January 2005 Archives

The story of how I acquired a copy of Apple's Pages software (part of the recently introduced iWork package) is an interesting one and is a good example of why Apple is gaining more acceptance in the industry these days. It all started with a new job... a return to a marketing position (which I hadn't done for years in favor of a more technical SE job), complete with a brand new Marketing department: a new VP, a few great people, and a handful of new ideas. And a lot of work. One immediate task: Create a newsletter, for both print and email.

Not having much of a budget per se, I sat down to a Microsoft Word newsletter template. It started almost a month ago, and began life as an eight-page design that would be big enough to house a whole quarter's worth of company and industry news. The MS Word template seemed pretty good, and text wrapped (more or less) as it was supposed to between text boxes in a two-column layout with a sidebar on the outside of each facing page.

My happiness lasted only a few days, until it I needed to change the length of the document. At that point it all went downhill.

Against the wishes of of several spouses, and in direct contrast to the screaming protest of my inner voice, this year's New Years Eve activity was planned and executed. At the time, we called it "Robot Attack", but I have since taken a page from Kaiju Big Battle and I am now calling it Pryo-Kaiju. My wife, her friends, my parents, and local authorities call it crazy.

This is what we did...