I am about to leave on a two-week motoring trip, a vacation that will be made marginally less relaxing by the knowledge that upon my return I must needs produce a 32-page program for a professional association's award dinner, my boss having seconded me, or at least my services, to the said association for this purpose. I had hoped that my design would not scream "desktop publishing," unlike the last seven annual products, but my clients seem allergic to the notion of paying for white space. Many compromises have been made; I am reserving the option of crediting the design on the acknowledgments page to "Alan Smithee."

My main problem, though, is that they want pictures. Lots and lots of pictures. These are being emailed to me daily, and although I went into considerable detail at the outset as to what I required in a digital photo, my guidelines are being ignored. What I need are head-and-shoulders shots at a decently high resolution (either a nice hefty dpi, a large virtual "physical" size or, if 307,200 pixels are all the camera will yield up, at least a nice tight shot so that I can resample to a higher res without doing violence to the information content) and little or no JPEG compression. Much of what I'm getting is 640 x 480, 72 dpi and, what the hell, let's have the head-and-shoulders take up about 5% of the available pixels and let's save this image at such a fierce level of compression that there's room for another 750 shots on this floppy disk...some of these things look as though portraiture had been attempted using the medium of basketweave. Utterly unusable.

I just composed, and discarded without sending, a rather tart note to my main contact at the professional ass'n (she might not have understood that I intended certain terms to be taken metaphorically only, and I learned long ago never to commit to the office email system any words that might prove toxic were one compelled to eat them). I'll make another attempt after lunch, which I'll chase with a cooling beverage.

I'm reconciled to the existence of idiots in the world, but I'm bitterly resentful of whoever it was who first thought to make computer technology available to them.

disgruntledly,