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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.

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.

Answer: Missing Sync.

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!

I ran 10 miles this past Saturday! (View my route.) There’s an intense hill in there that goes on for a couple miles. That was kind of fun, actually. My left knee started to give out around mile 8 and I ended up having to walk limp the last mile. I finished 20 minutes behind everyone else and the team was ready to send out cars to look for me by the time I made it back. D’oh! However, that knee lasted 2 miles longer than the previous week so maybe it’ll continue to get better.

After the run, I iced the knee for a bit and went to Phil’s sushi birthday lunch. The whole gang was there and it was a lot of fun to see people. Directly afterwards us Burners met up at Cathy’s house for a meeting to organize our finances. I continued to ice the knee and was in pretty good shape for the drive back home.

Sitting in the car for 4 hours was probably not a very good thing to do, however. When I finally made it to Rick’s house that night, my legs and feet were as swollen as if I had sat in an airplane for a trip to the Philippines. The next morning, I got out of bed and almost fell over because my feet had stiffened solid! Stretching helped some but a one-hour full-body massage that evening helped even more. The massage therapist said she’d never felt quadriceps that tight before.

Monday I was back to school and work. This week has been so crazy – everything seemed to go wrong and I had my midterm drawing portfolio due along with two major projects. Right now, I’m so grateful that it’s over and I have a nice, long weekend to relax and NOT drive to LA again.

Also, my auntie (who had emergency surgery for an aneurysm) has been moved out of Critical Care and into the Step Down unit. She’s off the ventilator that they had to put her on when she crashed last week and is on oxygen. Thank goodness. Send some good thoughts/prayers her way if you can.

I ran 4.1293 miles today at 6-minutes-jogging, 2-minutes-walking intervals. I’m still averaging 14 minutes per mile. I was anticipating torture when I started out today but I bought a jug of powdered Gatorade and have been mixing it in with my water for the past couple days and it’s made surprising difference in my endurance. The only problem was that my right groin area started hurting around mile 3. Hopefully my continued stretching will help.

I’ve been upgrading my computer set-up at home. After 9 months of working on a 15-inch laptop, I picked up a 24″ Samsung display, Apple wireless ultra-thin keyboard and Mighty Mouse. Working is a pleasure now and the keyboard is particularly enjoyable. This thing is so tiny and cool. The mouse presented a problem with Warcraft at first but I figured out how to use the scrolly ball as my look-and-move button. I also bought a new PC – a 2.4 GHz Quad-Core with 2 gigs of RAM and a 500GB hard drive, despite the bad reviews. Out of the box, video didn’t work and I had to open it up and re-seat the video card to get everything working. This thing is fairly bad-ass, however. Yay!

Work is still keeping me busy and although I’m looking forward to starting school on the 16th, I’m a little concerned about balancing school and work. I’ll just have to be careful to schedule work lightly at first and see how it goes.

I’ve made the decision to finish my bachelor’s degree. I’ve taken the first step in signing up for a summer-session class at my local community college to begin establishing a stellar college record. And now, of course, my freelance business has exploded and local businesses are putting up job listings for a variety of designer positions. The universe works in mysterious ways.

Must. Resist. Compulsion. To. Apply. For. Amazing. Jobs.

2007 has been such a great year. I accomplished projects that seemed insurmountable at their beginning and life has definitely changed for the better.

A year ago saw Rick and me standing in Mom’s driveway, surrounded by a massive pile of junk and frantically calling Cathy for advice on how to deal with it. Cathy very kindly came over to help direct Operation Empty-the-Garage. A few weekends later the 10′x10′x20′ garage that had been packed to the ceiling was almost completely empty. The rest of the house and yard followed suit over the next few months.

Finally, the house and practice were listed for sale. And I was finally able to start moving my life to the Central Coast, where Rick had moved a year ago. The apartment search took longer than I thought but I found a charming loft in Los Osos and moved in in August. I left my in-house designer position at j2 Global to pursue a freelance career. I got rid of that piece-of-junk VW Jetta and picked up my super-reliable Honda Fit. Pixel is healthy and happy to be away from the day-to-day awfulness that is Hollywood. We both enjoy our visits to LA, though. (Pixel and Murphy are now good buddies and the Fit’s up to 11,000 miles already!)

Now to plan  2008. What seemingly-insurmountable goals will I complete this year? I still have about 10 hours to figure that out…

Happy New Year, everybody!

More pictures from Napa on Flickr

Went to Napa Valley a couple weeks ago to meet up with a friend of mine and Rick’s out here on a business trip. We took a day trip to San Francisco and saw Fisherman’s Wharf. We took a 1-hour boat tour around the Golden Gate bridge and Alcatraz. It was great! By far the best $10 I’ve spent on a touristy thingy.

Rick and I went to Los Angeles for a huge Thanksgiving gathering with Mom, Gene and the whole fam-damily. There were about 10 of us at the dinner table that night. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a Thanksgiving dinner that big! Tami’s mom, Jeannie, cooked a fabulous turkey dinner and Gene soundly beat everyone in the house at ping-pong. Good times.

Am now extremely happy to be home for a while now. Work is copious which is great for the pocketbook but bad for my sore shoulder. Do deep-tissue massages count as a tax-deductible business expense? I sure hope so.

My new apartment is shaping up quite nicely! Rick helped me put up my giant gold-framed mirror over the couch this weekend, along with some other pictures. I also got a comfy chair and footstool from IKEA so that there’s more place to sit than just the futon. I moved a bookcase out of my dining area into the living room and then turned the dining table and chairs at a 45 degree angle. It looks a lot more like home in here.

Now I really need to get my bedroom into order. I’ve been working on my dining table this whole time but would really like to convert a small nook upstairs into my work area. There’s also about 4 boxes worth of “stuff” upstairs that I need to deal with. I want to get a new bed (of course that means new linens), nightstands and possibly a new desk upstairs. It’ll be a total re-do! Am very excited about it, just need to clean it all up to start with. Once that room gets in order it’ll be much more conducive to working up there… and keeping lounging and working areas more clearly defined!

The Tumblelog was a fun little experiment but it didn’t last. So here I am again.

Right now, I’m working on GUI customization for a project involving eStara. They supply the back-end for click-to-call: You’re browsing a website for a product you’re interested but need more information. You click on the click-to-call button, enter your phone number, hit the talk button and a customer representative immediately calls your phone.

I used it once myself at jcrew.com and it worked wonderfully. Nice product.

GrandCentral.com offers a similar feature as part of their consumer level service. Sign up free and get a GrandCentral number. Then they supply you with a number of different widget-like thingies that you can put on your site. A visitor goes to your site, puts in their number and hits the call button. GrandCentral connects your phone to theirs while maintaining your privacy.

I put one such widget on my homepage but no one has used it yet. Speaking of GrandCentral, I should probably start giving that number out to people…