Day: August 9, 2004

I don’t have one of those fancy wireless wifi networks at home, but I do have a hub, and a router, and 4 (plugged in) computers in the basement, and 2 ethernet cables running through the house. So due to the fact that we had a small flood, and were forced to rebuild the office, we figured it was a good time to label each ethernet cable, just like the big guys do.

So now each cable has a sticker on each end, and on each side of the sticker is a number, so that we can easily trace the ethernet cable from the computer, to the hub (or router) and figure out what is or isn’t working…

Of course we really should have matched the numbers to the respective port numbers of the hub (or router) but for now some simple lookup chart taped to the wall should do. (It works for our DNS, I mean, host files…)

We also wrangled the power cords, USB cables, audio connections, and on and on…

If there’s another flood, we’re sure to be even more organized.

My contribution to the web today is to let people who do not have a copy of Adobe InDesign know that if someone is sending you an InDesign tagged text file, tell them to choose Unicode in the Tags Export Options dialog box when they do the export, and not ASCII, unless you can somehow guarantee that the text going back into InDesign will really be ASCII, which seems unlikely in many cases… (See every discussion on Unicode in the last year for background…)

Since I found myself trying to explain such concepts to someone who had a copy of InDesign, but no knowledge whatsoever of charatcer sets and the like, I’m just hoping this might help someone else… …And if not, at least it’s here for my own use! ;)