I just cannot believe how much trouble I had installing Office 2010 on my two computers!
The first computer is an 8-month old 64bit Windows 7 machine. The first install went brilliantly smooth until I discovered that the autorun setup installs the 32 bit version – not the 64 bit. OK – so I removed that install and then tried to install from the x64 directory. The installer immediately quit and told me that I could not install the 64 bit version with a 32 bit version of Office 2007 installed. Great! So I removed 2007 and tried again with the result because removing Office 2007 did not remove Visio 2007 which was installed separately. OK then – let’s try again. (Note at this point I was wondering if I could not run a 32 bit version of Visio with my shiny new Office 2010 applications). After removing Visio 2007 I was finally able to successfully install the 64 bit version of 2010 and re-install the 32 bit version of Visio 2007.
Next came my Windows XP laptop. This time the installer wants to upgrade the Office 2007 installation. No problem with that. The installer gets almost through a spits out an Error 1316 telling me that it could not read from an .msi file. I did a quick search and decided to remove the Office 2007 installation (including Visio) first. When I started the un-install process of 2007 I get the same Error 1316! So now I can neither install 2010 or remove 2007.
I went to the MS support forum and described the problem. Thankfully I got an answer in less than 24 hours that recommended running a ‘Fix It’ tool available in the support knowledge base. So I tried that. It was interesting watch it work – first it tried the standard removal, got the error and then proceeded to brute-force remove the files a registry entries. It was successful.
I re-ran the 2010 installer. This time it gets nearly through and spits out an Error 1935. What next! Thankfully, this time I found a fix relatively quickly on line. It seems like I needed to update my .net installation. I did that and the 2010 installer finally worked.
All of this reminds me of the time nearly a year ago I tried to install the Adobe Web suite on my old XP desktop. That process took nearly three weeks after getting a new set of discs and running the install in some bizarre safe mode of Windows XP. I can only conclude that the level of complexity of these large, inter-connected software suites must be very high or that the companies QA processes go only so far and then they let thier customers take on the QA role!
Even though I keep hearing about how bad the job market remains – I have been amazed at the number of emails and calls I have been getting over the past month from recruiters and staffing companies!
Just today I received 2 calls and about half a dozen emails alone. About half of the jobs are web design and the other half for user experience work. I am also amazed at the number of postings for UX designers on the various job boards.
On Monday I will start a 6 month assignment for IBM. I’ll be working on UX for their third party / partner website. This is a great mix of my background in channel marketing together with my UX experience at Autodesk and my front end development skills. I’ll be working with what looks like a completely remote group of folks in San Fransisco, Boston and Raleigh-Durham. I am looking forward to the experience!
I went to my first Atlanta IxDAmeeting last night and was pretty well stoked at what I found. There were maybe 15 folks representing about the same number of companies including McKesson, User Insight, and HP Developer Evangelist Glen Gordon.
I was pleasantly surprised how willing everyone was to show their designs. The guy from McKesson showed some interactive prototyping done with Axure. The HP Evangelist stole the show by demoing Microsoft’s new iPhone-category (mPhone?) phone coming out this fall. I was impressed and it automatically made it to the top of my must have gadget list. There was a lot of interest in developing applications for it.
Speaking of which, one of the designers worked at an ad agency (i think) and had a iPad. They showed some examples of what magazine publishers have been experimenting with. I played with both the mPhone and iPad’s interface. Boy does the iPad have a nice display and feel to it. However, how to interact with it is not at all intuitive. I keep looking for buttons…
It seems like IxDA is alive and well in Atlanta. I’ll definitely go to more events down the road.
I spent a couple of days last week and a bit of time over the July 4th holiday with my php & MySQL book getting through about half of it. The most difficult thing I see is the complicated syntax used to create HTML using php. I am also beginning to appreciate the differences in building script-generated web pages versus those built only with HTML/CSS and the front end design programming.
My training goal in learning this is to be able to have searchable multimedia files for display. I would like to personally create a database of all of my family photos and create an interface so they can be searched / categorized and viewed by my family and friends. I also want to have an interface for them (and me!) to upload their own photos along with tags and descriptions.
Several weeks ago I spent some time learning about CSS3. I was interested in something somewhere that said that HTML5 was “all about typography on the web.” I tried out some of the new stuff like Photoshop-like effects with drop shadows and the like. More recently I read about this company typekit which provides a font solution that works on many of the newer browser versions.
I signed up for their free package which basically allows me to use a single font on a single site (this one). So what you see on any other page of the site is the new font. I haven’t figured out how to make it work with WordPress yet.
I tried several of the fonts available with the trial package before I settled on the one you see now. I was surprised that most of the fonts rendered smaller than the default font and when I adjusted the scale became pretty shitty looking.
The other troublesome aspect is the branding done on the site (notice the little graphic in the lower left). I would guess this is mostly because of the newness and will go away after this stuff becomes more mainstream.
I’ve been learning about front end design technologies looking at the various JavaScript libraries out there. I’ve been using jQuery for a while now without knowing much about it. Last week I spent a couple of days on the jQuery site and ran through their tutorials. I also stared looking at all the plug-ins that folks have developed.
I’ve seen some recent examples of 3D carousel image applications on line. I quickly identified a plug-in from the jQuery website and spent about 6 hours getting it to work and then updating my portfolio on this site. Now you can see a cool 3D slide show of my portfolio, click on any one to see a detailed description. At anytime the user can ‘View All’ to see to original long listing of my portfolio.
After spending a day with WordPress I have been able to successfully create a site but not using my Dreamweaver template for the site. Instead, the look is very different. I have spent most of the time trying to customize the WordPress site so it looks close to the main site. I am still struggling with figuring out the details of the CSS files. For example, right now I am trying to figure out just how to make the background of the navigation bar white instead of black. I also lack confidence that the browser is being refreshed right so I spend a lot of time trying to figure out if the change I made in a file actually does anything.
After spending a couple of more hours with the CSS it’s pretty well understood now except still a lot of experimentation to get it to look right. I found this cool tool CSSViewer for Chrome that lets you look a the CSS for various parts of a rendered display. It was helpful in identifying what rules needed to be changed.
Here’s what it looks like now:
Page Comparison for Dreamtime Creative Website
The most perplexing thing is the difference between the background image rendered inside and outside the over all width. The various CSS rules point to the same URL which contains the background image in .jpg format.
The first computer is an 8-month old 64bit Windows 7 machine. The first install went brilliantly smooth until I discovered that the autorun setup installs the 32 bit version – not the 64 bit. OK – so I removed that install and then tried to install from the x64 directory. The installer immediately quit and told me that I could not install the 64 bit version with a 32 bit version of Office 2007 installed. Great! So I removed 2007 and tried again with the result because removing Office 2007 did not remove Visio 2007 which was installed separately. OK then – let’s try again. (Note at this point I was wondering if I could not run a 32 bit version of Visio with my shiny new Office 2010 applications). After removing Visio 2007 I was finally able to successfully install the 64 bit version of 2010 and re-install the 32 bit version of Visio 2007.
