Yesterday, I help a friend get their Epson Stylus Photo R200 USB printer up-and-running. Although they support Mac OS X, treating it as a first-class-citizen in the documentation, the software has many shortcomings.
First off, downloading the driver is a cumbersome process. After clicking through several pages on their website to find the right one, you end up downloading a self-extracting StuffIt archive. That produces a folder containing a disk image file. Double-clicking that produces an Installer VISE app. Launching that finally gets you to the installation process. This process requires that you quit all running apps and that you restart at the end. Now, as far as I know, as of Panther (and probably earlier), you don’t generally need to restart after installing USB drivers.
In addition, while searching for the driver on the website, you’ll see a note that warns you not to connect the printer before you install the software (a common Windoze admonition when installing USB devices); the printed instruction sheet that comes with the printer very clearly has you connect the printer first, then install the software (for both Mac OS and Windoze).
Next, after you’ve completed the installation process and restarted, you need to add the printer in the Print Center. (I’m not complaining about this step; every printer requires this.) There is a menu whereby you choose what type of printer to add (TCP/IP, Rendezvous, USB, etc.). What’s tricky here is that if you choose “USB,” as one would expect, the Epson printer shows up, but always displays “Driver not installed,” and you won’t be able to select it. Instead, you must choose ”Epson USB Printer“ (I may not have that quite right) from the menu, and only then can you choose the printer and set it up. The Epson printer driver should not create a separate menu item just for its printers.
After all that, you can, depending on what capabilities you choose, end up with two printers in your list of available printers, one for “normal” printing, and one for “borderless” printing. These should instead be a single printer, with appropriate settings available in the print dialog.
Anyway, after figuring all that out, it seems to work. I only printed a simple black-and-white text test page, and the printer took upwards of 30-45 seconds to get started printing, but was reasonably fast after that (for an ink jet).

Every now and again, maybe one in one thousand incoming spam messages makes me laugh. The latest:

Subject: Elisha Cuthbert recommends these penis pills.

For those of you who don’t know, Elisha Cuthbert, one of the stars of the Fox television series 24, is one of my favorite sexy celebrities. So the subject definitely caught my eye and made me chuckle. But what made the message laugh-out-loud funny was the sender:

From: Vaughn

I still didn’t read the message, because it is spam, after all, but I did get a kick out of it. If it isn’t funny to you, then you need to watch so much Alias that both shows meld into one.

Berkeley called today to tell me I’ve been readmitted. Unfortunately, I have to wait until Monday to get the oh-so-symbolic student ID card, and to ensure that I can get it on Monday I have to go to campus tomorrow to ensure my approved application gets into the system before the Friday night deadline, but I’m walking on air (and writing excessively long sentences to boot)!

Now it’s up to the Deans’ Conference. I’ve turned in a rather large pile of forms, recommendations, letters, and transcripts. They’ll meet on Thursday and I should know if I’m readmitted by Friday.
Wish me luck!

More and more people seem to be fawning over Bush’s ridiculous “vision.” It’s not a vision, it’s political strategery. It is nothing but a waste of money, and the negative impact is already being felt, as evidenced by the recent announcement to abandon Hubble. (I only reference one article referring to the announcement).