I like free stuff.
I’ve been dowloading a lot of 30 day trials versions of software. After doing a lot of HTML in vi, the Macromedia suite is pretty nice to throw ideas together in a hurry. Photoshop Elements is also pretty fun, probably because I’ve never seen Photoshop 7. I’ve only made cursory passes at these apps, and time’s running out, but I imagine I’ll play enough to make my wallet itch.
Digital photos are also nifty, if only because they’re free after the initial hardware outlay (and they don’t use gelatin). I took 111 pictures at The Golden Dogs show last night, and I think about 3 turned out like I thought they would (I was being optimistic). That’s actually not too bad, if you consider that I’d been doing some heavy DOS attacking on my liver a few hours earlier, there was low light, and I didn’t move from my seat the whole show. Back to free stuff, it was also an opportunity to try iPhoto, which I’m not too impressed with. The zoom feature when you’re organizing photos is fun to play with (I make race car noises while I use it), but the organizing part really sucks. Besides iTunes, I haven’t been too crazy about any of the free Apple products. Maybe I’m being too hard on them and I should spend some extra time to “learn”, but dammit, this is from Apple. It should make sense in the first pass. Just a small example: if I’m looking at the picture, I can’t drag it to another program, but I can if I’m looking at thumbnails. When you’ve got 111 pictures that all look pretty much the same, you learn to like the view function. Ah well, I’m probably just tainted from my PC days, where nothing worked either, but it didn’t work differently.
Sorry if I left anyone hanging with the Golden Dogs reference, they were great, as usual. I like the Cameron House for their shows, as long as I get a seat. I don’t think the beer guy liked me. I got in his way when I got there and he mostly ignored me the rest of the time. The beer was pretty affordable, but check it out: it was more expensive than the Golden Dogs 6 song EP, which can be had for a mere 5 Canadian dollars, and presumably some postal fees or something. Buy one for your parole officer this holiday season.