Okay.

For what­ever rea­son, I wasn’t pay­ing atten­tion when I bought CS2.

I some­how failed to realise that Pro­duc­tion Stu­dio Pro has nearly all the same things (ex. DTP stuff that I don’t really have much of a use for, but it’s nice hav­ing any­way) and more (Pre­miere, After­Ef­fects) for… not a lot more money at all.

*breathes deeply*

On the plus side, Cre­ative Suite 3 is launch­ing later this month though I don’t know if that means the next ver­sion of Pre­miere just yet. So I’ll wait til that’s an option before pur­chas­ing Pro­duc­tion Stu­dio, which means I get CS3 ver­sions of the stuff I actu­ally use — Pho­to­shop & Illus­tra­tor — and still have CS2 of non-essentials, like InDe­sign, GoLive, etc. Acro­bat is going to be alright for a while coz I’ve already got Acro­bat 8 because of relatively-late acqui­si­tion of CS2. Dreamweaver… I don’t par­tic­u­larly care about, though I’ve hap­pily used it for var­i­ous things.

And yeah, I’m still going to uni and doing all that sorta thing, so it’s cheaper. I’m just vaguely annoyed I didn’t drop $200 more for Pro­duc­tion Stu­dio when I could’ve if I’d read a bit more, but it’s done now. Hope­fully they’ll launch a new ver­sion of that along with CS3 so I can pick it up soon after the end of this month.

One day I might even make a decent amount of money out of this :P My rea­son­ing is that liv­ing at home & study­ing = good time for doing loss-running, skill– and network-building, moderately-expensive-but-just-within-means geeky things.

At the minute I’m not los­ing money on it, but it’s not some­thing I’d be able to afford to do if I were depen­dent on reg­u­lar income for rent, or what­ever. Speak­ing of reg­u­lar­ity, John C & I ran job inter­views yes­ter­day and decided to get one of the appli­cants onboard for CYIADA! So now that enters the build phase & we’re actu­ally going to be Mak­ingStuff™ that’ll become more directed and sta­ble — not in a finan­cial sense, but just in a number-of-hours-a-week kinda way. At the minute my hours have fluc­tu­ated a bit depend­ing on what I’ve been able to think of/motivated to get done, but that’ll obvi­ously sta­bilise a lot as I move back to cut­ting code and actu­ally see­ing it develop!

Any­way. Can’t wait.