this is an irritating and technical post

(*above drawn with my right hand, to keep it from smashing things.)

Those of you who have been around me lately may have noticed that all things electronic seem to fail in my presence. In the last month I went through 2 scanners. Monday, at work, I killed the second optical drive in my Imac (no fault of my own), and the giant printer. Since I have upgraded my home machine to 10.5 I have regularly fantasized about throwing it out the window (if you're interested, there're a couple of problems and fixes at the bottom.)

Today was this - Epson's built-in drivers for my printers (Epson Stylus C88, and Epson 1280) are broken. They allow you to only use "Matte Paper - Heavyweight", default to "Borderless", and will not let you check the ink levels on the printer.

Work Around : With a lot of testing, I figured out that by setting a custom paper size of "8.5 x 10.97" it broke the defaults enough to let me change the paper settings.

It looks like any paper 10.97 inches or shorter gives you the options you need. 

The ink levels can be tested by finding the "Epson Printer Utility" application on your harddrive.

I know this is probably not interesting to y'all, but I hope that maybe someone finds this, and it keeps them from losing the minutes off their life that I did today.

OTHER PAINS (and fixes)

•When opening Mail for the first time in OS X.5 : The message viewer did not show up automatically, my messages did not open when clicked on, new messages did not come through, Mail did not respond to "Quit" and had to be forced quit.

Fix - go to "Macintosh HD > Users > (your user name) > Library > Mail" and remove the files "MessageRules.plist" and "MessageRules.plist.backup" to your hardrive. Open Mail, quit mail, and replace the files you moved. 

Everything should work great after that, but you will have to do this with each user account on the computer.

•When opening iPhoto for the first time in OS X.5 : The library panel did not show up. 

Fix - move the cursor to where the library panel should be and wiggle it around in a couple of different places. A bar should pop up so you can adjust the width of the panel.

I promise to do something pretty next.