The first Optima credit cards (from American Express) bore the word "Optima" set in Optima, a typeface designed by Hermann Zapf in the 1950s. I don't know if that was an in-joke for typophiles or what, but it amused me (and my boyfriend at the time, who worked in graphic arts). I looked on the web for a sample to show y'all, but all the images I found show current-day Optima cards that sport a different typeface.

I never much liked Optima. (I don't care for most of Zapf's typefaces.)

McCain's campaign makes extensive use of Optima in printed materials. I know where to find a sample to show y'all, but I prefer not to sully my web pages with his promotional material. You can see some in a NY Times blog entry with comments from various designers et al. on how the look of Optima relates to the candidate. Several of the remarks are choice, e.g. this (from Seymour Chwast):

Optima is one of the worst pre-computer typefaces ever designed. It was created to satisfy everybody’s needs. A straightforward, no-nonsense, no-embellishment face, it comes in regular and bold but little character can be found in either weight.

Optima is not inappropriate for use by Senator McCain.

And not that this has anything to do with Optima, but my latest T-cell count was 324, up from 220 in October. It may not be such a bear market after all.

The flip side of letting anticipation excite you is (of course) the potential for disappointment when something doesn't come through.

I've been waiting to hear whether friends of mine can get financing for a company they want to start. I'd like to work for them, and I allowed myself to get excited when prospects for their financing started looking up.

You know what's coming next.

The financing that looked promising a few weeks ago has fallen through: a disappointment to them and to me. It's not like all my eggs were in that basket--I have other things in my life to be happy about besides this work opportunity--but I was looking forward to it.

They might still raise the money elsewhere, but the project is delayed. That's not just an annoyance for those of us who are subject to being impatient, it's also unfavorable because how quickly you get to market matters in the electronics business.

So now I get practice in trying to be as unflappable as the farmer in the parable I quoted here a couple weeks ago.

My abs are still sore from climbing two days ago. Okay, I probably facilitated their continued soreness by spending a bit of the weekend working on and under my car.

I put in a bigger, spiffier radiator. (Overkill is not a bad approach to cooling when one's travels include driving through Death Valley.) I discovered this weekend that "drop-in OEM replacement" is a relative term. A part may evidently be deemed a direct replacement if fewer than five modifications are required to get it to fit right. I could never work in marketing.

The job only took about 2.5x the time I'd anticipated.

The worst injury sustained in the process was a blood blister on a fingertip. It's a nice one, as blood blisters go: good sized, conspicuous. I appreciate it for its aesthetic value, although I don't know how endearing it would be if it were permanent.

Call me weird, but I like seeing the undersides of cars. It's one of the things I miss about living in San Francisco; on the hilly streets there, you get fleeting peeks at the underbelly of the car in front of you. But this pleasure quickly wears thin. I saw enough of the underside of my car this weekend to last me for a while.

I'd known for a while that the 760 area code
would be split (or overlaid), but I didn't
know whether or not my town would be
getting a new area code. At long last,
the CPUC has spoken: "The area in
the western portion will become
442. The area in the eastern
portion will remain 760."
Referring to their map
(my added blue lines),
area A extends farther
west and farther east
than does area B,
making talk of
a "western"
portion"
and an
"eastern
portion"
kinda
silly.

The CPUC also gave us this unwieldy sentence:

In this case, however, due to the uniquely expansive geography of the 760 area code, we conclude that customers in the north-east portions of the existing area code are not sufficiently a part of the multiple area code lifestyle to justify a determination that an overlay would not create significant confusion when all calls placed, even local calls within a remote location, require dialing 10 digits.

These people have telecom on the brain if they think in terms of multiple area code lifestyles. From their vantage point, we in the hinterlands must seem like primitive folk indeed. We've even got telephone no-man's lands; that "open area" adjacent to the Lone Pine rate center is as big as a couple states on the east coast.

In any case, we get to keep 760.