Still, a belated Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to y’all!
I seem to have been too distracted by other things to come up with a post for this blog. I do have some things in mind but they’re too short for full length posts, so I stared at my blog for several days and pondered on whether to install some sort of asides (side-blogging) feature. Obviously, I haven’t (I tweaked and added other features anyway). So I shall resort to what I usually do, and that is unload a bunch of disjointed topics in one go.
[Looking for the list of Adobe CS3 program abbreviations?]
Adobe Photoshop CS3 Beta Released
(A prelude.)
Let’s start off by announcing Adobe has recently made Photoshop CS3 Beta available for download. It’s free as long as you have a valid Photoshop CS2, CS2, Production Studio, Video Bundle, or Web Bundle serial number and the final Photoshop CS3 version hasn’t come out yet. Another caveat: no tech support is available for the beta.
All the details are given on the Photoshop CS3 page, including download instructions and system requirements—at least 320 MB RAM and 64 MB video memory!
New Adobe Creative Suite 3 Program Icons
Adobe has been known to change branding strategies every new version, particularly the logo and icon aspects. Take Photoshop for example. From versions 1.0 to 7.0 there was the ever-present eye in each of the whimsically conjured designs. But this was followed by a more nature-friendly feather concept starting with the two generations belong to the Creative Suite.
For CS3, though, Photoshop and practically every other member of Adobe’s Product line has adopted a drastically different icon scheme (mentioned here), sporting two letters of the product name on a soft-gradient-fill-ed square. The typeface details are in the postscript of this entry. The color of the gradient is the color the product is assigned to on the color wheel. In the case of Photoshop, it’s a nice, deep blue, around #2B75CC (according to ColorZilla).
The Alphabet Soup and The Color Wheel
The Periodic Table of Elements comes to mind—transformed into a color wheel using the polar coordinates filter! (Kidding.) Yes, it’s very disorienting.
This year, Time Magazine has named You as the Person of the Year. Yes, You, the publishers powered by the platform that is the World Wide Web.
The article begins by reporting that 2006 is the year we have realized history is no longer shaped by few greats. Instead, we have witnessed a phenomenon concocted by the crowd, from people all over the world. Wikipedia and YouTube are cited as the prime examples of such revolutionary behavior.
But beyond speaking in awe of such a new, large-scale, worldwide trend brought about by advances in computers and the Internet—here the phrase Web 2.0 has since been thrown about—Time commends us for all the hard work we put into making the revolution a reality.
I’ve been dead lately and I’m sick right now. In the meantime, some first looks…
Perhaps more than a week ago, while browsing around my site, I found this shocking message in the comments section:
I really don’t know why something inside me told me the hacker-like message pointed to the Gravatar plugin installed on this site, but sadly, Googling around confirmed my suspicions. Apparently it was a debugging message for the Gravatars2 plugin.
…Getting no gravatar back from gravatar.com is very common. I removed the rougue “SUCKAGE” message that I had been using for testing. Oops. :) You can download the latest 2.5.3 release to get rid of that. It only shows up when the gravatar downloaded from gravatar.com should have been valid, but wasn’t (the reason for the previous emergency release)… »
Putting a message like that may seem fun (in a geeky way obviously) when it’s for personal use only, but if you’re writing it inside code somebody else will see, and might possibly get scared of, don’t put it there! But then I guess this is no MP and we are not teachers who can scold you for such silliness. This is real life.
Basang Panaginip, the highly controversial blog that brought us The Sexiest Filipino Bloggers, The Sexiest Filipina Bloggers, and The World’s Most Photorealistic Vector Art have come up with a new list: the Best Designed Filipino Blogs for 2006.
I was shocked to find out that Michael dropped by to tell me I was on the list. The awards are no Philippine Webbies*, but my respect (or awe) for that award-giving body has started to erode a long time ago (here’s Mia’s story).
I’ve listed the winners here, but you should visit Basang Panaginip’s entry for visual proof. (Which means you’re under a rock and you haven’t heard of these people, much less visited their kickass sites before.)
Best use of contrast, eh? To me that means they appreciated how I used black. Wai!
But beyond basking in awe (a. that they called me Sophie; b. Caterina Fake! Avalonstar! Rebelpixel! Can you say webstarstruck?) and l33tness, I’m thankful I have a few more Filipino greats to add to my list. Of what? Shhh!
Once more, this proves we are slaves to social conditioning. Because sitting languidly on a “throne” was deemed more civilized than the ways of crude native folk, we have embraced it as the proper way to sit.
If you have ever felt, as many, many people do, that after you have evacuated, there is still something left, here is the reason:
The anal canal is UNSTRAIGHTENED when seated. Bowel evacuation when seated results frequently in OBSTRUCTIVE CONSTIPATION… Adopt a relaxed, FULL SQUAT POSTURE and the anal canal STRAIGHTENS.
So that’s why L sits like that.
It goes beyond constipation, though, as, detailed at Nature’s Platform. And among the experts on the subject is a certain Dr. Alexander Kira:
…While we regard the use of the water closet as natural, we represent only a relatively small percentage of the world’s population, and a percentage that may be said, in an absolute sense, to be wrong, insofar as we have allowed civilization to interfere with our biological functioning.
I am a stickler for remembering what happened to me exactly one year ago, and if need be, the year before that, the year before that, and so on. Case in point: September 28.
Last year, particularly last November 22, Stellify.net officially resolved to the Filcode nameservers and appeared on the web. (Not for the first time, though.)
Perpetually in Pre-Release
(That’s one of the taglines I made for Qwerky.)
I slapped on a “coming soon” splash screen promptly, but it took forever to replace. It would take a while before I start my very “first” blog, Qwerky, notebook of the weirdest Web 2.0 names. Stellify also proved to be a useful host for different projects, mostly school-related (sampa02/stringed, CSS, CSN, Lifetime, p^3) at first. Then I was coerced into making a site for two. I also placed my first freelance web design stint for the year at Stellify (GCHS).
Then it was time to face the inescapable.
