Traveling about and other ramblings from a sleepy traveler

So here I am, it's 2:43 in the morning body time and I'm on way way home
from a customer site. I'm not quite sure where I am right now. Probably
somewhere over western Montana. Which just happens to be where I am supposed
to be leaving for in about thirty six hours. I'll be lucky to see my kids
for twenty four of those thirty six hours (ten of which I'll be sleeping)
and my girlfriend for just a couple of hours at best. I almost feel like a
golf ball being blasted from one end of the course, the country in this
case, to the other and then half way across and back again for good measure.
Where's the sleeping pill when you need it? Maybe I need a good belt of some
fine whiskey like Makers Mark to knock me out. Of course all I an ever find
on a plane when I need to sleep is that crummy Jack Daniels. But I digress

Last Sunday I left to come to a customers site in Virginia for a
installation and training. We were putting in a workflow to automate the
receiving of art, customer email notification, automated file processing of
PDF's and other art. It was a tough week. It wasn't that the work was
"hard", it's never "easy", but it was just a long week of sleeping in
hotels. I had been working with this customer for several months and it was
nice to finally meet him. He's a very hospitable host. Tough and demanding
but a good guy with a tough job.

This Sunday I'll be heading off to another trip to Montana, different city
and client though. I'm very excited by the possibilities here. This company
is *very* well run, a high volume operation, and a already efficient
operation. So this should prove to be very interesting. I had a interesting
occurrence on the plane while we sat at the gate for an hour waiting for our
food to arrive. You ever notice how everything at O'Hare is slow when it
comes to the ground crews? Makes one wonder if the tail is wagging the dog
or what. One of the gentlemen that I am sitting next to got to talking about
our difficult day of traveling. Both gentlemen began their trips very early
in the morning back in eastern Europe. One of them is an engineer and we got
to talking about what each of us do. He works on power plants, I work with
PDF's. So we got to talking a bit about that and how publishers like to use
it. Like the airline magazine we were looking at. And then it struck me,
there's an ad for the client I'm visiting next week. I was thinking to
myself "Where in the heck *don't* these people advertise?". I'm hoping to
get some free time so I can go see Yellowstone. I guess I will be quite
close.

A couple of words of advice on travel here real quick. Always make sure you
check in 24 hours ahead of time and print two copies of your ticket. When
ever you can get "Economy-Plus" on United, take it! It was a real life save
on this trip. It is definitely worth the extra money for the leg room. I'm
short guy, only 5'7, but the extra five inches was so nice. The porters and
gate agents can be a real good friend too. I tipped the porter a bit "extra"
in Seattle to get a first class boarding jacket so I could bypass a very
long security line and get to the front of it. The gate agents in Dulles and
Chicago were real good to me with a little bit of patience and gratitude.
Not only did they get me off standby and on the plane but they got me the
Economy Plus seat I had paid for on the initial flight. Long story here...
Suffice it to say I missed my non stop flight and had to take to hops to get
home. I was really worried that I'd get stuck in cattle-car seating back by
the bathroom again. So a little kindness and patience will go far with
people who don't normally get treated well. I found out first hand that
being a smart ass to a gate agent is a sure way to get on the plane last. If
the woman had just bit her tongue and not been a smart ass there might not
have been a "glitch" with her ticket when trying to board. I'm not sure if
it was a computer error or operator error. But the wink I got as I walked
passed her leads me to believe it was the latter rather then the former.

So I'm looking for a server based product (hopefully hot folder driven) to
convert Word, Publisher, Excel and PowerPoint files to PDF. I'm not quite
sure where to turn. It has been an interesting research project. I don't
need anything "fancy". Just a decent PDF with fonts embedded, color (RGB is
just dandy) and one that won't down sample images too low. Windows based is
preferable. But a Mac program would be dandy too!~

A couple of weeks ago I was responding to a email post about how to merge
pre-separated PostScript or PDF. I suggested a program called PStill from
Andrew Stone and Frank Siegert ( http://www.stone.com/pstill/ ). I forwarded
the message to Andrew as a courtesy. I was surprised by his response. It's
not that I am surprised that he responded. More so it is the way that he
responded. He not only explained how to do such a thing with his software,
several different ways, but also gave out a free one week demo key for the
software. Now isn't that cool? I don't know, maybe it's just me. But I think
it was.

Okay, well I'm less than one hundred miles from home and it's almost time to
wake up for my body. God I hate these transnational flights. Especially
being an insomniac...

"Do the wont not..."