I was lucky enough to get student licensing and save quite a bit of money on Adobe CS4 Master Collection ($525 instead of $2,499!). I use Adobe Illustrator for web design and am quite pleased to see that they addressed my biggest concerns in this update:
Better gradient control
Gradient transparencies without opacity masks
Selecting all objects on an artboard via menu instead of hunting and clicking
They have a number of tutorial videos to showcase new features across all Adobe programs at Adobe TV.
What a holiday-filled week it’s been! Rick and I went shopping for our Thanksgiving dinner supplies on Monday. He allowed me to take this picture of him in a Santa hat:
(I also have a picture of him in a leprechaun hat from St. Patrick’s day a few years ago. Am thinking of collecting pictures of Rick in strange hats.)
For Thanksgiving dinner, I planned to cook the turkey, stuffing and gravy from scratch and go with pre-prepared for rolls, mashed potatoes (the frozen ones from TJ’s are pretty good), sweet potatoes (microwave-in-bag), creamed corn, cranberry sauce (again, thank you TJ’s), pumpkin pie and whipped cream. The stuffing started out promising. Fresh marjoram, thyme and sage with minced and sauteed onions and celery. Sandwhich bread cut into 1/2-inch cubes and toasted in the oven. I put it in a casserole dish to bak during the last hour of turkey-cooking time. But the turkey took an extra hour to cook and I had beer and a headache and … it ended up burned. D’oh!
The gravy, which was to be made from drippings that cooked in the bottom of the pan with coarsely-chopping onions, celery and carrots, turned out fine. Even though I burned the veggies by not adding enough chicken broth in the first hour. While I napped on the couch, overwhelmed by all the burning, Rick supervised the last hour of turkey-cooking and turned out a juicy, well-roasted bird. Thank goodness. And then I burned the rolls in the toaster oven. Double d’oh!
Not too bad for a first on-our-own Thanksgiving, though. I had back-up stuffing in a box in the cupboard. And there were still rolls left over that I have managed to not-burn everytime we have leftovers.
I used the rest of the weekend to start on Christmas. Rick helped me put up LED Christmas lights from Costco:
And, I also got the jump on addressing and signing all my Christmas cards. Only have to get a few more Christmas presents and I can relax and enjoy the season. Woohoo!
I’ve been successfully using GTD with my Treo for 2 years now. This project/action management system served me well throughout downsizing and selling Mom’s house, transitioning from full-time employment to freelance, and moving to Los Osos from Los Angeles. Yet, I’ve always felt a niggling dissatisfaction due to having to use Palm Desktop to successfully sync my Calendar, Memos, Addresses and To-Do List with my Treo. And with the increasing number of mysterious application errors and lack of active development, the Palm Desktop problem has been coming to a head for a while now.
Missing Sync is a reliable, simple sync solution between Treo and the Mac OS apps: iCal (events and to-dos) and Address Book. It also includes Notebook, an application that handles Memos seamlessly. Instead of using a dated, buggy Palm Desktop to manage these buckets I can use the snazzy Mac OS apps.
iCal lists calendar search results line-by-line. Since I track my working hours in the calendar, this makes invoicing easy. No more paging through weeks, searching for project numbers/names visually to count up my hours worked.
Address Book integrates nicely with Pages and Numbers, meaning I can generate mailing labels without having to export/import from Palm Desktop to Address Book first.
Missing Sync’s Notebook application behaves well, like any Mac app should, and not like Palm Desktop’s 1997 weirdness.
iCal can subscribe to public calendars, keeping me updated on US Holidays and Basecamp projects. This feature has been around forever but I’ve never been able to use it with Palm Desktop.
Upon reflection, all this seems rather DUH! But I could never figure out how to make it work before Missing Sync. Well worth the $39.95!
