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Unusual Requests
Martin Hansen
Being a dab hand with computer graphics leads to unusual requests. Once I was asked to design and produce tickets for The Rolling Stones' Mick Taylor when he played a solo concert. No cash changed hands but I and several guests were given free admission. It was a great show from the guitarist who made the Stones the greatest rock and roll band in the world.
Recently, a psychologist commissioned me to produce the diagrams for his text book. He'd written his four hundred page book in Word. Many authors dump enormous BMP images into Word when they want a diagram. Typically, the diagram is captured from a screenshot taken in 16 million colours. Amusingly, the diagram itself is black and white so the file is Mega-Bytes more than it need be. In an effort to avoid such bloat, I entered the world of the Windows Meta File, the Word equivalent of a Draw file. A newsgroup posting resulted in my being sent a smart utility that converted Draw files to WMFs. Thus, RISC OS is the secret behind a Word document that's superior to most and far more compact than it might otherwise have been.
The artist Anthony Gormley is in the London News with his Fourth Plinth project. This involves volunteers spending an hour on a massive stone column in Trafalgar Square. They spend their time doing pretty much whatever takes their fancy. One plinther decided to use her time to raise awareness of the Miscarriage Association. So, my most unusal request to date; produce a graphic in the style of the official one, but which poked fun at Gormley. An hour with !Paint resulted in the above. If you are in London at 10am, September 4th, you'll be able to watch it being used.
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