My wife and I had a delightful breakfast with Nancy and her sister, getting to know them on a personal level along with a little bit of business. Maybe it was Nancy that brought all of this February sunshine to Oregon the past four days.

Aloha, Nancy.

Georgia, serif

Palatino Linotype, Book Antiqua, Palatino, serif

Times New Roman, Times, serif

Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif

Arial Black, Gadget, sans-serif

Comic Sans MS, cursive, sans-serif

Impact, Charcoal, sans-serif

Lucida Sans Unicode, Lucia Grande, sans-serif

Tahoma, Geneva, sans-serif

Trebuchet MS, Helvetica, sans-serif

Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif

Courier New, Courier, monospace

Lucida Console, Monaco, monospace

Graphical

If you weren’t satisfied with the list of web-safe fonts then you could use a graphical tool like Photoshop and make a graphical image with one of the thousands of fonts available. The only downside is that these graphical images were not really found by search engines, and updates took time and effort to create by a graphical designer.

Cufon

Crafty engineers came upon a way to use Javascript to create fonts on the fly and Cufon offers a quick way for your web developer to get almost any True Type Font (TTF) onto your web site.

Google

The number one search engine company in the world is the darling of web developers and they offer another free way to add fancy fonts to your web site.

Font Squirrel

Not to be outdone by the big guns, there’s a smaller site that offers a third way to use most any font on your web site.

Summary

Fonts can help further refine the look and feel of your web site, so they are a big deal from a design and impact point of view. You now have several ways to get fancy fonts onto your web site.

Here is how superior customer support works:

1. After a client authenticates then you give them what they want, even if they want to cancel
2. Your web site allows users to login and cancel their own account
3. Links on your web site work, when they are reported broken then you fix them
4. You publish a toll-free number where people can find it
5. You don’t have 6 levels of automated phone service to find out how to cancel an account

Then I got inspired to create my own Christmas Card, click to see the message and hear the music.

These animations used to be created with Flash technology a few years ago however today we now use a technology called jQuery that allows you to enjoy these on your iPad, iPhone or iTouch products.

Earlier in the year the PMPA web site won 2nd place in the annual Professional Photographer’s of America (PPA) competition for affiliate web sites.

Kristi Johansen, PMPA President presents award to Daniel Payne

Another Angle

The Award

An alternative is to save your Word Document as a PDF file which will be more popular for your visitor to read from, because they use the free Adobe Acrobat reader already installed on their web browser and don’t have to buy Word from Microsoft. If your version of Microsoft Word doesn’t have a PDF print option then download this free program called Cute PDF, I use it all of the time.

At the office I opened the lid and hit the power button. Uh oh. My LCD was dim and I could barely make out the windows. No problem I thought, then pushed the Power button to restart my laptop. When the laptop restarted I saw the familiar Apple logo and the swirling icon:

After several minutes and no login prompt I knew that something was wrong. Probably the Hard Drive, so let’s try rebooting with Command+R:

Then I choose Disk Utility and clicked both Verify Permissions and Verify Disk, followed by Repair Permissions and Repair Disk:

Tried to reboot but my laptop was still stuck at the Apple logo, no login.

Well, time to try and restore Lion from the Internet, so another reboot with Command+R then tried Reinstall Mac OS X:

A dialog asks for my AppleID:

I lookup my AppleID in an Excel spreadsheet but it isn’t accepted. I click Forgot Password and wait for an email confirmation, none comes. I try a second AppleID, that also is rejected. Finally, I try a new AppleID which is accepted however it tells me that the new AppleID wasn’t the one used to originally buy Lion.

I phone Apple Care and spend 58 minutes on the phone (very nice tech support guy who helped in spite of the fact I don’t even own AppleCare):

I try several things the tech support guy offers, none of them fix the broken login.

Support: Go to iTunes and add Lion to your cart.
Me: I only have a PC and iTunes won’t let me buy Lion. Can you just charge me the $29.00 and add Lion to my account?
Support: No, we aren’t allowed to do that. Do you have another Mac?
Me: Yes, at home.

Driving back home I login to my iMac, click the App Store, buy a 2nd copy of Lion, pause the download, then drive back to the office.

In the office I reboot with Command+R, choose Disk Utility, Reinstall Mac OS X, AppleID. Finally, it’s accepted and I wait another 95 minutes for the download to complete, the MacBook Pro reboots, I wait another 35 minutes for the install to complete, then I see the login:

All of my data and apps are in tact, the only things I had to re-install were:

• Java for OS X Lion
• DisplayLink drivers for my 2nd external 24″ monitor

Summary

I entered my office at 8:00AM and had a working laptop at 2:30PM. That’s 6.5 hours of character building experience for me today.

Lessons learned:

1. Recharge or plugin my laptop when it’s low.
2. Use TimeMachine to make a backup.
3. Never forget my new AppleID password.

Clicking Log In brought me to a blank screen. Hmm. After several hours of Google search and trying several dead ends I finally read about the functions.php file and looked for empty spaces after:

<?php
php?>

Sure enough, in the middle of my functions.php file I had some blank spaces. Removing those blank spaces brought my WordPress login back to life.