The phone rang at 7.30pm last night. The usual thoughts flashed through our minds: is it double-glazing, a Hotel Metropol invitation to join their gymnasium (Me, are they mad?), a relative has just died, or maybe ma wanting a long chat? It was Panasonic calling about the TV I bought a couple of months ago. It seems that Panasonic contact customers after a while to make sure they are happy with their new sets. Can you imagine Dell or IBM doing the same?
I told Mr Panasonic I regretted the purchase and had it been from a local shop I’d have tried to swap the TV for a Sony. Yes, the picture is brilliant, the fast refresh rate means action has the crisp edges of a CRT and colour fidelity and viewing angles are excellent. No, the problem is the operating system – which is what is termed technically as crap.
Even our cheap Cello TV from the Co-op is easier to use and we could have bought three of those for the Panasonic which has an intensely annoying feature. If you turn to the electronic program guide (EPG), all TV and sound disappears. No picture in the top corner of the screen or even sound playing in the background.
Dial I for infuriation
Panasonic’s software engineers decided your full attention must be on the TV schedule and never get distracted by such mundane things as Gardener’s World, Kirsty Wark or Radio Seven. Worse still, there’s no program information, just the name of the show and time it starts. To get extra details you press the i button. That’s i for infuriating because pressing it again jumps straight back to live TV rather than returning to the EPG. With digital transmission offering 70+ potential TV and radio shows, you’ve probably flicked past 50 before finding one you want information on so have to start from the beginning again.
Pressing i for information during live TV brings up a ‘What’s on now and next’ band running along the bottom of the screen but again, pressing i again to return to the schedule band, leads straight back to live TV rather than returning to Now and Next. Sound output is pretty pathetic as well for a TV worth a grand. Plugging in external speakers through the jack or phono sockets means you lose volume control from the zapper. Arghhhhhhh!
Proprietary, closed system
Mr Panasonic was quite put-out to find a customer complaining and promised to forward our thoughts (as-if). This was after admitting he has a set by another manufacturer and also took it for granted that all TV’s had picture in picture when looking at the EPG. As for the volume control, it was because Panasonic want customers to use their Viagra system where all devices connect via the patented Panasonic Viera sockets.
“You mean Panasonic put tiny speakers inside the set and have deliberately made it impossible to control volume on any external speakers other than their own brand?”
“Errr… yes, I suppose so. Is there anything else I can do to help?”
“Thanks, it’s spelled B R A V I A.”
As an Apple customer since the 1980’s I shouldn’t be put off by Panasonic’s proprietary, closed system attitude but I am. After all, Apple have always let me attach external speakers, hard disks, scanners, printers, cameras, monitors and never insist they have an Apple badge. Lately just about any MP3 player will work on a Mac even though Apple’s iPods dominate the market.
Anyway, I’ve never thought of my Apple computers as being particularly closed, they usually make it easy to add memory, PCI cards, change the video board and on some Macs, the CPU as well. After three or four years my computers are knackered and obsolete so I’d rather buy a new one than fiddle with motherboards and soldering irons.
Three or four years seems to be the life span of modern TVs as well.

We spent the weekend house-hunting. Our present home and office suits us perfectly: town centre location, large garden, just off the sea front and newly modernised. That’s why we bought it, to renovate and make money, but it’s 5-up, 5-down and I go into some rooms once or twice a year. Thank goodness for a robot vacuum cleaner to keep it all clean. We could sell up and buy two or more houses with no mortgage, an attractive proposition. With this in mind a chunk of the week is spent trawling the ‘Net, Google-Earthing potential locations and trying to find the next one.

This weekend it was Eastbourne, home of the blue-rinse brigade and a university full of potential tenants. The only problem being we couldn’t find any part of the town we liked for us. We ask ourselves: “Would you live in this house If I paid off your mortgage and gave you £200,000?”. The answer was always a definite “No” apart from a house in Saffrons priced the same as the one we have to sell. After a lifetime with the sea at the end of the road we would miss seagulls: friendly, intelligent blighters who are useful as food scrap recyclers. Our present feathered dustbin, Steve (Segal, Beko, whoever) came with our house, has reared two offspring to whom he was a caring parent. He’s easy to live with apart from his penchant for red Rawlplugs. Closeness to the sea is our number one priority.

Willis or Clarkson
There was a cycle race on as we drifted along the sea front, we noticed all the male riders had one thing in common. Without exception they were shaven-headed. Apparently not because of wind resistance or safety helmet constraints but because they had the Bruce Willis pattern of baldness. Presumably their choice is either slaphead, toupee, fly-over or a reverse Mohican with a gap where there ought to be hair. As an old geezer twice the age of the cyclists, my hair follows the Jeremy Clarkson style. Full-face reflection shows a complete head of hair above a high forehead. Experience teaches not to use the mirrors in Marks and Sparks with one in front and another behind, to see oneself from the back. Also to never ever let the hairdresser show you your head from the back. I know hair is there because it was when I wore it shoulder-length so there is no need to see it now.

With all the mileage we do, a diesel car will prove far cheaper to run so every competition is entered to win the new Civic CTDi, a car that any self-respecting alien invader would feel at home in with it’s sci-fi dashboard and pocket rocket pretensions. We would be even better off not having to drive to view potential houses at all. Google Earth’s satellite’s viewpoint now shows most of the south coast in high resolution but cannot display what the area is really like. Estate agents talk up the good points forgetting the sewage farm next door or the 1 in 10 hill outside. What is really needed are short videos introducing the area.

Betjamen bombshell
The words friendly bombs and Slough come to mind but Betjamen did its residents a great disservice and for anyone who had never visited the town. With all the media studies degrees universities churn out, the skills base already exists to make videos. A quick tour around the town, focusing on its various areas, pointing out the local shops, schools and amenities. Then a drive down the road a house is for sale in, perhaps taken by the estate agent with their digital cameras used to make the brochure images.

Estate agents and firms like rightmove.co.uk are missing a trick here. We would like to see what other sea side towns are like but don’t want to spend all our free time driving, only to find we don’t like them. Towns of the Kent coast or Thames estuary have potential, Dover, Margate, Deal, Southend might all suit us if we could get a flavour of the towns without needing to visit them all. Streaming videos on estate agent sites would be a perfect substitute.

Alastair Crooke, the Director and Founder of the Conflicts Forum, has said that in his experience of negotiating with terrorists it is pointless to ignore groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah, hoping they will go away. There is no nice, fluffy, occidentally inclined organisation waiting to take their place. It will be al-Qaeda who replace them and things will change for the worse. Much the same seems to be said about the adoption of Vista and Microsoft’s Open XML format.
Over the years there have always been headlines about such and such company abandoning Microsoft Windows, or Macs or Office. This time there seems to be more about firms deciding they are not abandoning Windows XP to move to Vista and there’s even an active movement to stop Open XML becoming recognised as an ISO standard.
Torpidity
In both cases the move – or more correctly, lack of move – is because of the control it would give Microsoft, who given their way would have us all wearing their digital burkhas. Some, such as America’s Auto Warehousing Company, have gone one step further and switched their entire organisation away from Microsoft products apart from where there are currently no alternatives. In those cases, the software is being rewritten and in the meantime run in a virtual environment. They found that the new Intel Macs run Windows blazingly fast, faster than any PC he’s seen according to AWC’s CIO Dale Frantz.
The AWC are a huge, full-service car spares, logistics and delivery company whose customers are the biggest names in the business. They cover the entire of the US and Canada. For an organisation of this pedigree to move to Macs must surely open Steve Jobs’ eyes to the potential Apple are missing while they concentrate on the consumer market.
Short-sighted
Their decision to use Mac OS X was taken after examining the alternatives, a decision that would scare other companies who erroneously see Macs as under-powered, over-priced and too geared to specific areas such as publishing and certain scientific communities. Apple have never shown great interest in attracting corporate business and gave AWC no help in the transition. This seems rather short-sighted considering the help Apple gives in other projects such as Virginia Tech’s Mac-powered super computer whose success led onto the US Army and others constructing Mac super computers.
Microsoft has brought this fatwa on themselves. Windows XP has been highly successful and runs on over 500 million computers. As long as those computers continue to function users have no real need to upgrade, especially as it will involve hardware and software costs. The company has also announced it will continue to supply bug fixes to XP until 2014 and possibly even beyond that. Many of the new security features built into Vista are available as free or low cost tools. The rest of the new operating system is just goodies rather than essentials as far as business is concerned.
Where this will end remains to be seen. As a long-term Mac user, Windows XP is the first Microsoft operating system I would consider moving to. As a book designer I can foresee a time when I will not be able to open Word documents because they are in Open XML format – in fact this has started to happen - and Microsoft provide no working translators. So much for them making it a “standard”.

“Welcome to HSBC Premier. Please enter your sort code… date of birth… inside leg measurement. Please note this call may be recorded for blackmail purposes and we are members of the banking mafia. Your home and life may be at risk if you don’t cough up the dosh (cue music from dodgy 8-track cartridge).

“Good morning Mr Tennent, how may I help you?”

“Yes, hello. I’m interested in your 5-year fixed rate mortgage. We had one of your mortgages for a number of years until you got too expensive, so we moved to a building society until your interest rates became more competitive.

“We have banked with you for 20 years, all our accounts are well in credit and want to borrow 14% of the value of our house for a short period.”

“Okay, let’s fill in the on-line form and make you an offer… your incomes…?”

“My wife has had a professional, pensionable position in a national charity since 1990 and has an insurance policy to give her an income for 18 months should she become redundant or too ill to work. I am self-employed and for various reasons we want to take the mortgage on just my wife’s income as we have always done in the past.”

“I’m afraid that will only give you half of what you want to borrow.”

“But four years ago you gave us a much larger mortgage on the same house when it was only worth four times as much as the mortgage and needed complete renovation.”

“I’m sorry Mr Tennent but our computer says you cannot afford to pay the mortgage. It’s all based upon affordability now.”

“Yes, and four years ago we had smaller incomes, had to pay to renovate the house and we’ve had a mortgage since we were students. Over the last 20-odd years we’ve never missed a payment. Plus we have nearly half what we want to borrow in our HSBC bank accounts. And we are ‘Premier Customers’. You advertise that means we get extra special treatment.”

“I’m sorry Mr Tennent but our computer says you cannot have a mortgage.”

“But I already have one with one of your competitors, you can see the payments going out each month. Their computer has offered us a new one but it is more expensive than yours. The Bank of Ireland’s computer has no problem offering us a mortgage but it works out about £100 more expensive over the five years so I’d like to return to HSBC and put the money saved into one of our accounts at your bank.

“Im sorry Mr Tennent…”

“Our house is worth well over half a million quid, there’s no risk to HSBC, we have excellent credit references. I know because we checked them out recently. And you know us, you have all our savings and gave us a much larger mortgage four years ago.”

I’m sorry Mr Tennent…”

“Oh sod it.”
——–
“This is the Bank of Ireland. Top of the morning to you Mr Tennent, your mortgage is all arranged and ready to start when your existing one runs out. You will not be charged for this fee’s-free mortgage. Have you ever thought of visiting the Emerald Isle…”

By the way: I gave up trying to ring HSBC’s complaints department due to them having an “unprecedented number of calls”.

The weather forecasters tell us that all the rain we’ve been having recently is due to the Rocky Mountains and a sluggish jetstream. They say that standing waves build up behind the Rockies and if we get a trough hovering over us, it means rain. I can tell them they are wrong.

The reason we have so much rain is my fault. After years of a hose pipe ban I took advantage of a Wickes special offer and installed water butts everywhere in the garden, some even daisy chained together. Obviously it needed a lot of rain the fill them all up, enough to bring a smile to St. Swithin. The people flooded out of Doncaster and Hull will have to hope the weather clears up before ‘his day’ next Sunday. Unless, that is, they don’t stop whinging that us Southerners would get more help than they have, conveniently forgetting their huge rate support grants for a local infrastructure us Southerners fund and look on with envy.

Flooded out
It is pretty similar in the broadband world. With deregulation, loads of small suppliers sprang up in much the same way as happened with bus companies. Our towns were flooded with umpteen buses driving near-identical routes. The broadband market has become deluged by different offers, ‘up-to’ speeds, download limits and local loops unbundled. Eventually the bus companies sorted themselves out, simply by one or two buying up their competitors, almost back to as it used to be before politicians fiddled with things in the first place. The same is about to happen with high-speed Internet suppliers.

British Telecom, from whom the near monopoly rights were whisked away, is slowly grabbing them back, purchasing Plusnet in January and recently the Brightview Group who have operated some of the country’s best-run brands such as Waitrose.com and Madasafish. Pipex, current owners of Freedom 2 Surf, Nildram and Bulldog, hung a for sale sign out in March, soon to be followed by Virgin Media who recently merged with NTL and Telewest. Tiscali are rumoured to have grabbed a large residential customer base.

Five hundred quid of BS
These are all names we have considered or used as broadband and Internet solutions suppliers. Meanwhile Carphone Warehouse quietly gets on with destabilising the market by undercutting everyone and making broadband free if not trouble-free, the latter being a speciality of the likes of Bulldog and the (not) much lamented Business Serve in this office. BS consistently offered no email service then charged us five hundred quid to dump them – it still stings today.

Two excursions away from BT’s telephone service saw us running back nursing our wounds, the same with broadband even if we now buy from a smaller supplier (Aquiss) for that extra yard they go. At least BT seem to be buying up the cream of the independents to offer a quality service.

So what went around, came around. Until that is, the politicians fiddle with things again.

Many companies have been integral to digital printing since the day Caxton spread pressed inky fingers to paper. Adobe and Quark are obvious examples, alongside them are the smaller niche products made in someone’s spare bedroom or garage. One of these old timers is Markzware here. Born 1989 in a Santa Ana mobile home where their first application, XState, was developed as a project management XTension for QuarkXPress.
Markzware’s first major product, MarkzTools is still on sale today and arose from co-founder Patrick Marchese’s need to keep his job at a major advertising company. He was working with QuarkXPress but his colleagues couldn’t open his jobs in their earlier versions. Facing possible redundancy as a result, he asked Markzware partner, Ron Crandall, to come up with a converter for QuarkXPress documents. MarkzTools were born. This was soon followed by a Pagemaker to Quark converter, and again, spurred from personal necessity at the advertising agency, in 1995 FlightCheck, the first pre-flight tool.
While QuarkXPress was the de facto industry standard, document conversion became less of a problem. As soon as Adobe’s inDesign grabbed market share the need was there for another batch of converters. Markzware have given me copies of their latest versions of MarzTools, Quark to InDesign and inDesign to Quark converters to play with.
MarkzTools
I started using QuarkXPress at version 3, even now at version 7 a feature common to them all has been the ability to screw up. QuarkXPress gets its knickers in a twist just because an imported Word document has clashing style sheets or an image is not to Quark’s liking. Usually this just crashes the application and hopefully leaves one or two rescue documents as a starting position. Sometimes the whole document can be corrupted, or won’t open at all.
This is where MarkzTools come to the rescue by offering various ways to salvage the offending document. Each process by-passes the more likely trouble-makers one-by-one, such as complex run-arounds (a regular Quark crasher), applied style sheets and picture imports. A last resort is the option to extract all text from a document. Markzware also magnanimously offer to try to salvage the document for you. Not bad for a £139 tool.

Having no corrupted documents to try it on, Markzware kindly provided some for me. They arrived without icons, no indication of what they were and trying to open them in QXP6 and 7 caused them to crash. However, using MarkzTools they quickly converted into perfect documents with everything in place, all typefaces defined and as usable pieces of work.
MarkzTools could be a time and career-saver should the need arrive and while I’m grateful to Markzware for letting me test it out. I hope I’ll never need it but having a copy around gives you that warm and fuzzy feeling of safety. For a large organisation it is a no-brainer to have a copy of MarkzTools to hand… just in case.
Verifying
As well as rescue options, MarkzTools can prevent saving a corrupted document by offering to verify its integrity before overwriting a previous clean version. This doesn’t guarantee the document is 100% perfect or QuarkXPress will open it. Instead MarkzTools determines the chance of it rescuing the document and that nothing untoward is discovered.
Converting
The final act in MarkzTools’ repertoire is to export or convert a QuarkXPress 6 or 7 document back to version 4.1. Obviously there are features in the later versions beyond the comprehension of earlier editions of the program. To test this we converted some flyers full of layers, drop shadows, transparency effects and 21st century fancy must-haves. Then opened them in QuarkXPress 4.11 and 5.01.

In general the documents converted well and took no longer than a normal save would. The drop shadows and image effects were missing. Items on separate layers were moved to the top but they did stay in the correct sequence. QuarkXPress 4 did not support layers and needed the QX Tools which were installed. One image moved out of position for some reason in both QXP4 and 5 but everything else was faithfully copied across including cut-out paths made within QuarkXPress 7. QuarkXPress 4 crashed trying to open one document that caused QXP 5 no problem.
More basic documents within the scope of QuarkXPress earlier versions converted almost 100% correct, with minor text glitches where manual kerning or baseline shifts had been applied. This doesn’t mean the file would be good enough to use for final printing and a further stage of tweaking and proofing would be needed but at least files could be passed to Luddites and tight wads who haven’t updated their software.

Converting to and from QuarkXPress and inDesign
Our work tends to be either solidly in QuarkXPress or inDesign depending on which client we are designing for. We use either program for weeks before opening the other again. This tends to make us rusty in the application we aren’t using. For quickness we stick to the application already open to do smaller pieces of work. A problem is when we have to go back to change an earlier job: a Yellow Pages ad for example, made in the alternative program. It would be tremendously helpful if QuarkXPress and inDesign could open each others files and from what we have seen from the Markzware converters, this is possible. The document converter plug-ins are simply placed into the relevant folders and the applications restarted.
QXP to ID = 8/10
Converting from QuarkXPress to inDesign is easy and effective. QuarkXPress documents show up as workable files and open as if inDesign documents. The file converts on the fly, faster than opening normally within QuarkXPress. Only minor text tweaks were needed in the files we tried, where manual kerning had been applied and text tabbed but without an accompanying stylesheet. Paragraph and character styles were imported and retained.
One table containing text and graphics needed minor amendments where in QuarkXPress the graphic would have been locked to the baseline grid. This grid was also imported along with master page items, automatic page numbers, spreads, drop shadows, image and transparency effects. The only minor gripe is that Suitcase did not automatically open the relevant fonts.
As a way to pass a QuarkXPress document on to an inDesign user, Markzware’s Q2ID is amazing. It also shows up the weaknesses of the two protagonists when they can both display the same document. inDesign is much slower than QuarkXPress but its document display is still far better than Quark’s and is far more stable.
ID to QXP = 5/10
It is a shame that the same cannot be said for converting from inDesign to QuarkXPress. From the start the process is more hands-on, having to open the document via a conversion option in the Utility menu. This brings up a dialogue box with choices for Text Attributes, Picture Previews and other options.

Documents convert rapidly but in general need a lot of work before they can be used. Some elements did not convert - text with paragraph and character style sheets applied for example. All converted to Normal even though the style sheets did convert from one to the other. However, they were not correct and if used, applied the wrong characteristics from inDesign’s. Most image effects transferred but some images shifted out of place. One simple document refused to open at all and crashed QuarkXPress.
From the documents we tried, the converter from inDesign to QuarkXpress gives a good starting point. Documents as opened in QuarkXPress would not be immediately usable as the ones converted to inDesign. Both converters handled master page items, grids, spreads and the basics of documents, even offering a choice of layouts if more than one had been used.

When BMW released their second generation of the Mini, they didn’t bolt on more gimmicks, make the car slower, more thirsty or corner worse than before. Instead they put in a brand new range of more efficient engines, redesigned just about every body panel and cleaned up some of the annoying weaknesses of the previous iteration of the Mini. Very often it appears web designers accomplish the exact reverse.
All too often, websites which used to work fast and perhaps a little dirty, get redesigned to remove the dirt but in the process their practicality is completely ruined. Form is allowed to intrude into function to the detriment of the inner workings of sites.
Digital Vault
A classic example of a good web site ruined is BT’s Digital Vault. It has been running very successfully since last year, providing free on-line storage for BT’s Internet customers and a smaller free space for ‘outsiders’. We grabbed at 2GB each when it was made available just before last Christmas and have used the space for large file transfers since then. As BT provide our Broadband Max service, albeit wholesale through a third party, our speeds to and from Digital Vault were just about the maximum our line could give. Up to 7MB down and more importantly 86KBps up. The up-speed being 50% faster than our first ADSL line of a few years ago.
It meant we could happily bung up to a gigabyte at a time onto our Digital Vaults for clients to collect and the whole process took a couple of hours or so. Then BT redesigned the site.
Sunday morning at 7am, I tried to put 860MB into my Digital Vault. Where once the upload speed would have jumped straight to maximum and stayed there, the upload started to trickle through the wires at a miserable 40KBps. Okay, I thought, it’s a slow starter, we’ll leave it for 15 minutes and see if it gets better. Not a chance! And typical of the new improved Digital Vault.
Apple’s iDisk
Instead of waiting the 9 or so hours the upload was estimated to take, I sent it into my iDisk over the Atlantic at Apple’s mac.com. The speed immediately maxed-out and stayed there for the 2 hour upload. Then, later, it was collected by the intended recipients in Montreal and Chicago who downloaded at the unbelievably fast connections their cable companies give them (Jealous, me? And they’ve both got iPhones…).
In the past the iDisk service has been a bit iffy but its latest update has seen it improve immeasurably. So much so, I bought another gigabyte of space (£21) and will use it as my main large-file transfer method from now on.
Throttled back?
We have a sneaking suspicion that maybe BT have deliberately throttled back the speeds for free-loaders like us but we were never extensive users, our total need never rising above 4GB per month. Apple’s on-line tools are far superior to BT’s and the iDisk Public Folder gives our clients a place to leave files for us as well. Much of Apple’s on-line tools are there to make life easy for non-technically minded users so they have simple point and click interfaces which work well. Making a download page, for example, takes moments and means the iDisk is available for Windows users too.
We have tried running ftp servers in-house but they really need a separate computer running 24/7, especially when taking time-zone differences into account. Cheap ftp space is available from various suppliers but in our experience their service is patchy and these firms seem to come and go with a high churn rate and usually our files wth it.
For the next year, then, iDisk will be our doorway to the world. Easier to use than our web space, faster than BT’s Digital Vault and on current experience, more reliable than ftp space providers.