Today, Adobe announced that the release of Photoshop CS5 is imminent. That’s cool.

What’s even cooler is that it looks like Adobe has now created a path for upgrades from CS4 Extended to CS5 regular version. That is waaaay cool! I bought the Extended version a while back — CS3, I think — and have found that I’m really not using the “extended” parts. The downside was that there was no real way to upgrade numeric versions from a downlevel Extended to an uplevel non-Extended version.

Now, it appears that Adobe has solved that little problem, and all is happy in the Deauxmayne!

For the first time in a long time, I not only stayed up until midnight hit the ol’ Midwest, but we were actually out and about during the event.

Last night, six of us went to Stoney River for a late dinner. We’d gone there a couple of years ago for Beck’s birthday (big snow that night!), and really enjoyed the place. Big food, albeit pricey, and treatment like you’d expect for the ticket price. Steak, lobster tempura and some 30-year old tawny port… wonderful. We kept hanging around, telling stories, and around 11.40, one of the waitstaff asked if we were staying around until midnight. Why? Well, the house was buying a round of champagne for all of us that were hanging around. Cool. We finally left around 12.30, and made it home and were tucked in bed by 1am. Quite a night.

So did I make any resolutions? Well, a couple came to mind, but they don’t bear repeating here. I’d rather look toward the things I’m thankful for from 2009: family, job, freedom. All good. I figure with those in my hip pocket, everything else is gravy.

And Lambert’s returned frog legs to the menu!

Darla and I took a spin toward Babler State Park for an Easter sunrise service. I’d not been to a sunrise service before, so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Add to that that the service was delivered outside my own denominational orientation, and that added a bit of trepidation to the pot.

Despite the 35-degree weather — offset by some hot chocolate — the service was terrific. The sun just crested the hill behind the preacher as the service ended. Simply beautiful.

Follow that up with the best chicken-fried steak I’ve ever had, combined with the all the wonderful gifts of life represented by the celebration of Easter, and this Sunday was indeed a good Sunday.

Today marks a new phase in my day job. I begin working 4×10 this week.

For me, this isn’t really much of a change. Up to now, I’ve generally arrived around 6:30am, and started trying to leave around 4:00pm (with mixed success). Now, it’s 6:00am to 5:00pm, Monday through Thursday.

Aside from occasionally being able to sleep late on Friday, this should buy me an extra shooting day each week, along with time for post-processing. This is key, as I have trouble finding time for post on weeknights or once the crush of the weekend starts. Friday will be somewhat insulated for me, with few folks roaming around in the places I’d like to shoot, and nothing at home to distract me from post work.

In theory, anyway…!

I wish for each of you the best of Christmas wishes, and all the joy the season brings. We’re having fun spending time on The Mountain with the family, and waiting for the last us to get up here this morning so we can open gifts.

For those of you who like my twisted sense of humor, here’s a little gift….

This was shot during one of our vacations as we passed through Santa Claus, IN. Truly, truly twisted!

I’ve been fighting a weird little problem with my iPod Touch. I’ve noticed that some Genius-generated playlists have a quirk about them that prevented the correct artist and album cover to be displayed in coverflow for some tracks. Tip the thing over to the track view, and presto, chango, suddenly the art is right, as is the artist.

After doing a bunch of searching, I didn’t find anything that matched my symptoms. And then I noticed something… all the tracks involved in this had the same album title: Greatest Hits. Having all those tracks labelled like that created a giant album on the Touch that had myriad artist’s GH tracks all attached to the same album, and that seems to have been the root cause of the problem.

Now, I’ve added something to the album title for my GH discs so they will now be distinct from each other, and that appears to have solved the problem. Weird, weird, weird….

I’ve been a fan of music for as long as I can remember, and it seems like I’ve gone to proverbial ends of the earth to get the music I love. However, I’ve always insisted on having the original media — nowadays, that’s CDs. My figuring is that if I have the original media, I can convert the music into whatever format comes next. What I’m coming to find is that there’s a lot of the music I grew up with that just ain’t available on CD.

Enter the iTunes Music Store. I have been finding all kinds of old music — some I’d be kinda embarrassed to fess up to — on iTMS. And at 99 cents a pop, it’s pretty easy to take, and easy to grab the one-hit wonders I remember from days gone by.

However, there’s a fair amount of junk out there too. Many, many of the old tunes are actually re-recordings by the original artists. To me, that just doesn’t count.

So, if you see me bopping around with my Touch on, and it looks like the moves are old-school, just ignore me, and pass on by. It’s probably something you’d rather not listen to anyway!

Have you seen the Veterans Day commercial Boeing is running? Take a gander below. It really doesn’t need me gabbing about it.

I haven’t done very many craft shows this fall. Dunno if it’s my energy level, or just not enough time, but I haven’t had the excitement about getting out there this fall. However, there’s a couple that I always try to do — they’re tried and true, and always bring me some business, along with giving me the chance to talk about my images. That alone’s worth the price of admission sometimes!

Today was the show over in Belleville, and I usually get a fair amount of traffic, and a fair number of sales. Today though… nothing. Not a single sale. It’s the first time I’ve been skunked at any of these shows.

I knew times were tough, and I changed what I brought with me to cater to that — smaller pieces, all unframed, with lower prices than I’ve typically run, and yet still…. nothing sold! It wasn’t just me either. The other vendors had the same problem. There just weren’t very many customers through the door, despite a lot of good advertising by the organizer.

I’m beginning to wonder if it would make more sense for me to focus on the gallery (I badly need to get new material up there), my web site (badly needs work), and some of the bigger juried shows in town. Those shows still seem to be drawing, as does the gallery, so those would seem to be some good points of focus, as opposed to schlepping my wares across a 50-mile radius of the house. Even if I sell one or two items at those little shows, I’ve still got to think about the gas, effort and time involved in doing them. If the sales aren’t there to make the event worthwhile, then I need to rethink where my focus is.

Man, I’ll be glad to see the economy turn around!