• Congratulations to Wall*E for winning the Oscar for Best Animated Feature this year! Also, La Maison en Petits Cubes by Kunio “Mr. Roboto” Kato for taking the Best Animated Short!


• My Dreamweaver/CSS studies were making me claw my eyes out so I switched to After Effects and studiously knocked off 16 chapters today, completing the whole course. I guess that means I’m back to clawing my eyes out with Dreamweaver again tomorrow.

• Attending the “Apocalyptic Visions, the paintings of Alex Rubio and Graham Toms” which is being curated by my friend Joe, who coincidentally drafted the show synopsis. Haven’t been to an art opening in a while, so I’m looking forward to it. It’s at the Semmes Gallery in the Fine Art Building at the University of the Incarnate Word from 5:00pm - 8:00pm.


• Still studying Dreamweaver and CSS. Into the good stuff now and I expect to be complete in the next day or two. Then the fun work of transitioning sites from HTML to XML begins.


• My tag cloud was growing like an unkempt beard, so I shaved it by rate-limiting it to a couple of dozen tags. The large number of tags could also take quite a while to fetch, which slowed page rendering times. Ok, not a lot… but I really don’t like waiting that extra second. It’s much more tidy and neat looking now.

• The past few days I’ve covered 10 chapters of Dreamweaver and CSS training. I have a lot of web-related development I want to tackle here shortly, so I’m being meticulous.


• I located an error in my Tumblr theme regarding listing displays and I fixed it. I post a lot of topics under one title sometimes and I prefer to use an ordered list to display them, instead of a <hr> tag like I have been using. For one, Tumblr omits that tag in the dashboard view and -more importantly- it looks ugly on the page.


• Facebook has quietly changed their Terms of Service this month. They claim the right to use your created or uploaded content forever now, instead of allowing those rights to lapse when you remove your account as was previously the case. I’ve removed all my artwork from Facebook as a result. I don’t really care about photos, but for artists who used Facebook for their portfolios, this position change reduces Facebook’s appeal.


• Unusual structures like Tensegrity formations have always fascinated me. But lately I’ve been revisiting my interest in origami and folding. Earlier today, an article popped up on my RSS feed about Flexagons, which I’d pretty much forgotten about since I was a kid. They’re fascinating for a lot of reasons, but I was especially interested in some of the clever uses people have found for them. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about them today.


• Science Daily had an fascinating article on viral parasite/host gene therapy, as practiced by Parasite Wasps. The wasps lay their eggs in caterpillars and when the larvae hatch, they use the caterpillar as food. To protect the eggs from the caterpillar’s immune response, the wasp also injects a viral agent which suppresses any defenses. It’s not a chemical or a bacterial agent, it’s a viral one. The virus is produced in the ovaries of the wasp and appears to be lacking any reproductive mechanisms, meaning that the wasp has literally “captured” the virus and used it as a vector for transferring its own genetic material (somewhere on the order of 150 genes) into the host! This dovetails nicely with last week’s notes on viral co-evolution and AIDS research. Although the HIV virus has been a literal plague, the efforts devoted to understanding exactly how it functions are increasingly being viewed as a potential goldmine . The exact clever mechanisms which allow it to elude our immune response and mutate so rapidly without changing function also make it potentially the most exciting vector for gene therapy ever discovered.


• Researchers at OHSU have discovered that empathy in mice is partially the result of genetics. Human children don’t generally develop empathic traits until after 24 months. Poor empathic development often coincides with Autism, Asperger’s Syndrome or psychopathy. Empathy doesn’t guarantee compassion, either. Examples of this would be Schadenfreude or sadism. However, the variation of empathic expression in people doesn’t interest me as much as the notion that the range itself is possibly a heritable trait, a genetic acknowledgement that each trait has considerable survival value in different situations.

Another boring software rant, skip if you value your sanity.

Adobe has this nasty habit of buying programs I like, giving them a quick make-over and re-branding them into their massive software suites. And, after a version or two, they abandon the program entirely for something they’ve developed in-house, or they buy another program that they think is even better. Oh, we’re sorry… did you actually LIKE that software package you were using for 7 years? Tough!

Gather ‘round as I tell you a tale:

A long time ago in the wee land of Earlymaclandia there was a princess program called Freehand, made by a friendly company called Aldus. Freehand was a structured drawing tool in the early days of desktop publishing, great for making logos and editing vector graphics which were defined with bezier curves instead of pixels, so they scaled losslessly. This was important because a fancy new invention called the laser printer could print at amazing resolutions that made most on-screen fonts and graphics look like they were made from Legos. Thus was born the kindly Postscript language which was soon spoken throughout the land. Princess Freehand was an elegant program, wondrous to use, with a refined yet distinguished power that had evolved from countless artists in Earlymaclandia lending her their wisdom. Freehand’s legendary development defined nothing less than the very history of desktop publishing itself.

Down the road, however, a jealous dragon named Adobe had his own Vector Editing program. Named Illustrator, he was a fledgling beast, who -despite their best attempts- could never quite quite surpass the capable grace of the experienced Princess Freehand. Enraged, the mighty Adobe stormed Palace Freehand, consumed it entirely for its patents, then locked Princess Freehand in a nameless dungeon, tossed aside like a two dollar whore. The whole of Earlymaclandia was plunged into darkness and despair.

The end. What? You were expecting a happy ending?

By and large I enjoy Adobe products, but this arrogant trend irks me. My most recently executed piece of faveware is the WYSIWYG html editor Adobe GoLive. It was a relatively robust program, developed by a company called GoLive. The actual name of the program was Cyberstudio. How’s that for arrogance? When they bought the program, Adobe actually dropped the software’s title and used the deceased company’s name instead. Adobe GoLive, the program with two companies for a name, has become some form of corporate tea-bagging insult.

Long story short, Adobe puts a bullet in GoLive’s head in favor of Dreamweaver. And, just like Framemaker was succeeded by Pagemaker, who was in turn offed by InDesign, the circle of life continues. In this case it was more Pagemill>Cyberstudio>Golive>Dreamweaver. The irony here is that Freehand and Dreamweaver were both owned by Macromedia, the happy people who brought us Flash; Adobe bought the entire company mainly to acquire Freehand only to eventually just abandon it. But Dreamweaver lives on. To annoy me.

The real reason I’m ranting is that I have to negotiate the treacherous waters of transitioning a lot of active mission critical websites from one piece of software to the next, which is annoying to say the least. Adobe didn’t leave GoLive users out in the cold, there’s an actual protocol for the transition which makes it relatively easy. And let’s face it, Golive wasn’t exactly a the sharpest tool in the shed anymore. But it was still capable of handling modern web chores with a practiced charm. My real beef is with how the design philosophy mandated by the Dreamweaver interface feels so limiting in comparison to Golive. Dreamweaver is a wonderful package, especially now that CSS is really catching on. Modular site coding has significant advantages over monolithic scripting, and I’m down that. Honestly. But where Adobe products once felt like they incorporated the mentality of the artist, striving to work in harmony the creative spirit, it now seems they only serve their true masters, the dark and precise realm of Engineeria. In case you haven’t been there, at the gates of Engineeria is a sign which read, “No artists or creative types allowed!”

This fable isn’t quite over, Adobe. Don’t just consider the size of your treasure hoard, think about your legacy as well. The artists of Earlymaclandia have a long memory and are likely to write the .pdf history file singing the tale of your exploits. Wouldn’t you rather be the King who united Earlymaclandia and Engineeria, instead of causing them to war with one another? I guess my point is, if you have to be a dragon, wouldn’t you rather be like Puff instead of Smaug?