July 31st, 2008

Back to Work – Another great vacation is over.

I just returned from a great vacation in South Carolina. Had a great business meeting while there – but really enjoyed seeing the entire family. It was my grandparents 50th anniversary – 25 of us got together for the week. A VERY full house.

I came back to the office to start a very hectic week. We’re launching a new product so things are very crazy. Organized chaos is a good title.

Here’s a shot from my vacation – my little cousin Connor has clearly tired me our after riding on my shoulders for quite a while.

July 31st, 2008

Towns need to address funding needs of Fire, EMS and Police – NOW.

As a call firefighter in a small town I see how impossible it is to get even the basic needs of a public safety department taken care of. In the last two years our department has spent countless hours in meetings, research and labor to try and raise funds for a new firetruck, pay raise for department members (from $4/hour to the Fedaral Minimum Wage of $6.55) among many other things. The true need for these expenditures was questioned over and over again, even though it was more than obvious that we were in serious need. As the economy continues to dip I can only imagine what it will be like in a few year. I wouldnt be surprised to see a petition to extend the age limit of Fire Apparatus to over 20 years just so towns have an excuse to spend less on us.

Today the lack of respect and care for emergency professionals has hit an all time low. We are now seeing departments offering to sell naming rights to their station and emergency apparatus. That’s right – You might see a firetruck responding to a house fire or car accident, adorned from front to back with Coca-Cola logos. Crazy isn’t it?

The Marshall Township Volunteer Fire Department in Pennsylvania is doing just that:

The Marshall Township Volunteer Fire Department is willing to do whatever it takes to raise money for a $1.6 million expansion, including selling naming rights to a fire station and even to its trucks. We’ll look at anything right now,” said John Ashbaugh, fire company president and building committee chairman. The department is also willing to put contributors’ names on paving bricks, trees, benches and about anything else to help pay for the expansion of the main fire station in the Warrendale section of the township, Mr. Ashbaugh said.

Via FireHouse.com News

July 24th, 2008

Fixed: Errors printing PDF from Quickbooks, post script errors

I print all of our company invoices from QuickBooks and found recently that printing to Adobe PDF using the distiller didn’t work. Adobe would create a .log file on the desktop containing the following error:

%%[ ProductName: Distiller ]%%
%%[ Error: rangecheck; OffendingCommand: endcidrange ]%%(lots of misc. characters omitted here)

%%[ Flushing: rest of job (to end-of-file) will be ignored ]%%
%%[ Warning: PostScript error. No PDF file produced. ] %%

Unfortunately it took two uninstalls for me to figure out the quick fix. The problem was due to using fonts in our Invoice Templates that apparently didn’t work with Adobe’s Postscript. Simple Fix: Go into your template and change your recently modified elements to use a popular font such as Arial.

For those who are sick of distiller, a free open source option is available and works great: PDFcreator via SourceForge