout in early sparing with Senator Edwards. Senator Biden was way ahead with charm and down to earth answers and staying on point about how we take the country and world forward instead of political sparing.

It is a day early for Friday funnies but this email from Examsoft today was too good to pass up:

Dear Administrator,

SofTest was certified to run on Mac OS X running Windows XP with the beta version of Boot Camp in the spring of 2006. August 31, 2007 marked completion of our first complete academic year (9/1/06 - 8/31/07) supporting this platform. Over this past academic year no issues have been reported to us running SofTest on this platform with either XP or Vista. We purchased the new Leopard OS (with the now supported version of Boot Camp) and have tested SofTest running XP and Vista on this platform without incident. SofTest is now certified to run on Leopard through Boot Camp. We will continue to support SofTest's use on this platform moving forward.

Apple's release of Leopard (http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/features/bootcamp.html) confirms that not only is Apple moving forward with Boot Camp, it is now an integral part of their operating system and contains its own "Boot Camp Setup Assistant" to simplify Windows installation. It appears that their marketing strategy is to make every Mac computer Windows-compliant as they now even install all necessary drivers. Based upon Apple's aggressive marketing, it seems inevitable that Mac's will be shipping with Windows pre-installed in the very near future. Some vendors are already offering pre-installation of Windows on Mac's as an option.

Sincerely,

Maribel Olvera
ES Client Support Manager
ExamSoft Worldwide, Inc.
350 Jim Moran Blvd., Suite 120
Deerfield Beach , FL 33442
[O] 866.429.8889 ext. 116
[C] 561.573.1090
[F] 954.429.0733

Some of the folks from Cirque du Soleil were on campus Tuesday to talk about the entertainment industry. They shared their corporate mission which I like a great deal. "To invoke the imagination, provoke the senses and evoke the emotions of people around the world." It makes for a good motto too. Invoke, evoke, provoke.

And they have some interesting jobs available for folks living in the right locations.

Hearing Fish Lake Valley advertised on the radio this morning was pretty fun. The valley has the small town of Dyer, Nevada which is home to a few small businesses. To hear the ads put in the best real estate terms the Mountain Water Ranch Development is just a hop skip and a jump from the slopes in Mammoth, California. Well it might be in the summer, in the winter it could be quite a drive.

Hearing that 10-acres can be yours for only $70,000 must be attractive to some who have challenges reading a map or don't mind being a few (hundred) miles from doctors, dentists and much of civilization. On the other hand it is about the closest thing to Deep Springs College.