I spent my lunch break finishing the CMYK color separated copies of Insights, the Title V newsletter at ASAP. I never thought my experience from Yearbook would be useful. Fixing, editing, and tagging a 4 page newsletter in 4 hours, without any kind of technical direction is more an indication of experience than anything else. There is always something about a deadline that gets you working. Thankfully, this wasn't something like 4:30 in the yearbook room using chairs as a bed because you couldn't sit in front of the computer anymore. (Although those memories of late night color deadlines are pleasant looking back.)
My day started at 9:00 or so, as the ringing of my phone shook me up out of my bed. I honestly can't remember what time I flicked off the XBox and crawled into bed. For that matter, I don't even remember turning off the XBox in the first place. I do remember it was slowly becoming dawn, because I grumbled to myself about morning coming too quickly. Anyway, the call was from Jake according to my voicemail, and the Kiosks were down. I was dressed and out the door within five minutes of hearing the message, pausing long enough to change away messages. By the time I got there, someone had figured out that the computers were not plugged in to the network. Of course you can't access the database over the network when you are not connected to the network! I took some time to clean and set up a computer, and by 10:00 it was time for Insights.
I promised Silka I would come in and do technical editing for the ASAP Title V newsletter. One of these days, I swear I am going to sit her down and teach her how to do proper layout in Pagemaker. I opened it up and was horrified. The target resolution was 300 dpi. The images were Linked (not placed) at 72 dpi, no originals found. There were no column guides, no pica spacing, no consistent typeface, and the color was set to Auto, not Black (c:0/m:0/y:0k:100). There was no tagged color, and the images were in color, B/W, and Monochrome.
The past three hours started with trying to locate the original files for the images, followed by trying to track down the publisher specifications (is it 1 or 2 spot color), then make column guides and redo the entire layout, make the fonts, move the fonts to disk, move the images to disk, fix the imported excel chart, edit, correct, color, tag, and print the final version, including a color separated version. I don't know if I needed a spot color seperation, but I found it in my best interest since when I asked Silka she said "what's that?"
It's now one, and time to switch from editing mode to tutoring mode. Tindall was here, and reminded me about the 5:00 gathering. One of these days I swear I am going to learn how to say no to people. -_-()
In response to "10 Minute Power Lunch":