BunkBlog

Adobe Acquires Macromedia in $3.4 Billion Stock Deal

Holy cow, that’s a lot of theoretical money. Now, with Adobe owning Macromedia, weird things will happen in content-land. Why keep all those programs around, when they overlap some functions? Some of us remember when Adobe acquired Aldus (500 million dollars in 1994). I really liked PhotoStyler. The only piece of Aldus remaining is Pagemaker, and even that is not getting much support nowadays.

Hopefully, they’ll realize that some things are better left alone. Adding more bloat to Dreamweaver, for instance, would be a bad idea. Merging Fireworks into Photoshop would also be a bad idea. The products are different, and they work differently so don’t belong in one mega-program.

Having watched the price of the Photoshop program rise, and now the CS Suite is above a grand, I can just imagine if Adomedia creates some uber-bundle with all the Macromedia programs and all the Adobe programs stuck in one box. Maybe three DVD-ROMs for distribution? Mac People will line up around the block to plunk down their two grand for software they will barely use.

If anyone was thinking to themselves, “what would Gary like for an extravagent birthday present” – have I got the gift for you. The Virginia Edition by Robert A. Heinlein will be sold only as a 46-volume set, in a limited edition of 5000 copies. All for a mere $2500 – and, if you act now, you can get it for a 300 dollar discount. That’s right, $2200 for 46 volumes of RAH goodness. Just perfect for your favorite SciFi Geek (hint). 🙂

This is yet another reason that I continue to plan on building a non-commercial PVR(Personal Video Recorder) – nobody will control what it does but me.

Hey, you’re skipping commercials with a button designed to skip commercials? Well, we’ll put a stop to that! Tada, we have reduced your functions and keep charging you for the favor.

It’s so very frustrating living in the middle of nowhere in the digital age. I can order things online and they get delivered to my door – good thing. I can watch their movements via the UPS and Fedex website – good thing. UPS routes everything through Dallas – weird thing.

I’ve ordered a new MP3 player for work. I cannot have a device at work that records or that broadcasts, so my lust-worthy players are out. However, Rio recently discontinued the 20Gig Karma and it’s on sale at Buy and other places for under $200. The Karma has no recording ability, no FM receiver or transmitter, none of the bells and whistles that people are demanding from digital audio devices today. But, it is legal in the SCIF(Secure Compartmentalized Information Facility) so I snapped it up. It was shipped from Phoenix, to me here in West Texas. Because of the hub-and-spoke system that UPS uses, it has already passed by me once. It went from Phoenix to El Paso (West of me) to Dallas (East of me) before it gets to me hopefully tomorrow. Bizarre and frustrating.

Now I’ve got to figure out which 30% of my music I want to put on it first.

Firefox Eats More Microsoft Market Share

Microsoft is taking steps to stanch defections.

I don’t understand Microsoft’s pathological need to be the only game in town. Since they don’t charge for IE, what do they get out of market domination in the browser market, besides the network effects that lead people to associate all things computerized with Redmond?

So, my secondary hard drive went tits up (SMART monitor on the motherboard says it’s hosed, and Windows says, “you have a D drive?”) Saturday, with no warning. Now, Windows won’t boot at all, even with the D drive disconnected. I have used the Ultimate Boot CD to do what I can, and copied some files from the NTFS-formatted D drive to an old FAT32-formatted drive with Knoppix (good thing I keep weird shit around, eh?).

Now, I’ve got a 20-foot ethernet cable strung across the living room to my computer so I can use Knoppix (which doesn’t recognize my POS WiFi card), so I can attempt to do some homework (darned online classes have pitfalls after all).

This is fun. And not at all paranthetical.

For some reason, my times are wonky on here, for syndication. The last post, at 20:19, was listed as 12:19 in the RSS feed. Hmm…

You may notice a difference in the site. I’ve upgraded to WordPress 1.5, which has a very different theming engine than WP 1.2 (which relied on an external tool called styleswitcher). Have fun, feel free to tell me what’s wrong, etc.

This is a good description of why I’m building a MythTV box this spring. Of course, it may be illegal to build one by the fall, so I’d better get on it. Maybe I’ll buy an HDTV card for future use, before they’re banned in the USA.

Go innovation!

Previous post on this topic is here.

Concho Online is live. Now, to get more contributors…

While reading up on CivicSpace, I came across a reference to w.bloggar – a tool I used to update my site when it was a Movable Type blog, but was kind of frustrated by. It seems a lot more polished now, but I can’t help but wonder why I would use this external program to update my site, when I usually am using the “blog this” link on my browser to comment on something I’ve found online anyhow. Oh, and my plugins for LJ synchronization don’t show up in w.bloggar either.

Must ponder more.

After reading We the Media a few months ago, I came to the realization that San Angelo is most definitely an “underserved” market for local news and views. Like many small cities, we have a couple local television stations (although one is currently in a fight with the major cable provider so almost nobody watches it), and we have one local newspaper. That paper, usually referred to as the SubStandard Times, is so thin on most days it can cause a paper cut with the folded edge. Sunday’s paper is almost the size of the international edition of USA Today. And yet they charge as much or more for that thing as for the Dallas newspaper, also available for local delivery. Our ABC affiliate is from Abilene. So today I read Julie Moos’s article about citizen journalism, and I’m reminded yet again that it would be so easy to set up a site, using a CMS(Content Management System) like CivicSpace to provide a place for all the local people to share information, meet virtually or arrange to meet in reality, and generally recreate the town square of a true small town in this small city.

So, what domain should I use? I’m thinking something with the Concho River in the name, since most of the “San Angelo” URLs are taken. Concho Corral? Concho Online? Hmm…

According to the SciFi Channel, BSG returns this summer for its second season. Hey, if your season is only 13 episodes, it’s not too tough to make two seasons per year, eh?

pointed out something cool, so now I have an Audioscrobbler profile. If you go there, you can see what songs I’ve listened to in WinAmp. Just so ya know, if the songs are listened to during the normal work day, it was some other member of the household playing ’em.

If, like me, you’d never played the GTA series when they were new (first one in 1997), Grand Theft Auto is now available for free. Also available, Wild Metal and GTA2. That’s about a gig of shooting and driving badness.

What a time sink this will be…

Important news for fellow BSG geeks. Now, to figure out how they’ll resolve those cliffhangers the first season ends with… Let the wild speculation and fanfic begin!

After my post about trackback spam, I checked my email and got three junk faxes in my eFax account.

Didn’t junk faxes get ruled illegal some time in the Reagan administration? Why am I getting them now? I note that I have had this eFax account for years, and only since the CANSPAM(Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing) Act went into effect have I been getting junk faxes. This leads me to assume that CANSPAM did something that made the formerly illegal practice of junk faxing legal. Way to go. I read a recent article that showed that email spam has gone up quite a bit since CANSPAM went into effect, so it’s been proven emirically to be completely worthless and perhaps even counterproductive in the fight against spam. Go, Republican Congress!

Since comment spam has become a well-known problem with well-known solutions, I guess it was inevitable that a new scourge has arisen – Trackback Spam. This morning, I have received no less than a dozen trackbacks from online gambling sites. Since I use WordPress, the trackbacks get sent into the same queue as comments and nobody but me sees them. But I still have to clear them out manually. It’s about time I got a spam-killer plugin for this thing…

So, with the one gigabyte Memory Stick in my Clie, I’ve finally gotten around to ripping some DVD video to it. So far, just a Looney Tunes short, “One Froggy Evening,” but next is one of Alex’s movies. Something about Dino Thunder Thunder White Thunder Ranger Thunder Power Thunder I think.

Meanwhile, I’ve decided that a PVR(Personal Video Recorder) would be a cool thing to have, but hearing the stories about the studios reaching into machines and turning off features, I’m a bit wary of the commercial Tivo and MCE products. Then, Tivo starts adding commercials when you’re trying to skip them…

So, I’m putting together plans for a MythTV based recorder once I graduate this spring. Figure nobody gives a 34 year-old graduation presents, so I’ll get ’em for myself. 🙂