I had a job where I got to use the Macromedia MX suit and I absolutely loved it.  Flash has to be indisputably one of the coolest things to happen to the internet.  Thank you Youtube, Homestar, telecrapper2000, and a myriad of crappy flashy band websites etc.  Dreamweaver was a phenomenal HTML editor, the design end would write clean well formatted code (as opposed to other Frontpage end editors) and had a lot of cool integration features.  I only did a little maintenance with ColdFusion, but it was easy to learn, and kind of fun to work with. Hooray Macromedia.

To be fair, we also had, and I enjoyed using Adobe Photoshop (which was better than Fireworks) and Illustrator.  Both were great programs.

Then on a sad day, apparently at the end of 2005, Macromedia was ingested by it’s rival Adobe.

Once again…I’m not a complete hater.   Adobe did a fantastic job with Photoshop.  They made the PDF format a success and Premiere and other programs had an important part of the market.  But why kill Macromedia?

I liked all of the macromedia stuff better before adobe got their clay-caked hands all over it.  And why do they want me to update my Acrobat Reader every other day?  It’s pretty much the same as it was in 1999, can’t they get it right yet?

I just saw an ad for an adobe media player.

… there goes the neighborhood

So a lot of our language is lazy.  Contractions abbreviations, slang and don’t get me started on that silly chat acronym stuff. (LOL, BRB, ROFL, etcetera)

 I was thinking the other day,  why do we say “underneath”?  What’s a neath?  When is it ever better to add the “neath,” when “under” wouldn’t be ’nuff?

Again ”This one” makes sense, but why do we say “These ones”  …Ones?… That doesn’t make any sense… we should just say “these”

Come on all you overachievers, let it go.

Posted by mobile phone:
Notice the date. It snowed on me today! Yesterday was shorts weather. Whats going on?

Posted by mobile phone:
One of the problems with the internet is that it isn’t time sensative–It is just as interesting no matter what time it is. I need a little unwind time occasionally after studying. Late night TV would tranquelize an elephant (not that elephants watch much tv). Instantly boring. (Ok, maybe not quite instantly–the Magic Bullet infomercial was cool, ONCE.) But the internet has all the good stuff all the time. It can be very difficult to find adequately pithy content.

I guess you could say the same for computers, or books for that matter, they can keep me up. But with a book I feel obligated to push through the boring parts and I might end up nodding off. if a website is boring I’m gone. (hey, where did all my readers go?)

the point is…I’m still awake. and my brain is still churning.  so I guess I’ll see you again on the same bat channell and the same bat time–whatever that happens to be for you

“Taking the fun out of fundraiser”

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How do your arm hairs know how long to grow?

It kind of makes sense that they are only so long, so if one falls out, it grows back the same length. But if you cut, trim or singe off the hairs, they grow back to the same length… then stop.

If your hair really is just dead chitin or whatever it is… how does the start know what’s going on at the end?

my cousin recently did a post of 100 things about herself. I think it is an interesting idea… To quote a friend , I do this for me, not for you–I think it will be enlightening. Probably much more for me than for anyone who reads it. So

1. working for my dad was one of the best things in my life

2. I am an inconsistent insomniac

3. I like HD

4. I have failed more classes in college than I should have

5. retaking classes is harder than it sounds.

6. I miss lifting

7. I learned a little piano, and even less guitar.

8. I like the Simpsons

9. I don’t get really excited about…anything.

10. I like reading

11. One summer I had a doctor diagnose me with acid reflux and carpel tunnel… I wouldn’t let him tell me I have sleep apnea

12. I think dentists are scam artists.

13. I remember lots of little bits of useless information

14. I love my wife

15. I wish I went camping more

16. I miss my jeep. (I’ll get it back someday)

17. I used to love The Never Ending Story. I watched it recently, and it was great–reliving my childhood

18. I am the second of 5 children

19. my kids are cute

20. I’m into technology

21. I don’t really get buyer’s remorse. I usually plan out my purchases pretty well.

22. I eat more than I should

23. I like my job, but I usually feel like I am missing something important.

24. I love burgers.

25. I speak Portuguese

26. for all the time I spend at a computer, I don’t type that well.

27. I’m going bald, but my hair comes and goes with stress, if I ever relax, I bet it would fill in a lot.

28. I wanted to minor in psychology–but it probably won’t happen.

29. I beat the original Myst in a week.

30. At one point in my life I could bench press over 315 lbs, squat 585 lbs, and clean press 305 lbs.

31. Music is my aeroplane. (I don’t fly much lately)

32. With the traveling I’ve done, I think that Utah, especially southern Utah, has some of the best scenery.

33. I don’t kick when I swim.

34. I walk different than most people. I step on the outside of my foot and I don’t push off with my toes. My flip-flops don’t usually flip.

35. I like conspiracy theories.

36. I miss living close to my family.

37. I’m bad at spelling.

38. I am 5′9″

39. I’m a sagittarius–and don’t really care

40. I’ve had two casts in my life, both were for broken growth plates.

41. I’m right handed

42. My mom makes great homemade bread. I don’t like it.

43. I like driving

44. The poetry I had to write for school was pretty good. The poems I have written spontaneously since then, are usually dark.

45. I like songs with non words. Usually. “Coo coo ka choo Mrs Robinson”

46. I read a lot of engadget, but I’m disappointed they sold out to sony.

47. I hate Sony

48. I like playing Xbox live with my brothers, I don’t like playing with strangers.

49. I enjoy writing tech articles.

50. I’m half way done

51. Most people (including Em) glaze over when I talk about tech stuff.

52. I enjoy laughing.

53. I like my dad’s sense of humor.

54. My mom and I have stayed up all night talking, lots of times.

55. I’m resourceful.

56. My favorite color is black.

57. I really like a Portuguese band called Silence 4

58. I wasn’t very good at football

59. I’m more politically inert than I should be–than I wish I was.

60. School has jaded me.

61. I used to skip over skittles in vending machines, subconsciously they seemed too expensive. (probably that my dad just preferred M&Ms)

62. I can drink water really fast

63. I had an imaginary friend growing up, his name was Jack Harrison.

64. I have been to Europe

65. I think I was pepper sprayed near the Eiffel Tower

66. I am deeply religious

67. I like leaving phone messages

68. I am right-handed

69. Here’s my take on Europe: if you want to see tourist sites–go to Paris. If you want history–go to Rome. If you want a European experience–go to Venice (and make sure you eat the icecream).

70. I broke my shoulder in 8th grade and was misdiagnosed.

71. I backed a rototiller into my leg.

72. I poked myself in the eye with a stick (breaking firewood) and punctured my eyeball. Literally a fraction of an inch from losing my sight in that eye.

73. A chicken attacked me when I was little–I think it was aiming for my eye.

74. I enjoy reading classics. I really enjoyed Swiss Family Robinson

75. I like watching movies over and over.

76. I should go to bed.

78. I’m lucky I had a big sister.

79. I have an active imagination

80. I’m all about justification… unfortunately the bad kind.

81. my bark is bigger than my bite

82. I have a guardian angel

83. I have three younger brothers, but I’ve never really felt like their big brother. just their brother.

84. The color of my eyes change based on lighting and what I’m wearing. I also have spots in my irises

85. I’m not a good friend. I don’t keep in touch well.

86. I have short, fat fingers.

87. I learned to cook without recipes. Probably not fantastic, but I can usually make what sounds good to me using what I’ve got.

88. On standardized tests I always did really well on reading comprehension, and poorly on math computation.

89. Growing up I used grown-up’s first names too much. Portuguese culture taught me more respect, and now I have a hard time calling my inlaws by their first names.

90. I think rain on a freshly shaved (”Bic’ed”) head is one of the most amazing tactile sensations you will ever feel.

91. Waterfalls are my favorite thing in nature.

92. I climbed half dome.

93. I don’t deserve my wife

94. I’m happy with my life

95. When I get really tired, I can hear my thoughts.

96. My hands and feet blister easily. I really have had a blister on a blister. My feet have had over 20 blisters on them at the same time before.

97. I take pride in doing a good job. I think my Dad taught me that.

98. I can read and interact well with most people, I think I get that from my Mom

99. I don’t buy into birth order. I love my older sister (who is a natural leader), but I refuse to accept that I need to be a follower because I wasn’t born first.

100. I’m laid back.

Well that’s it. I’ve fought the urge to edit and rearrange the list but I’ll leave it as is–which isn’t really a good start and stop point necessarily. I originally wasn’t planning on making the list, but one night I couldn’t sleep and just started writing to clear my head… so I sort of started in the middle of my list and filled in some of the gaps here and there. I also realized that the real complexities of who I am are either to difficult, or too personal to write out like this– but at least it got me thinking.

I’ve always felt a little vindicated by entropy, and have always enjoyed when it comes up in science classes. We are talking about it again today.

 So the second law of thermodynamics says that all irreversible processes result in an increase of entropy, constantly adding to the overall entropy of the universe. 

Have you heard that they have pretty much disproved the big bang theory? They decided the universe couldn’t have been created by an explosion, because then gravity would be pulling it all back together, slowing it down, and eventually collapsing it back together. But they have seen that the universe is expanding, and accelerating so something else is driving the universe’s expansion. 

I think that entropy is the driving force of the universe.

 Go disorder!

So I bought my first digital text book, which I thought was cool.  Last semester one of my textbooks had a PDF of the text on CD that I loved, it was easy to search for information and convenient to bring to class (since I bring my lappy anyway)

 I was excited about the ebook, but a little annoyed, while it was a PDF of the text they made me download a special reader (dont’ get me started on Adobe) called Adobe Digital Editions which looks like it is just a Flash app–whatever. 

Digital versions of text books are great because you can search for text, but the search is buggy and there is no overlap on the page shifts (so if you skip to the next page, you might only get half of the transition line) Which is a novice kind of mistake.  You can’t copy and paste, which I understand for copyright stuff, but it’s annoying that you can’t highlight the text you want to search for.

The support I received was terrible.  My textbook did not have the figures referenced in the book.  I’m not talking about the pictures that they throw in to make the page look good, I mean the figures “Figure 4-14 shows the components of half adder and full adder circuits.”  So the book was hard to follow.  I asked what happened to the images, and I was told that it was “probably” a copyright problem (which is stupid, the publisher should have all the rights to the images as much as the text)

I complained that I needed the images, and they didn’t respond.  I waited for a week and a half before writing back, and then they told me that I was ineligible for a refund because I had downloaded the book and it had been more than two weeks since my purchase.  I was furious, because I didn’t know about the problems until I downloaded it, and the two weeks thing really got me mad since they took that long to answer me.

I wrote back an angry email and asked that they just get me a copy of the full book (I knew it existed, my teacher had showed me his version) Eventually they just told me that they were going to refund me.  Which they didn’t until almost a month and two more emails later.  Absolutely ridiculous

So… what’s the phrase… caveat emptor

You know how when you get a new cell phone, you seem to see the phone everywhere or when you buy some new shoes, you notice everyone who has the same shoes.  Recently I started driving an old Honda Civic and I noticed that they are everywhere.  Everywhere.

The other thing I noticed was that there are civics, and there are civics.  Boring, stock, rusted and busted, or chromed, tricked, pimped and primped.  It’s kind of amazing that they are all the same car. 

 I forget the exact thought process that brought it up, but I decided that I know what the perfect getaway car is.  A black Honda Civic, stock.  Then some of the stick on window tint, magnetic sign style racing stripes or flames or something, spinner hubcaps, and probably some sort of fake license plate.

 While making your getaway, a quick stop anywhere, pull of the tint, the magnetic flames and the fake plate, and no-one would think it was the same car.

(course some people running around their car with nylons on their head might be suspicious too)