October 2010 update on My Life

Busy is the word. This past September has seen me make two trips to Florida where I was helping out my parents. My parents are doing pretty well at the movement. My father seems to be fully recovered from an operation to put a stint in his leg. My mother who was diagnosed with lung cancer will be entering treatment next week at the Moffat Cancer Center in Tampa. I am very hopeful now that all the diagnosis has been completed and she is entering the treatment phase.


At work, the project that I have been working on appears to be on schedule for launch later this month. Thank goodness, it has been a bit of a stress to get it through the final QA while working from Florida helping my family. It is looking good though, I am quite impressed with what we have created.

Then of course there is the book “Battle Gaming: The New American Sport!” I uploaded a copy for proof print to Amazon’s CreateSpace PoD system. It was rejected with several errors that would prevent a proper printing of it. The biggest problem was that the source PDF was in color and I wanted a BW result. In the end I was rescued by the Zan Image Print Driver. This remarkable little tool allowed me to convert the entire book contents form color to B&W and automatically handled all the halftones and it looks great. I was even able to set the correct page size for the black and white with bleed that CreateSpace required. It is a great little tool that I would recommend to anyone with a similar problem.

I am about to try for the proof again, but that is not the end. I am missing about four pictures that I will need to stage when I get back to Colorado. And I say that because the family is on vacation in the D.C. area visiting the in-laws and historic sites. The kids are old enough now to get some education about our government so we will be visiting the Capitol and the White House along with seeing many other sites.