I also use my PC to play video games and WoW was crashing with a fatal exception sometimes when loading new areas. I ran a defrag and that made my programs open faster again but it was still crashing during loading so I updated my video driver (ATI Radeon 3800 HD, PCIe 2.0 w/ 512MB onboard) and upon opening things I’d been working on in Illustrator was greeted with the error message that my fonts were invalid. I tried reinstalling the fonts and got the same error message – for ALL of my OpenType fonts. I recall I had a similar font issue beforehand, but the solution then was to update the driver, but as this was the cause of the problem this time, I needed a new solution.

Once again, Google comes to my rescue

Googling for technical advice can be dangerous territory because there are a lot of sites out there which try to get you to install their “better” versions of system utilities, but they turn out only to be better for the distributor. Be careful out there, folks.

I’m sometimes worried when I see a URL that contains the word “install” in the title, but this one actually turns out to be a legit site – http://www.thomasphinney.com/tag/install/ (my thanks to the folks on TechSupportForum.com for the tip). My problem fits into his solution #4 which requires a registry edit to resolve the issue, as I’ve outlined below. In a nutshell, this problem is caused because Windows expects the device driver (video driver) to be a certain size, and the driver exceeds it, so we need to tell the registry to accept the larger size. Thanks Thomas!

ALWAYS PAY CLOSE ATTENTION TO WHAT YOU ARE DOING WHEN EDITING YOUR REGISTRY! It is not a toy, it is the brain of your operating system – proceed with caution. A lot of the entries have similar names so double-check to make sure that you’re editing the right one. The following information is provided for your convenience, use at your own risk.

1. First and foremost, back up your existing registry.
   1. Click Start -> Run and type into the Run dialog box “regedit” (and press enter).
   2. Welcome to the Registry Editor, please be on your best behaviour in here. To start with, let’s make a backup of your registry. Click on File -> Export and then save your registry file in a memorable location
2. Navigate the registry tree to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management
3. Once you have selected Memory Management, in the right plane, right click and choose New -> DWORD.
4. Give the new entry this name “SessionImageSize” (omitting the quotation marks).
5. Double-click the new entry, which will allow you to edit it, and switch the radio button from Hexadecimal to Decimal, and give it a value (Value Data) of 20. Then press OK.
6. Restart your computer for the change to take effect (the registry is loaded at startup).
7. Your OpenType fonts should be working again.

Further resources:
Adobe User Forums (long) thread about this issue.

On June 2nd, 2010, Patrick Stewart received a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace for his contribution to the theatre. Although he is best known as Captain Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek:TNG, he has been a notable stage actor during his 50-year acting career. Apart from his role on Star Trek, Patrick Stewart has been in several of my favourite movies such as Dune.

I was looking at IMDB this morning and found a little trivia factoid that said that when he first arrived to do Star Trek TNG, Patrick didn’t unpack his bags for six weeks because he was convinced that he was going to be fired!

“When it first started, I didn’t think that I would survive beyond the pilot. I did not unpack; I didn’t see the point. I thought the producers would come to their senses and realize they’d made a grave error in casting me. I was certain that I’d be on my way back to London…Eventually, it became clear to me that not only wasn’t I going to go away, the series wasn’t going to go away. I stayed, and have relished every moment.” (On his initial belief that he would be fired from “Star Trek: The Next Generation” (1987)).

IMDB also notes that he’s been friends with Brian Blessed since childhood, another actor that I admire. (Who could forget Brian as King Richard IV in Blackadder I?)

I’ve heard experts that say that 30 days is enough time to develop new habits and if you do a thing for 30 days that it will stick. Well, it’s worth a try I suppose…

So what am I going to do for the next 30 days?

1. Exercise!

I’m going to……exercise! Being a self-employed designer/techie/entrepreneur means that I sit at my desk all.day.long – and on the weekends I vid out with a bit of WoW, which means sitting around on the weekend too. Clearly evolution did not set us up with big butts to sit on all day (or did it?>>>) and so doing some exercise every day is a big step to not turn into a blob. I eat really well (vegan/vegetarian) and I think that if I didn’t I’d be enormous, and sometimes I have little bad girl snacks (mmmm soft australian liquorice, or mmmm banana bread) and I worry about overall cardiovascular health so I propose to do exercise every day, in some shape or form. Mostly I’ll be doing hokey workout videos with music I detest, but sometimes I’ll crack out the NYC Ballet workout and maybe even go for a run (I stress the maybe).

2. Blog!

I also resolve to blog at least once a day, on any one one of my 4 blogs. One article per day on every one of them I think is too much but 30 days will give me at least a good start at building quality content and get me to a stage where I want to promote them (watch this space).

3. eBay Selling

At one stage, I was an eBay Powerseller (which I find semi-hilarious so feel free to laugh) – and now I have a house full of stuff which I am “planning” on selling. I think that if I create listings every day for 30 days that ought to be enough to put a dent in my pile, and who knows, perhaps I will continue to sell after the 30 days.

4. Stop skipping meals

Sometimes I get busy, and eat “lunch” at 4 pm. Henceforth, I am going to have an observed lunch hour (she says at 2:30pm).

Well, I will report back in 30 days (probably) and see how I’m doing. I’m hoping to be a few pounds lighter and infinitely more productive. There is always hope, right?

Leonard Nimoy sings the Ballad of Bilbo Baggins on YouTube (sadly they’ve disabled the embed code due to licensing. *shakes fist*
Read more about it on Wikipedia

And a lil tweet from Leonard about William Shatner’s public nomination for Governor General of Canada:

@WilliamShatner Bill: You’re being considered for Governor General of Canada. Do it !! Finally a chance to do something w/your life. llap

I hunted around Google and found various Ubuntu forums and bug reports about the ATI proprietary fglrx driver but none of the suggested solutions worked for me. (This thread has a number of useful suggestions for others encountering this issue.) For me, I could not “sudo apt-get autoremove xorg-driver-fglr” because I got an error that the package wasn’t installed and “sudo aticonfig –initial” gave an error saying that it couldn’t find any supported hardware.

My solution in the end was to run the following from the recovery root shell (with network support):

#apt-get remove xorg-driver-fglrx

I then rebooted and used the graphics fix option in the recovery menu and then booted normally et voila! Hope that helps someone out there on teh intrawebs.