This entry may get very random since all I’m doing right now is trying to fight off my late afternoon lull. You see every afternoon around 3:00 I get really sleepy. Some days it’s all I can do to not fall over and mash my forhead on my keyboard. Why don’t we get nap time?

So it’s not my favorite type of weather right now. My brain knows it’s December, but when I look out the window there’s not any snow on the ground. I like it to be sunny and warm, but that’s in the spring, summer and early fall. Right now it should be real winter, not this cold quasi-sunny weather we’re having now. All in all winter is not my favorite time of year anyway. If it weren’t for Christmas and New Year’s holidays and basketball to take my mind off of the time of the season I really would not be happy right through winter. With there barely being any day light during the day and people getting sick and it just being COLD, winter is just not fun…

It’s Ella’s birthday tomorrow. She’s gonna be a one year old little cup cake toddler. She’s a funny girl and she’s so happy, and loves everyone in her family, until it gets to be late evening. When that happens she’s not very happy and she only has love for Heather and wants nothing to do with me.

*YAWN* Must… Keep… Eyes… Open…

So I have to write the annual Christmas letter, and I’m having trouble knowing what to do with it. Well see if my brain can get it together.

So I don’t know who reads this blog but let me tell anyone who’s reading this that I am currently working hard to be able to work as a freelance designer full time. Right now I have a “day” job but that actually has now become a smaller part of my income than my “side” job. And since when I do freelance work it is the kind of work I am best suited for and I do best it really would be best if I could get a little more work to be able to make the leap. Plus I would be able to save myself almost 2 hours of wasted driving time I lose by commuting… So if you or someone you know needs a designer, give me a shot. I really am pretty good at what I do and I haven’t ever had anyone that has given me a chance regret it.

So last night I Ella woke up after being a sleep for a while (this was after the no-love-for-papa cut off, so she wasn’t happy that I was the one that got her) and I walked past Cooper’s bed room and he was starting to sit up in his bed and reaching to the floor to grab a little toy king that was on his floor. Now I looked at him for a minute and I couldn’t tell if his eyes were open or not. Either way I don’t think he was awake. He’s a crazy boy. It’s always awesome when children do things while sleeping that don’t include laying in bed, things like removing their clothing and walking into the family room and the like…

So, I’m into my third week of working out and I can honestly say that I have begun to exercise the old man that was starting to take over my body. After the first 2 weeks I have gained 1 inch over my initial jump tests, so I’m at 27 inches now. Though the documentation on this program says that after week 3 (my current week) there will be a slight decrease as your body adjusts to everything. So I’m not expecting gain to hold through this week I guess. But the good news is that after that the increase should swing back up and there should be steady gains.

As for the old man, well I played basketball on Tuesday, like I usually do – unless some stupid pipe in the basement decides to burst and I have to spend my evening fixing it – and I felt really good. Not like my old/younger self who was always in constant motion when I played, but like I could have played much longer than I did. The feeling of being completely incapable of doing anything good on the athletic front has left and I’m excited to not only see where this takes me but to start adding other physical improvements to what I’m doing now.

On other fronts, I will be launching a new website soon I just need to finish it up. And for those who want to see some pictures of our kiddles check out myfamilyharris.com which is a domain I have had forever and was going to use as a family newsletter/networking site, but have never had the real time to develop. So for now it will be the holder of cute pictures of Aleksia, Cooper and Ella.

I use a lot of different types of software. I’m a designer so much of my daily life is spent staring at some application created by Adobe (Flash, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, etc.). However I am not on of the uber snooty designers that for some strange reason thing that if you are not using a box that has bitten piece of fruit on it (pronounced “Apple”) on it that you are just a nobody. I believe that in getting the best for my money. Being that I can get a PC with windows on it that runs all the applications that I need, and then some (Games to help me waste time). Plus it’s easy to upgrade and customize a PC. Not to mention that it costs like 1/4 to 1/3 the price to get to the same hardware level that Apple gets away with charging I figure I will forever be a PC user.

That being said I saw today that two companies that keep my work going – Microsoft and Adobe – are releasing or in the process of trying to pump out new versions of software for which they are best known for. Adobe with the CS4 and Microsoft with a new version of Windows, currently called Windows 7. Now as I sit here an contemplate these, I of course have to wonder if it will be worth it to delve into either of these products when released in the coming weeks/months. You see, I really like CS3 that Adobe released a while ago (it seems like just a couple of weeks ago to me, but time flies I guess). And to be honest I have truely yet to get up to speed with using Flash 9 and AS3 (the programming language for Flash 9 for those of you not familiar with that abbreviation – meaning ActionScript 3). I also am so busy that I don’t quite feel that I have found all the great things my Photoshop CS3 Extended can do, and I don’t really use many of the features new to Illustrator CS3 – upgraded from CS2. I do however use a lot of the new features in InDesign CS3, so I am very glad that I am not using CS2 just because of that, since I spend so much time in InDesign now…Â So with that in mind I will have to give CS4 a seriously hard look because there could be something new that could make my life so much better in upgrading. We will see though…

As for Microsoft and a new version of Windows, I really would like to have this be a good OS. But is seems like there are hits and misses with it comes to operating systems and versions of operation systems. If you’re some uber geek you may dabble in Linux and Unix and some other kind of ‘nix, but there are so many “distrobutions” of Linux that I gave up on ever trying to make sense of that strange world. As for the fruit company that decided to get into computers, they put out some supposedly “NEW” version of their OSX every 25 minutes or so (that’s just my perception, do not take that as fact), and I have to go with out food for something like a year to get the money together to buy one of their fancy-pants computer boxes. Plus I have spent many hours at my “day” job waiting on my OSX snail to know that is not my chosen path of computing. So that leaves me with the windos OS, not perfect, but just good enough for my needs. In reading about this 7th installment to the Windows family I have to wonder if there will actually be an operation system that will be more useful to me than my current Windows XP. Windows Vista seems to be an outcast, I haven’t used it much but it seems to have fallen victim to bad press and to Microsoft rushing to get it out too soon. I am sure that if more time was taken to develop it in the first place then it would have lasted as long as the trusty XP has and MS wouldn’t be already ready to move on to other things. So I will not be living in Vista land. Just as I (thankfully) was never a regular user of Windows ME. Now Windows 7 may become to Windows Vista what Windows XP was to Windows ME, a child that Microsoft can be proud of (ME, why can’t you be more like you’re brother XP, he’s such a good son…). We will see.

So that brings me to this point. I remember when I was using Photoshop 6, it seemed like there was a much longer period of time between versions of Adobe applications. Now they are putting out completely “new” versions of their whole suite of software titles like every year. The question is, what really denotes a new version? If you take Photoshop 10 and add a new filter and slap a Photoshop 11 label on it, is that really Photoshop 11? To me that would be like Photoshop 10.0.2 or something like that. So really from what I see I am probably using Photoshop 8.1.3 and Illustrator 10.2.4, but I am actually using InDesign 3, there have been 3 true versions of InDesign. Windows 7 will probably be Windows Vista 1.75 (almost a full new verion). So if we’re not getting completely new versions of software why do we have to pay the price of a new version? I say that for each “Version” we should only have to pay the percent of the cost of the previous version that the version is actually new, as compared to the previous version. So if Windows 7 is only 50% new it should only cost 50% what Windows Vista costs. With this in mind Photoshop CS4 (11) should probably cost $10 instead of $1000, because all they are doing is retreading the old versions of Photoshop and they add one new feature.

Seems fair…

Welcome!

This is the begining of a totally new blog for me here. I don’t know that I have a lot to say, but sometimes I do feel like saying something and this is where I will do it. I have a few entries that I will be posting shortly, just some things that have been on my mind, so if you’re here reading this, thanks. I hope you come back again.

Rob