Midnight Cheese

Adobe.com’s site design has taken a bit of a dive since the merger with Macromedia. The former elegance of subtle grays with highlights of red and the ever important use of white space has been replaced with a cramped mess of stark boxes and boring menus.

Before:
   

The worst part is the banner showcasing Adobe products. The image quality in these presentations is absolutely terrible. Adobe creates the best image manipulation products in the world, yet they can’t display photos on their banner without compressing them down into a pile of dookie. And uninspiring photos at that. Adobe has to realize that Photographers and Graphic Designers and other artists of all types are the majority of people who look at the site. These are people who can tell when an image isn’t looking its best.

Now:

Lots of compression.

Lack of image information. No sharp edges.

Uninspiring.

I think it’s time to bring back the old guard. Maybe even get Hillman Curtis back in there. Give Adobe.com its glory back!

I signed up and downloaded the Vista Beta 2 ISO and was greeted with the popular 80070241 error. Supposedly I just need to re-download a non-corrupt ISO… Perhaps, if time allows. In the meantime, there’s plenty of other people having their own Vista issues.

Edit 7.4.06 : Turns out it was a bad download. I redownloaded and reburned the ISO and Vista isntalled without issue.

I was lucky enough to attend Bonnaroo with my Dad for the day on Saturday. What an amazing experience. 80,000 people all in one place all attending to have a good time and listen to some great music. No conflicts, no aggression. Everyone was equal.

So much great music all weekend. I was able to see Beck, Radiohead, and Dr. John on Saturday. Radiohead was amazing. They played for well over 2 hours. Thom Yorke was exceptionally graceful not saying much more than a quiet “thank you” after each song.

Here’s a link to some of my Bonnaroo photos posted on Flickr.

The ultimate road trip. Who’s in?

I’m not diggin’ the “Flockstar” marketing idea(sounds very 13-year-old MTV crowd), but Flock is quickly becoming my browser of choice. With built-in blogging, Flickr and RSS tools, they have the potential to eliminate the need for separate apps like MarsEdit, Flickr Uploader, and NewsFire.

With the bombardment of roughly 45,000 comment spams in the last few days I finally found what will hopefully be a nice solution to end the madness. SecureImage is an easy little plugin that you can drop into your WordPress plugins folder and it automatically generates random text within an image that each poster must enter as a security code.

Spending time each day deleting several thousand comment spams is just ridiculous.