Bitstream’s just released the Vera font family as a cross platform replacement for the now removed MS core web fonts. JD Welch has a page up promoting them and their use online.

Lot’s of folks are jumping up and down about this, and it’s a good thing they’re now out and available, especially for the Unix/Linux/Open Source/Etc. crowd but they’re just not doing it for me. I have added the family as a second choice in my style sheets ’cause they don’t suck, and I think they will get picked up by a good percentage of viewers in the future.

Y’know, when a client sends something “on disk”, you’d think by now it would be a simple affair. Especially when it’s a client you’ve worked with for several years and have trained assiduously in the arcane science of “how to send your developer files she can use”.

So, when I get the nice, hefty package with full notes and documentation telling me everything she wants done to her site, with all graphics already scanned and copy already typed, I think the day will be a smooth one. Right? Oh hell no.

It’s on a zip disk. Ok, say I - we can work with this. So I spend half an hour hooking up my old SCSI Zip drive to my WinXP system (a trip in and of itself). System and drive are talking? Check. I pop the disk in… and it gets spit right back out.

Oh look - it’s a Zip *250* disk. Which I can’t read. (30 minutes of my life I’m *never* getting back…).

Pondering my options, I decide it would just be simpler to upgrade my hardware rather than attempt to get the files on CD. So, off to CompUSA. (Where I find everything I need, one thing I don’t need but buy anyway, get to see the new Matrix trailer, and have not one but two sales guys try to sell me “service plans” that I don’t need. They get politely turned down.)

Back home, the box gets unpacked. (And I have to admit, the new drive is sleek and sexy - much nicer to look at than the old one.) I install the software. I reboot. I pop the drive into the *last* free USB port on the system. And then? Nothing. And more nothing.

After an hour and a half on the phone with a very nice guy at Iomega tech support, and I can finally access the stinking drive. (Somehow managed to hack an explorer shortcut - it still won’t show up in My Computer.) During that span of time, I pulled out every other USB device, popped them all back in, manually assigned a new drive letter, re-installed the zip drivers, upgraded the drivers for my USB card, upgraded the zip drivers, poked around in the admin tools a whole hell of a lot, uninstalled TweakUI, and came just this close to giving up and taking the whole thing back for store credit.

But at least now I have the files and can actually start working on the project.

Intersting article at The Guardian about how european textbooks are being re-written to reflect a more warm and fuzzy, cohesive, EU-centric view of european history. Heh. Someday, the way this is all going, the only folks who will have a good understanding of how europe became europe will be on this side of the Atlantic, and the only people who have a good understanding of *american* history will be anywhere but here.

That whole ignoring history and repeating it problem? Not just a theory.

Neil Gaiman has some interesting thoughts on it.