Status Update…

Let me start by saying that I don’t want you to read this as a means of drawing ‘poor Norm’ replies, and I most certainly don’t want you to look at this as an excuse for the delays in getting your product.  Most of you have already paid for your products, and I promise that you WILL get them, but I do want you to know the series of events that has caused the delays, and hope that you will not lose confidence in my ability to learn from these situations and be better prepared for similar situations in the future.

1. The Knee.  During the Courtenay Rodeo, I had the misfortune to put my left foot in a place that it didn’t want to come out of, while flipping the rest of my body around my left knee in an effort to avoid serious injury falling off the top of a 7 foot fence.  Well…  in short, I failed.  I didn’t hurt my back or my head, and I even managed to avoid breaking any camera equipment, but I did do some serious ligament damage to my left knee.  The final evaluation won’t be known until after an MRI in Victoria in November (YES… nearly 4 months after the injury) but the early assessment is that I’ve torn the ACL in my left knee, and have since been working hard to be able to even walk normally.  It’s getting better, but still makes even a short walk dangerous and sometimes painful.  I was just able to start driving my little car (standard transmission) last week.

2. The laptop.  So… after 3 weeks basically doing nothing since I was in that knee immobilizer thing, and couldn’t even sit at my desk without discomfort, I started the process of catching up on the backlog of orders and paperwork that had been growing (something like mushrooms or coat hangers) on my desk.  Just as I’m getting everything organized, and have spent dozens of hours in processing, my laptop (the main one that stores EVERYTHING) just up and died.  So I spend about 5 days in panic attempting to diagnose, repair and recover from this potentially catastrophic failure.  The good news is that MOST of the data I had on this all important machine was backed up, and the stuff that wasn’t was still intact…  well most of it anyways.  The bad news…  the computer itself was toast.  So off to FS to buy a new laptop, which of course meant making the move to Vista.

3. Vista.  Well…  I never liked Vista to start with.  It’s not really that bad though on this new computer, and with 4 GBs of RAM on a 64 Bit laptop, the thing actually works nicely.  I’m actually starting to like it.  But getting here was slow, painful and at times, costly.  I thank ALL of the software vendors that have been there to help me get the latest and greatest versions of their software that supports Vista and the 64 Bit environment I’m now running under.  Oh… and of course the files that I had backed up (or rather the manner in which they were backed up) is of course USELESS to recover to a new computer.  So the rebuild was entirely manual and all of the data had to be restored selectively from the backups.

4. EPS.  For those that have noticed, a few months ago I moved over to a new software system that makes my event booth run much smoother.  Unfortunately, to get at the back end to get the orders out, the software has to be up and running, so with the additional discovery that EPS won’t run on the 64 Bit Vista, it was over to the author in Australia.  After a few days of back and forth emails, new versions and more than a few foul words (at the software, not each other!), we are now able to say that his product will run in the Vista 64 environment, and I am back in business and able to actually read the orders that I had taken.

5. COLOUR!  Has anyone out there worked with color matching to make sure that monitor and printer are able to produce the same colours?  Trust me…  if you’re smart, you’ll hope that you never have to, but for me to make sure that your product looks as good as it can, I HAVE TO!  And EACH PRINTER IS DIFFERENT!  So add 2 more weeks in delays to ensure that everything that comes out of my computer looks very close to the same when it comes from the printer – no matter which lab I’m using.

The final word… I WILL be caught up by the 15th.  I’m close.  It all works finally, and I’m actually getting results that I’m happy with from all of the software that had to be re-installed, re-configured, re-trained, re-calibrated and in a few cases re-purchased (or at least partly re-purchased in upgrade fees).  7 weeks, you don’t want to know how many man-hours or dollars were involved, and more than a few long nights later, and just in time for school startup (I still have my day job with the School District as a Computer Technician), and I think I might actually get the last issues and items off of my desk and my to-do list.

So…  there’s the summary of the past 2 months, and I have to say once again that I VERY much appreciate the understanding, support and patience that most of you have returned to me in light of this rather bizarre rash of problems. 

Through all of the challenges, I am still alive, healthy, and for the most part better off than I was 2 months ago.  I’ve learned, acquired some nice new tools, and have not lost anything of value.  I have a new backup system as well as a very large (2 Tera-bytes now – 4 soon) storage system that keeps all of my images at hand for easier access and faster turn-around.  If I still owe you anything… please know that it WILL be coming soon, and thank you for your business.

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