Random Notes
When I pre-ordered Tiger last week (guaranteed delivery by April 29th!), I broke down and ordered a copy of iWork with my educational discount (hey, I am a teacher). I've been wanting to buy it for months, but I hadn't had much of a chance to get down to the Apple store and give it a test drive. I was finally able to play with it a few weeks ago at CompUSA, and I was hooked immediately. Keynote is swell, and I'll probably use it periodically, but I bought iWork mostly for Pages. I love all their templates, and the interface is incredibly intuitive (to me, anyway). It's like a cross between Word and PageMaker - not really intended for pages and pages of plain type (although you could certainly do that if you wanted to), but not a high-end desktop publishing application either. It's somewhere in the middle, and its mission is similar to that of many Apple products -- to bring good design to the masses.
I'm trying my darnedest to learn CSS. I can handle text formatting, and I can handle editing a stylesheet that someone else has created... but positioning causes me to stumble. Jason has been wanting to teach me for a while, but we haven't had a chunk of time to devote to it lately. So we went to Borders and he picked out a book that he thought was comprehensive and covered the topics in the order he would teach them in. The verdict? O'Reilly's Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide. So, here I go.
The cats love to hang out with us in the bathroom. We have a half-wall with a little ledge between our shower and tub, and they sit up there while we're in the shower and paw at the glass and cry. Or, if they're feeling less needy, they have their own spots on the tub surround to relax - Meatwad on the tile next to the bath faucet and Boo in the corner under the window. They're learning not to jump on the counter. Well, at least not when we're around. But I'm forever cleaning wet pawprints off the countertop. And last night they managed to turn on the water in the bathtub just after we had settled into bed. Jason was annoyed that he had to get up and turn it off, but we were both amused at the sounds of the water rushing out, followed immediately by the sounds of frantic cats scurrying to get out of the tub and running out of the bathroom and down the stairs.
We have a mantle. Pottery Barn sent us a catalog and a 10%-off coupon for being new to the neighborhood, and we used it to go buy one of their crown molding ledges. We got a four-foot ledge in white -- slightly shorter than the width of our fireplace and slightly longer than the width of the window above the fireplace. It's not exactly perfectly level, even though the mounting hardware has a spirit level attached to it and Jason mounted it with the bubble dead center, but it's not noticeable and it looks fab.
The weather here has been fabulous. I'm not cursing myself saying this, because it's supposed to rain today. But the last week has been warm and sunny and allowed us to take advantage of our balcony. Right now we just have our folding chairs that we take on camping trips or to fireworks shows; we've agreed that as soon as we get the refund from our builder for the moving company expenses, we're putting it toward the conversation set we want. And possibly even a matching rug.
Plus:
Adobe to acquire Macromedia: Wow.
It makes me think of filing some sort of anti-trust suit, not that I ever actually would, and not that a judge would do anything other than laugh at me. But, come on... competition is good for the industry. Will having virtually all the industry-standard design programs under one roof stifle innovation and breed complacency? I hope not.