Graphic Gibbon

I was building an icon yesterday for an iStockphoto.com job using Illustrator's 3D tool and ran into an old problem. When you expand the file back into a vector format it leaves loads of open paths, usually around areas where you've applied a bevel or some such. Any fellow iStockers will know that they refuse to accept any open paths in their illustrations and it can be quite a chore to go around your illustration manually closing them all up again. However after a little Googling I came across a wonderful plug-in filter that closes them all up instantly for you. And it does a host of other cool functions too. Check out Point Control for yourselves. It works with CS3, CS4, and CS5 versions and the site has several other pretty darn useful plug-ins to tinker with as well.

The other day we were frequenting the local Red Lion pub quiz when we experienced (another) blackout and all the lights failed. Thank heavens then that the beer pumps and fruit machines were on some kind of emergency backup circuit as this photo attests! Not so daft these publicans, you know?

I've got my home office mostly up and running now. Mac working: check. Printer/scanner working: check. Globe And Mail archive installed: check. Internet working: sort of. Electricity working: er, not if you're an NPower electricity customer in West Yorkshire, it's not. The wonderful power company blacked out my area of town yesterday for 11 hours, at exactly the time I was endeavouring to work. The house was freezing while I frantically worked on a laptop as its battery percentage counter drew ever closer to zero. At 9%, I transmitted my partially completed work to Canada via a Three wireless broadband modem, it too down to a last pixel of life on its battery indicator. As it turned out, the paper didn't use the graphic and held it for another edition! Perhaps NPower will let me finish it today?