News from the front

Announcing my accepting a position with Adobe.

Continue Reading Add comment March 17th, 2009

Time for another post…

Still working on the next version of the Contact Sheet script. My barbershop quartet won the Norcal Novice Barbershop Quartet Contest!

Continue Reading Add comment March 2nd, 2009

Contact Sheet, Next Version

Planned features for the next version of the contact sheet, and an invitation to suggest features and other scripts you’d like to see!

Continue Reading 3 comments January 26th, 2009

About Custom Scripting Services

Creative Scripting offers custom scripting services. The process is simple. You tells me what you want, I writes it, you pays for it. We’re both deliriously happy.

But seriously, custom scripted solutions and work miracles for your business. What you do for a living is creative stuff. What I do for a living is eliminate the repetitive “monkey work” that is a necessary part of the design->production workflow.

I received an email from a print shop in Pennsylvania on a Tuesday. They had a local auto auction that needed to turn a database report into a formatted document, and quickly. There were typically 5,000-10,000 vehicles under dozens of categories. These reports were to be a weekly event with the turn around for the printed books being less than a day.

By Friday, I delivered a script that took the report, formatted the vehicles into a series of tables in InDesign, and basically created a print-ready booklet. That process done by hand would have required multiple people many hours. The scripted process took 4 minutes.

The script was not trivial, and they paid $900 for it; but the script likely broke even for them by the second week.

If you can do it in InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, or Bridge, with very few exceptions it can be completely automated. With Adobe bringing out new development tools like PatchPanel, there are all sorts new possibilities given the ability to interact with web services and such.

Take a look at where you spend your time. If you find yourself doing the same thing over and over, I can help. I can more than help, I can do the monkey work for you and free you up to make some real money!

Add comment January 9th, 2009

About Bob

I’m a 1980 graduate of the US Naval Academy, with a degree in Marine (Nuclear and Power Generation) Engineering. I then served 5 years as an engineering officer. My claims to fame in the Navy were: Fixing a broken ship – when I reported aboard, my ship was unsafe to get underway. 4 years later, she had the highest rated engineering plant of her ship type. Training – My guys achieved the highest propulsion plant test scores ever given up to that time. Maintenance – I managed her 1985 overhaul. $30 million budget, 6 months duration, 4500+ tasks on the critical path. We completed it 6 weeks early an $6M under budget. I used a Lisa (predecessor to the Mac) and their Project Management software linked to my master db of work to be done.

My mother taught me computer programming when I was a kid, so when I left the Navy, I went towards high tech. I worked for an instrumentation company working on product development and software. In this case software was all assembly (early microcontrollers), with a little bit of C work later on. Throughout my life I have taught myself new programming techniques and technologies.

I left that company and went to work for GE Nuclear in San Jose. I was the senior engineer responsible for emergency core cooling systems and residual heat removal systems. My primary task was to research the design bases of these systems to help plants achieve licensing for a service life extension.

While I was at GE, my software side got the better of me again. They were using such antiquated engineering software. I proposed and got funding for an engineering knowledge management system. The idea was a bit ahead of it’s time in that it used an Oracle database as an XML repository. This was in 1991, 7 or so years before anyone coined the phrase “XML”. It was a massively linked system that tracked design decisions at the paragraph level. You could look at part in the system, and trace its engineering history back through the design documents paragraph by paragraph to find out why it was made of stainless steel.

I left GE to start my own company based on this technology. I funded starting the company by working as a contractor for EPRI. At EPRI I developed a 3d database model of a nuclear boiler, mapped the components to other plants as well as 1, 2, and 3d models for neutron flux and water chemistry to attempt predict the emergence of ISGCC cracks in reactor internals.

Then of course, came the web. I adapted my earlier work to a web model, and raised about $3M in venture capital. I worked for the company I founded for about 7 years when it died during the dot com bust. Our biggest success story was a corporate travel portal for Galileo. The home page on their portal had some 500 elements of dynamic content, and our server was able to render pages that complex at the rate of 70 pages per second with its dynamic caching technology. There still isn’t a web technology in existence that can meet that performance level. That system was written in Java, and I was a primary code contributor as well as the inventor and architect of the system.

Since then, I’ve been rocking around doing consulting work. I’ve done a bunch of database optimization projects (Oracle, SQL Server), as well as 3 stints with Adobe Systems working on automating their creative suite. I have done projects for a number of firms that automate print and web production workflows using InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Bridge.

I did spend a year with firm that does catalog software. I architected and wrote an XML interface to InDesign to automate the development of product catalogs. One project, for example created a 900+ page catalog with some 6000 products. It went from concept to print-ready in 4 days.

My IQ hovers around 170. I learn and absorb a tremendous amount of information very quickly. I have a proven knack for finding elegant solutions to very complex problems and am known for out of the box thinking.

I am married to the great wife, Mary Beth. We are animal lovers having horses, dogs, cats, donkeys, chickens, and…

For fun I like to sing barbershop. Here’s a song if you care to listen.

Add comment January 8th, 2009