DIMW - Digital ImageMaker World

Life has been very busy recently, and my output on DIMI and here has suffered. But I’ve still been shooting.

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From Friday morning to Monday afternoon I was effectively off the Internet because of some stupid thing somebody at my ISP did (or rather their upstream connection out of Australia). It took some 10 hours on the phone over multiple calls and innumerable emails to solve the issue. The process illustrated some important things.

In my desperation to solve the problem I turned, as many would, to the wider community. In Australia there is this amazing web site called www.whirlpool.net.au. Whirlpool is a central site for finding out about broadband connections and has an active set of forums, including individual ones for the main ISPs. So I posted my problem there. They suggested using traceroute to see exactly what was happening to my attempts to access overseas web sites (only they were affected). These showed that international requests were getting lost somewhere in the ISPs system whereas local ones were not. I sent these to my ISP in emails and it was really these that started to get them thinking there was a real issue that was not to do with my computer. I also found a dialup Internet company that sold a block of hours (20) for a set price ($27). I signed up and thus could prove that with a different Internet connection I could access these same sites from the same computer that I could not using the broadband connection. This proved it was not something in my computer. I had also earlier used an Internet cafe to verify that the sites I was using as examples were up and working. Anyother key was finding out through the Whirlpool forums that for one of the sites I could not get to, others using the same ISP could not get to either. In other words I had to be a very active participant in diagnosing the fault and needed to do what I could to methodically eliminate possibilities.

So I guess the lesson from this is that you can’t be an uninformed user and expect your suppliers to do it all. They can, but it might take much longer than you would want it to be.

I’ve just uploaded a tutorial to DIMi that demonstrates one way of using Photoshop and ImageReady to design web pages with rollover buttons. You may find it useful in showing the required steps.

Coming out of a discussion on the dfa Yahoo list I put out a very rough list of features for what I saw as the ideal inkjet printer for digital artists. So I have decided to flesh that rough idea out here.
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