This is almost getting funny. Certas/Desjardins, my insurance company, is still taking their time over the $6,500 theft. Nothing yet from them. And it is “not their fault” since they “stayed within policy”. The adjuster who visited last week (whom they sent) did not ask me for receipts according to the report he dictated a week ago that just arrived, so the claim is not yet valid, says the other adjuster, and this is apparently somehow my fault: “you should have known he should have asked you for receipts”.

Oh? When no-one asked me? Oh well. So I scramble and drive home and, in an hour, receipts are faxed. “The mail room logs your fax in within a business day and then one of the two mail runs the day after should, with luck, deliver your fax to me and then I will usually respond in 24-48 hours”, that sort of nonsense. People giving dictation? Mail rooms? 24-48 hours?

The fax I sent Saturday just arrived today as well, with the “11AM mail run”. Truly Dickensian. Of course I have asked the adjuster for his email address three times now - not a single response.

And then the veiled threats from the agent (”I am allowed to take seven days to respond to anything”) and worse still from the customer service “manager”: “Sir, we are allowed to take 60 days to respond to any claim”. That is just the sort of veiled threat that will prompt me to take action, I say. “No, it is a fact”, says the insurance person.

“Hence ‘veiled threat’ “, my 13-year old remarks - he has more sense than a dozen insurance people three times his age.

The insurance person says “there is nothing we can do”. “Yes there is”, I say. “I faxed what you wanted (and should have asked me for 12 days ago) two hours ago. Can you please walk to the mail room and get the fax, instead of waiting 48 hours? That is what you can do”.

No. They do not do that at Desjardins. “Can do” is a euphemism for “want to do”.

Nor am I asking for money. All I am asking for is a decision: how much is covered. “Sir, even after we clear it all we could not possibly get permission in a day”. Bah. I would say “crooks” if I wasn’t so neutral and balanced.

I shall change insurance companies after they pay. I will also lodge a complaint with the Canada Insurance Ombudsman. And this factual list of events will get expanded to every fact, so Google will pick it up years from now.

And Desjardins/Certas Direct, that is most certainly not a threat. It is simply a fact.

Hi all,

I've been away for a while, dealing with a death in the family. I have set up some "classic" posts and have not been able to respond to email inquiries. The repeat posts and low blog response will continue through Fourth of July weekend.

Solveig

So tonight I am reading (because I cannot find a working torrent) Dylan Thomas’s last (and best) work, the radio play “Under Milk Wood“.

There is no God and no afterlife, but there certainly is beauty and there is poetry. Here [link]. And if you have a chance to download the radio play (1954, Richard Burton): do. I listened to this in 1982 in the Libyan desert and remember it to this day. Shortwave, BBC World Service, 9410 kHz.

What a genius Dylan Thomas was. Here are the starting words of the play:

To begin at the beginning:

It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters’-and-rabbits’ wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboatbobbing sea. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine to-night in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows’ weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now.

Hush, the babies are sleeping, the farmers, the fishers, the tradesmen and pensioners, cobbler, schoolteacher, postman and publican, the undertaker and the fancy woman, drunkard, dressmaker, preacher, policeman, the webfoot cocklewomen and the tidy wives. Young girls lie bedded soft or glide in their dreams, with rings and trousseaux, bridesmaided by glowworms down the aisles of the organplaying wood. The boys are dreaming wicked or of the bucking ranches of the night and the jollyrodgered sea. And the anthracite statues of the horses sleep in the fields, and the cows in the byres, and the dogs in the wetnosed yards; and the cats nap in the slant corners or lope sly, streaking and needling, on the one cloud of the roofs.

That’s about as close as I get to a religious experience. Almost enough to make me want to move to 1944 Wales (not 2008 Wales, as it will be filled with cameras and rules and regulations).

OK. Bad companies news again. I just know you are interested.

OK, so you are not. But guess what. The people managing these companies are. Or should be. And the potential customers who are Googling. So here we go with today’s score.

Hakim Optical. In Oakville. Oh dear. I went in there to show them my glasses that need putting together every week: the screws come out. The ladies’ judgment (after I got to speak to “the manager”): nothing wrong with these. All glasses have screws. You have to put them together every week when they fall apart because they are reading glasses and you keep putting them on and off. Nothing we can do. A Kafka-esque experience and I will not be going back there. Like, ever. Bye.

Certas/Desjardins insurance: still no news, no money, no verdict on my $6,500 loss. “I have the right under our policy to take seven days to respond to a letter - that is, after the mail room delivers your letter a day or two after they receive it”. I will look for a better insurance company, of course. Bye.

The Globe and Mail. The cartoon of the day today called both SUVs and their owners “big, flashy, pretentious, and dumb”. I am switching papers. And I just wrote the Globe the following Letter to the Editor:

OK. So Gas Guzzlers as well as their their drivers are “big, flashy, pretentious, and dumb”? (Cartoon, today).

Big? It may come as a surprise to your (presumably city-dwelling and underpaid) cartoonist that some people need space to transport things. And some people actually need four-wheel drive abilities. With a cottage up north, you can count me in both those categories.

Flashy and pretentious? It seems to me that those are just words used by jealous people to describe those who can afford more. Would your cartoonist like to see us all on bicycles, dressed in Mao suits? Should I hand in my fountain pen, sunglasses and watch also?

As for “dumb”: In my eyes, it is your cartoonist who qualifies as “dumb”. And jealous. And insulting. Which is bad for a cartoonist, since dumb, jealous insults are never funny. I really had expected more than this from The Globe. Perhaps there are newspapers out there that do not deliberately insult their readers. If so, that’s where I am going. In my big, comfortable, four-wheel drive high-end SUV. Bye.

There. Vented. And I know Google will still find this five years from now - and these guys deserve this, since these are factual statements, hard as it may be to believe this.

So there you are. You've got a whole bunch of people signed up for various events you're planning. Or they've ordered a bunch of your products. Some have signed up for more than one event; some have ordered more than one product.  You want to just get a list of the customers who've signed up. If a customer has signed up for three events, you just want her name to appear once. You just want the unique values.

One thing you can do is use the Standard Filter.

Select the column of data, either with the heading or without.

Choose Data > Filter > Standard Filter.

Select None as the Field Name then click More.

• If you didn't select a column heading like Customer, deselect Range Contains Column Labels.
• Select No Duplication
• Select Copy Results To, click in the empty field, then either type the sheet and cell where you want it copied, or click in the cell in your spreadsheet where you want it copied.

Click OK.

You'll get only the unique values from that cell range, pasted starting at the cell you specified.

So the Aperture effort continues. Some of you may find it interesting to see how I get on, so…

I bought a 1 TB RAID0 drive at the Apple Store. I copied all my photo shoot directories ove rthere. I emptied Aperture (deleted all projects, restarted). I then started re-importing the images from the new drive (I chose the way that leaves the originals where they are).

So far it has been chugging along all night creating thumbnails. The CPU is 200% used (of which 190% is Aperture). Aperture is completely unresponsive.

In fact - Aperture is so unresponsive I am sure it has hung up. Now I need to repeat the process.

This does not seem like good software - certainly not well behaved. I mean, how difficult can it be to import 10,000 images - that is what this software is for. Right? So make the app “nice” 10, already, so I can do other things meanwhile. Or give me a progress bar, with an ETA.

I am willing to learn - not being difficult. I have Googled others’ issues. I have followed instructions. I have tried support (no help there). I ask here.

But should it really take month to import my images? I am very close to throwing this crapware out and getting lightroom instead.

Also, the printing issue continues: I cannot print from the Mac: HP prints come out way too dark - like two stops. MANY people on the Apple help forums are reporting the same. No solutions given, other than ones that don’t work (yes, I have done the calibration, all the settings, the gamma, etc etc etc, ad nauseam), or the useless “it works for me!” or even worse, “just buy a new printer”.

Right. I buy a new printer. NOT. Instead, I am doing all my photo work on the Vista PC. How dumb is that, when the Mac is meant to be the Media PC?

SO looking for solutions - I cannot find any. A month so far, almost every day an hour or so on these two problems - no solutions that work. Andd Apple is very adept at hiding its support phone numbers: hell, I’ll pay for support!

Tel Aviv has been pushed into the sea, if this map, showing Swiss Airlines’ Middle East routes, is anything to go by:

Or maybe it is wishful thinking: the Swiss are not known universally for their love of other races.

OK, so we just saw a giant raccoon walk through the garden and get under the deck. Great, a family of raccoons. Can I get rid of them without killing?

The zombies of the music and movie industries say that DRM is not dead. Apparently, stories of its demise are greatly exaggerated, and DRM, Digital Rights Management (i.e. copy protection) is making a comeback.

If so, then that is stupid to the extreme. According to Fritz Attaway, executive vice president at the Motion Picture Association of America, “We need DRM to show our customers the limits of the license they have entered into with us”. Um… Right. Sure. I am sure my son and his generation of music and movie downloaders are very interested in knowing those limits and having them enforced.

I’ve said it many times: DRM is essentially dead. Like the cartoon figure walking over a cliff, it just hasn’t looked down yet. Yes, it is a shame about Windows’ restrictions, Blu-Ray not playing hi-def over component, and so on (how many people realise you cannot play high-def video over component, due to deliberate technical degradation? The first time technology has gotten deliberately worse).

But when the Soviet Politburo announces that the party leader is not ill, he just has a cold, you know the funeral is only days away.

…that is, “Desjardins Insurance Co arranged by Certas Direct”, or some such waffly phrase, is taking more time. Now the company is slowly going through snail-paced process.

I make five calls (to the usual voicemail) this week, and received no retrun calls. Finally, I got hold of the adjuster at 4:25 Friday (they go home 4:30).

This week, an adjuster interviewed me. The adjuster is now on holiday. When he returns and his report reaches the insurance company’s adjuster, he can then prepare a claim for his managers. There is a maximum amount as well as a $1,000 deductive, but he thinks I may be under that maximum amount - how come “thinks? How about read up on this in the policy? Why is there any question?

I have to be grateful that this adjuster visited me so quickly, the other adjuster tells me. It’s cost for them. So I get interviewed to check out my trustworthiness, and I have to be grateful that they do this within a week?

Meanwhile I am sans camera, memory cards, wide angle lens, Blackberry, Flash, and so on, and have no choice but to wait some more. Maybe next week they’ll tell me if the adjuster thought I was trustworthy and the adjuster’s adjuster’s manager has approved some or all of my $6,500 claim.

Preposterous. I am being treated like the suspect instead of the victim. All this while they could have interviewed dozens of witnesses to validate my claim, and they could have caught the criminals. But that. apparently, is not interesting.

Remember the name, Desjardins/Certas.

See also my post on the pagination extension.

All right. It's the elephant in the room, and it's time to address it.

How do you have no page number on the first page, then have the second page start with the page number 1 in the footer? Or with page number 42, or 623?

(Or how do you have a landscape page in a portrait document?)

Good question. It's a common one. It's actually not more complex than the tax code, but there's some setup you need to do that's a little more complicated than the task at hand. I would like to see a checkbox/field combination somewhere  that would let you specify "For this document, start the page footer on page __ and make the first page number be ___". However, for now, we do it this way.

There are two things to control in this situation:
- Whether there is a page number in the footer--i.e. whether there is any number at all in there, regardless of what it is.
- If there is a page number in the footer, what that page number is.

You control the first with page styles: you set up the page style, say "yes, there's a footer and a page number in it" or "no, no stinkin' page numbers here" and then apply that page style.

You control the second a few different ways. I'm going to show you the most straightforward which is just to create a page break, switch to a different page style, and specify what the page number for that page is.: 1, 42,  623, or anything else.

Let's look at part 1 first.  Page styles are actually a really nice, useful feature.

Part 1: Setting Up Page Styles

Bring up the document you're working with.  Remove any page breaks you've put in between the first and second pages. This sample  document I'm using has some text that clearly goes on a cover page, and then it runs immediately into the content text that should start on page 2.

For any of these images, just click on any of them that are too small for you to read. (They mostly all are, but you might not need to get more detail on all of them.)

Here's my sample document. I want no page number on the first page and page number 1 on the 2nd page.

Choose Format > Styles and Formatting. In that window, click the Page Styles icon at the top.

Right-click in the blank part and choose New. You're going to make the page styles you need.

In the Organizer tab of the page styles window, just name the style  something like Cover Page. This is the one with no footer and no page number.

You actually don't need to do anything else. But just to make sure it's clear when we're applying the styles in this procedure, I'm going to suggest that you  click the Background tab and give it the  light gray background.

Click OK.

Now, right-click in a blank part of the Styles and Formatting window again, and choose New. This time you're creating the other page style, the one for the main body where you're going to have a page number and start it at 1. Call it Main Body or something, in the Organizer tab.

Then click the Footer tab and turn it on by marking the checkbox.

That's all you really need to do, so click OK.

Part 2: Applying a Page Style, Then Switching to Another

Click in the first page of the document, where you want the Cover Page page style. In the Styles and Formatting window, double-click the Cover Page style you created. The style will be applied, as you can tell from the gray background.

The style is applied not only to that page, but to the entire document. That's what's supposed to happen at this point.

Now you're ready to switch. So click to the left of the first word where you want to switch, the first word of the next page usually. Or click to the right of the last word on the current page. Whatever works. Here I've clicked to the left of "Why".

Choose Insert > Manual Break. In the window that appears, just tell it that now you want to switch to the Main Body page style by selecting it in the list.

That second page is also really the first content page of the document, so you'd like it to be page 1. So select the page numbering checkbox and specify 1. (Or any number you want.)

Click OK.

A page break will be inserted where your cursor was, and the new page style you specified, Main Page, will be applied from that page on in the document.

Now, there's one more step. You've already created the footer for that Main Page style, but it's time to put content in it.  I.e., the page number. This is easy. Just scroll to the bottom of the first content page (the second page), type the word page and a space if you want, then choose Insert > Fields > Page Number. The page number will appear. And  you already specified that on this page where the page style switches to MainPage, the page numbering should restart at 1.  So it restarts at 1. (If you had specified page number 42 earlier, this number would be 42.)

That's All There Is To It

Just create the styles you want, apply the first style, then just switch page styles the way we did in this example.

Tips for Landscape and Portrait in the Same Document

To have a landscape page in a portrait document, just create a page style and select the Landscape option of the Page tab. So in this example, you could create a third page style, call it Landscape or Horizontal. Switch to it the way we did here with the manual break, but just don't change the page number.

Tips for Automatic Switching From One Page Style to Another

If you want to automatically switch from one page style to another, you have two options.

In the page style definition window, click the Organizer tab and find the Next Style list. You'll still need to insert manual page breaks sometimes but you won't have to switch styles as we did earlier.

In the paragraph style definition window, click the Text Flow tab and find the section in the middle dealing with creating a page break with a particular page style on the next page.

Or try using all three approaches together.

I'm thinking of making this blog more about games. I haven't lost interest in Linux, but I don't eat, sleep, and breathe it anymore since I'm no longer writing about it full time. I know I don't have a massive following but I hope

Ok, so that is a bit much, But annoying, certainly:

Rogers. They will not help with the stolen Blackberry. A new one will cost me full price and a new SIM card ditto, the full $80. (They cost about $0.25 to make). If I do not do this, I still have to pay the full amount per month for the remaining two years on the contract, even if I do not use the Blackberry.

Air Canada. I am in Montreal with two hours to kill. “Super Elite” - yeah right. Counts for nothing on Air Government. Many earlier flights, all half empty, But AC insists on a $50 “change fee”. So instead, I sit in their lounge with a colleague and the two of us eat and drink as much as possible (at least $100 worth. preferably) of their food and wine. Silly: they could let us on and then possibly sell the seats on the later flight.

My insurance company, Desjardins/Certas Direct, For insisting on an interview at my house to take a statement. Whenever they have time (they are “very busy”). This feels just a bit like I am now the criminal, instead of the victim. And meanwhile no pay-out of the $6,000 I lost. I await the interview. I understand them - but still. I will forgive them if the intent is to catch the criminals - but we will see.

I just cannot imagine that annoying your customers pays off in the long run. If my customers were all hoping for me to go bankrupt, and wishing for a chance to leave, I would not sleep well. Aren’t you supposed to make your customers into fans? Instead, if Rogers went bankrupt I think I would go get a bottle of expensive champagne.

Frequent readers will recall the theft of my camera and accessories and wallet Friday. So now the insurance company “needs” to interview me at home. I suppose they don’t believe me re the losses. Or perhaps they want to find reasons not to pay out the full amount. I am the victim here, having lost $6,000 of stuff, and yet it feels a bit like I am being treated like the suspect.

I told them Friday: so interview me here at the show any of the next few days. There are many witnesses. Not interested. I also tried to get the insurance company as well as c/c companies interested in catching the criminals - should have been relatively easy. But no interest in that at all. Hassling the victim is OK though.

This will cost me at least $1,000 deductible, plus presumably a doubling of my insurance premium, so yes, I am a tad annoyed.

I am back.

Travel is tiring.

Here, just before landing:

I will not buy a Saab and I will not get a CIBC Aerogold card. Ever. Because these companies push advertising to me while I am sitting in my Air Canada seat.  Right in front of my face, advertising you cannot turn off. That is digotal advertising done wrong.

I also see signs of Air Canada possibly charging fo movies soon: look at these words:

Currently compliments of Air Canada. I pay $1,000 for a flight with no food (not even for sale- none!) and I am told by implication that movies will not be free forever. Nice.

When you add a graphic to a document, you can either plop it straight in so it's stored in the document, or you can link the graphic so that the document just points to where the graphic is stored.

It looks the same either way, but here's the thing. When you email your document to someone, or post your template in a network directory, what happens to that link pointing to the graphic?

The link points back to your directory at home\documentdrafts\2008\graphics\teamphoto.gif  or whatever the path is. And your cousin in Phoenix or the other people on your team can't get to that graphic.

So what you want to do, typically, when you're sending documents or templates to other people that those people need to work with, is to make sure that your graphics are embedded in your document.

NOTE: If you're doing large books or other documents where there are significant benefits to just linking to graphics, or if you have really big graphics of a few hundred KB or more, think hard before doing only embedded graphics. You'll have some issues, including really really big documents. Consider working with the documents only on the network so that the graphics are there on the network too and you don't have path issues. You might want to link as you work with the document, then if necessary break the links (see the last section here) or even better, make a PDF, before distributing the document.

How to Insert Graphics in Documents so They're Not Linked

When you drag a graphic from the Gallery (Tools > Gallery) into your document, it's automatically embedded. But when you choose Insert > Picture > From File, then you can choose to link or to not. If you want the graphic embedded, then don't select Link.

How to Add Graphics to the Background of Headers, Footers, or Pages So They're Not Linked

You can just click in a header or footer and choose Insert > Picture > From File. But you can also set up headers, footers, and pages with a graphic in the background.

Choose Format > Page.

Click the Header, Footer, or Background tab.

For Headers or Footers click the More.

Then you'll see this window. Select Graphic then click Browse. Find the graphic. Again, just be sure you don't click the Link checkbox which in this case is next to the Browse button.

 

How to Un-Link (Embed) Graphics When They're Already In Your Document

Let's say you've got a document chock full of linked documents and you reallllly don't want to re-insert them. It's easy to fix; just break the link and the graphics will be embedded.

Under the Edit menu, look at Links. If it's dimmed as shown, then you don't have any linked graphics and you're good.

If it's not dimmed, then choose Edit > Links. In the Edit Links window, just select the graphics listed and choose Break Link. The graphics stay, but now they're embedded and you can mail the document wherever you want or store it in another location.

(You could also select a graphic link and choose Modify to change where it's pointing to.)

Note: See also a related article I wrote for TechTarget.com on creating presentations in OpenOffice.org 2.0.

Printing handouts is a little more complicated than it needs to be.

Here's the quick description. With a presentation open,  choose File > Print, then click the Options button. In the upper-left Contents quadrant of the Printer Options window, make sure only the Handouts option is marked. Then click OK and print from the Print window.

Here's the full answer, however, to how to print handouts from soup to nuts in 1.x and 2.0 versions of the software.

 

Printing Handouts, 2 to 6 to a page, in OpenOffice.org 1.x and StarOffice 7 and before
First, create your presentation and get it how you want it.

Specifying the Number of Slides Per Page

Choose View > Master > Handout or click the Handout View icon on the right side of the work area.

You'll see the layout window where you can see how many slides you'll have on  a page.

Choose Format > Modify Layout. You'll see the Modify Slide window where you can change the number of slides on a page. Select a different number if you want and click OK.

Setting Up and Formatting Handouts

The default page layout is Landscape. If you want Portrait (vertical), choose Format > Page and select Portrait, then click OK.

 

Back in the main layout window, drag the slide placeholders to different locations if you want to change where they are.

If you want horizontal lines for people to take notes on, you'll need to use the line tool to draw a set of 3-4 lines by the first slide yourself. To make them even after you've drawn them, select them all and choose Alignment > Right (or Left, or Center).  Click the image to see a bigger version if you want.

To distribute them evenly after you've drawn them, select them all and choose Distribution. Choose Vertical and Center. Then copy that group of lines when they're how you want them (might want to group them first), and copy the lines to the other slides on the page.

When you're done, it should look something like this.

If you want a page number at the bottom of each piece of paper (not every slide), use the Text tool to draw a text box at the bottom of the page, and type the word page if you want. Then choose Insert > Fields > Page Number to add an automatically incrementing page number.

Printing Handouts

Now that you've done the setup, you're ready to print.

Choose File > Print.

Click the Options button.

In the Contents section of the Printer Options window, make sure that only the Handouts option is selected.

The default is for Drawing to be selected and that's all. That means you get one big slide per page. You absolutely must select Handouts here to print handouts. If you leave Drawing selected, your printer will also spit out a printout of your presentation with one slide on every page.

Click OK in the Printer Options window to save the changes and close the window.

If you want to print just a subset of the pages, in the Print window, select the Pages option and type 1, 1-6, etc. The page count refers to slides, not pieces of paper. Also, if you want to print slides 1-6 and 13-18, you need to type a semicolon between the ranges, as in 1-6;13-18

That's all! That last part is the secret. Getting to the layout window was too complicated, and setting up the note-taking lines was a bit of a pain to do manually, though at least those lines will stay there now that you've done them. But the last part, marking Handouts, is the main tricky thing that is really hard to find.

Printing Handouts, 2 to 6 to a page, in OpenOffice.org 2.0 and StarOffice 8
It's a lot like printing handouts in 1.x. Read through that section if you haven't already. I'm going to go over the few differences here.

Specifying the Number of Slides Per Page

This is simpler and different than 1.x. In your open presentation, just click the Handouts tab above the slide view.

In the slide layout view that appears, you want to look to the right and find the Layouts tab.

Now choose the number of slides you want per page.

Setting Up and Formatting Handouts

This is the same as 1.x. See the 1.x setup and formatting section.

Printing Handouts

This is the same as 1.x. See the 1.x printing section. As before, be sure to select just the Handouts option in the Printer Options window.

 

I am in Boston, in the Sheraton. But Boston is an old town. so the Sheraton is old and noisy: I hear all the neighbours. And this is America, so I am warned that if I make coffee, CAUTION, it will be hot. And the room service dinner is $18, which is actually $18 +$4,95 delivery charge plus $4 tax plus $5 gratuity plus $3 “additional gratuity”, meaning $35.

But at least they know here that fries come with mayo.

I’m really not.

But today is probably as close as I will get. I spent a few days at The International Centre, at the Photo Show, presenting photography training courses. And boy, is that ever fun: presenting to up to 300 people at a time who are glued to your lips. I like talking: talking to 300 people who appreciate your jokes and who actually learn something, and then getting paid for it, and on top of that, getting compliments and handshakes at the end, beats anything else. Hard work but extremely fun. Makes up for the loss of camera and other gear.

And to think, I used to fear public speaking. Like, 30 years ago.

Today was good, but I would still like to water-board the mean lowlifes who stole $6,000 of my stuff and put $3,000 on my credit cards. Nor am I impressed with the cops who consider this stuff not important enough to even warrant a one-minute talk with a detective. Guys, if you want to steal $9,000, then do it in Peel Region, because it seems it is tolerated.

Ah. Back to positive thoughts. Maybe I was meant to be a presenter, or a teacher. Or a rockstar. Now if only I had learned to play an instrument.