Mac Meeting and Fonts.
So I went to the meeting tonight in Boulder at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Very cool location, although I felt like I was driving into the boonies. It's about an hour from my house, and since I never commute (home office), I didn't mind the drive. Interesting demographic that showed up: about 5 Gen-Xers, most folks were between 30 and 50 and a fair amount over 60. Lots of seniors and about half women. Very different from what you see at Java User Group meetings. The people were very friendly, though it did have somewhat of a cult-ish atmosphere. Boy do some folks hate Microsoft. I like Microsoft, and Red Hat and Apple. If I could only use one OS, I'd use M$, but I prefer using all of the above.
The first presenter showed us his cool site of the week. Another great flash site that you i-hate-flash folks might actually like. The second guy was a Photoshop Guru and gave good tips on using layers and combining images. Stuff I'll definitely use.
I managed to sneak out without paying the $25 and no one asked me too. I'm thinking about asking them if they want a new website, their current one is sooo 1990s. Maybe one running on Roller (with the Aqua theme?) - now that would be cool. That brings up another point - my favorite thing about Roller that I realized today? That I get to write HTML, actually XHTML, every-single-day. I dig it 'cause I dig writing XHTML. It's how I got into this industry, and it's nice to be doing something so familiar every day. Some folks don't seem to like it so much.
I did ask if anyone could solve my Mac problems on Mini-me (my laptop's name). A guy in the front row asked if I'd installed any fonts recently, and if so, that was probably my problem. Since I installed 471 of them two days ago, I figured that must be it. So I removed them - dragging them to Trash from the /Library/Fonts folder. Didn't seem to work and everything seems to be getting much worse (applications not opening, no folders under "Computer"). So I made the leap and I'm in the process of re-installing OS X 10.2 right now. I did the Archive Install and elected to preserve my user settings. I hope it works - it sucks to lose data. Then again, I really don't use Mini-me that much, so if I lose everything, oh well. I've learned many things re-installing OS's - most often what NOT to do again. Hopefully this time Apple has made the re-install fool developer-proof.