22 Mar 2007
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 MakingStuffâ„¢ 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.
21 Mar 2007
I’m a grown man. (lol) (10:12 PM):
it just seemed like the right thing to say
Heh.
(This was in response to the news that Claudia & I are going out. Hehehe.)
Multinational corporations: Commemorating solutions to interpersonal dilemmas since May 15, 1940.
18 Mar 2007
Two articles from The Sun-Herald & The Age today contrasted starkly and got me sufficiently upset. An Australian company unveils a brain interface system for application with computer games, which is quite geeky and, quite frankly, very cool.
“US reports suggested children took to the system more quickly than adults who were less able to engage in fantasy.”
Yes, okay. I’d love to be able to use this to get things done in Photoshop more quickly — its applications seem primarily creative in nature rather than simply replacing a keyboard, etc., but that’s not really what upset me.
Excuse The Age’s horrifically sensationalistic “TV blamed for rise in child-speech problems” headline, but the actual article isn’t that rubbish. Essentially, it attributes an anecdotal rise in speech problems and a quantifiable detection-associated rise in referrals to speech pathologists.
“There is good data to show that the more often you sit around a dining room table and have a conversation around a meal, the better the language development of children,” he said.
Psychologists in Britain were running a campaign called Back to the Table to try to get families to share meals together around a table on a regular basis.
I’m not so concerned by it because I don’t have kids. I’m concerned by it because I deal with kids probably just enough to notice.
Funny how two articles so often crop up on the same day so starkly undermining one another’s message!
For all the rhetorical garbage that media studies & digital culture (described by a lecturer as having emerged from sociology, only without method — I jest not) spew out about how we should eschew the pessimistic futurists that tell us new media is only serving to distance us all… they are, in my view, quite plainly ignoring at least some of the impacts of these emerging mediums.
This is frustrating. I want to believe technology is pedagogically advantageous, but struggle immensely with its application even where there are fantastic (technology, not content) resources available–and I’m a geek. Admittedly, that’s no qualification to teach, but it should at least mean some kind of creativity where the two meet. Or not.
Mostly, though, this isn’t about technology at all. It’s about its effects, intended or otherwise — and particularly for children. I don’t even see the speech problems so much as the things that surround them, in the forms of attention span & relational difficulties with both friends (less common) and family. Please be praying for wisdom in thinking through how best to deal with these issues.
(Yes, I am still saying I want to do secondary teaching. I feel like I’m slowly being changed to have an openness to either secondary or primary, though. If you feel so inclined, pray about that, too!)
14 Mar 2007
Is it a placebo effect if you don’t remember why the effects are occurring? I just glanced at my calendar for tomorrow after having briefly gone to bed then got up thinking I had unread/written emails, spent a while doing that, then realising it’s 1.15am and I’m not at all tired. Then, thinking back through the evening and recalling that sugary black liquid was involved at some point.
Clearly, the only option is to become addicted to the stuff. What’s bizarre is that it is available everywhere, people don’t think twice about consuming or offering it, and yet (for me at least) it has greater immediate consequences than smoking tobacco (bad smell aside). I will be a wreck by tomorrow evening.
I’ve already started the week inexplicably exhausted (I have been sleeping more sensibly/normally the last few days/week than I have been for the last month) without the involvement of caffeine, and fortunately have had time enough to respond to that exhaustion (I had 14 hours sleep last night) with little impact to my scheduled commitments, but I still drank most of a bottle of this stuff without thinking. And I’m not at all physically ill, with the exception of something that looked like a very slight cold late last week. I have no reason to be tired (and, conversely, no reason to be this awake with the exception of that stuff).
Anyway… I’m now going to try and go sleep a while. Dreaming of people who aren’t projects, and Christ as a judge, as well as a saviour who takes the punishment deserved by men, Macbeth and dark performance on a daylight stage, and inexplicably out-of-sync databases.
13 Mar 2007
It’s finally starting to actually look okay. Amazingly, it’s become a resource that people will actually readily use — one of my TACKLES kids (he’s 11 years old) said that he’d just realised he could use the website to find out when TACKLES were having socials on Friday nights. Even better is that pretty much everyone on staff is prepared and willing to use the website to promote things. Its impact will always be pretty intangible, but it seems to be aiding the way we communicate quite a bit.