Monday, January 08, 2007

Rumpole's Snicket Map Fiasco

We enjoyed listening to "Rumpole à la Carte" by Sir John Mortimer, as read by Frederick Davidson, an excellent narrator, on Blackstone cassette audiobook - one of the best audiobooks I've had the pleasure of listening to (ever)! The reading in an excellent British accent really made this series of stories believable and entertaining.

We watched "Lemony Snicket's A Series Of Unfortunate Events" (2004; Jim Carrey, Emily Browning, Meryl Streep, Jennifer Coolidge, Cedric the Entertainer, Catherine O'Hara, Billy Connolly, Timothy Spall) on widescreen DVD a few nights ago. A great film, especially if you had already read the book (as I had), and the all-star cast made this film truly excellent.

Google Maps has gotten depressingly worse over time - so much so, that it's almost impossible to print anything anymore, especially in the latest browsers. It's a shame, too, because it used to be so good and easy to use, but now it sucks so bad.

It's gotten to the point where the most efficient way to get a printed-out map is to first get the map the way you want it, then take a print screen (take a screenshot), save it to your desktop (as an image via Photoshop), then use the built-in Windows Photo Printing Wizard to actually do the scaled printing (as nothing even comes close to printing images as well as it does). A few extra steps, yes, but the results are always better than trying to fight with the scaling issues presented by the browsers themselves and/or by Google's scaling options.

The problem is that Google and the browsers are fighting against each other over who is going to try and scale the images onscreen to your printer's sheet of paper. The browsers by themselves can print regular webpages scaled pretty well (sometimes), and Google maps - in a older browser - used to be okay, but when you have the two of them both trying to do the scaling, it's a retarded mess.

Since the browsers aren't going to change anytime soon, it's up to Google to remove (or improve) their scaling and print logic, otherwise I'm afraid it's pretty much unusable.

In brighter news, we helped a family move into our ward on Saturday, and we also attended a baptism for a new sister in the ward. Overall, a great day (except for the map printing fiasco which sparked the aforementioned rant)! LOL