neuro-designs

A few days back, we had a problem with two of our line of UPS at the office. It turns out that the ones we used for the networking equipment and the PC didn’t have any automatic voltage regulators built in. And when we measured the voltage, guess what? It’s only 170 volts. It was simply nothing and far below what our nation’s electric company promised their customers: A full load of 220 volts. I don’t think that will happen anytime soon. The problem is, the voltage downsize happens during broad daylight. We would probably understand better if it happened while we’re not working late at nights.

Enough is enough, we decided to purchase an APC Line-R 600I AVR and had it delivered to the office. So far so good, it steps up or steps down (which is unlikely) the unstable voltage as needed. We installed it for the networking equipment for the time being, as that is far more crucial than the PC in the corner of the office.

We’re going to see how this goes, and if it succeeds curing our electrical voltage problem, we’ll get another one for the PC.

Some randomities from our HQ.

THE TRAY

We do aim to get some healthier stuff the next time around. Think fresh fruits and fruit punch, fruit pies, fruit… Baby steps, people. Baby steps. 

THE MURALS

Courtesy of Christo. few things have been added along the way but until today, his creation still decorates the board proudly.

THE  JINX

This is somewhat of a peculiar occurence, striking at random delivering it’s blows when you least expect it. Luckily, so far none of the other machines in the office have been affected.

O HAI. I CAN HAS YOUR AFFEKSYUN?

It’s all about producing positive vibes, baby. LOL.

Continuing our quest to have a reliable electricity source because of the scheduled power outages, we finally got the generator installed today.

Since our office is a relatively small office, this simple Honda-powered generator is more than sufficient to power the whole facility during power outages. It also has a built-in power regulator, although it’s somewhat rather noisy.

The installation is not perfect, though. We still have some things to consider to permanently locate this generator. But as the time goes, at least should the power is out, we can still do our daily work for at least 8 hours a day with air conditioning.

Frankly speaking, I am quite pissed for these two days for the fact that there are still many (and I mean many) printing companies in our country that are not PDF-compatible. The story goes like this. One of our clients are going to print seven different kinds of letterheads, one for each branch that they have. The logical solution for this is obviously sending out print-ready PDF files of those letterheads, to whichever vendors they use, this will avoid the chances of film output mistakes. So I told them to have the vendor call me for a pre-press brief. And oh yes, they told me that they can accept PDFs, which turned out that they don’t, and they can only accept FreeHand or CorelDraw files for film outputs. Yes, they do accept PDFs, and then converts them into either FreeHand or CorelDraw, and then go on with the film output. But they have no means of a direct CTF process from PDFs whatsoever. They even asked me for the missing typefaces. Since when does a print-ready PDF asks for a missing typeface file?

This is just unacceptable. All these years, all of the printing and film output companies that we’ve worked with have been accepting PDFs without any problems. What year is this? I feel like I’m back to 1995 all of a sudden. Come on, if you can’t accept PDFs as a standard file format for your printing company, chances are, you better close down.