T-9 Hours...

Well. This is it. Tomorrow morning I'm going over to the College and St. George Alicos to pick up my poster for the ZOO 498 poster session. Damage? $189 and change, tax included. I've heard rumours that you can actually print posters over at Physics for free (which is apparently what Marc did for Alice's BIO 299 poster) but I know Marc's busy with his own papers, and, well, it felt really nice to have done all of that all by myself without having to rely on anyone to help me out. Not that I had a choice, anyway: Dan was in Mexico for a GBIF meeting. I cringed when I heard the price quote over the phone, but I still maintain that it was a good price; they're giving me a high-res printout on photo-quality paper, and given my experience with Alicos and special print/copy jobs compared to other places, I'm fairly sure that they had the lowest price overall. I didn't have the time or energy to go to every single print shop I know of to check prices, anyway.

God, actually laying out the poster was an exercise in absolute frustration. I've never had a more frustrating and infuriatingly irritating project: it should have taken a morning to do, but what it ended up doing was suck up the whole day. I had to rely on GraphicConverter to do all of the grunt work for me; now GC is a great file format converter for graphics files, but it's clear that it's absolutely terrible for anything else. The text tools are substandard and not directly editable; if you make a typo, you need to completely delete your whole block of text and start all over again. Sure, GC isn't supposed to be Photoshop, but not having editable text is silly (I am using an older version though, so maybe this has been improved).

And then there was the file itself. I'd never layed out anything close to 1 x 1.1 m before but I knew it was going to be massive, and indeed it was: even just scrolling through the file was excruciating. That was what took so much time: the process of actually moving from place to place on the file. And for some reason, even typing text was glacially slow.

As luck or irony would have it, I actually got Gimp.app running on my G4 via X11, which didn't happen before...and I realize just what a breeze this would have made of the layout. Well, not that it does me any good now. Sigh.

Anyway...if you're going to be around campus tomorrow, the poster session will be from approx. 1:30-3:30 pm on Thursday (tomorrow) in the Ramsay Wright Student Lounge, in the basement, and I guess this goes out to Alex and Katherine, since you're the only ones in my day-to-day life who actually go to the trouble of coming here and reading my posts...oh well. Wish me luck, guys!