Crisis Averted!

What crisis, you ask? Well, the fact that no one knows (except those of you who read this) is a sign that the problem was solved at the last minute.

Ward went to a gaming convention in Columbus, departing on Wednesday after uploading the stuffit file of the next issue of CSN to the Quebecor site. He asked me to look at the proofs and okay them; I kept checking the site, but no proofs. Finally, I wrote to ask about them, and received this note: "The file is corrupted. We need a new file in order to prepare the issue."

Problem is, I don't have that file--only Ward does. I called Maria, his wife, who told me that he did not take his computer with him, so there was nothing Ward could do from his end.

I downloaded the .sit file and unstuffed it... and got the same "corrupt file" message that Quebecor had gotten. As I analyzed the file, I discovered that five .tif files of the 22 used to prepare the issue had somehow gotten corrupted in the stuffing process; the other 17 were fine, as was the original Quark file. Their older version of Stuffit was ab-ending when it hit the first corrupt file, which was the 6th of the 22 art files; as far as Quebecor was concerned, 17 art files were missing.

I went through the .sit file with a more robust decompression program and was able to extract the other good files and determine which of the 17 were wonky. I then called Maria, who was willing to use Ward's computer to upload those files, one at a time, to the Quebecor FTP site; she found all 5 and did the drag-and-drop thing, while I uploaded the other twelve files that Quebecor needed. I then called Jasmin, told him the files were there, and he seemed both appreciative and surprised that someone was working on this after midnight.

Ten minutes later, the proof was available, the issue was okayed, and we're back on schedule. That's a good thing, because Ward's slogan for CSN is "on time or we'll eat a bug." For a little while there, I had a feeling he was about to have a bad taste in his mouth...