So? Do you recognize me?

What do you mean you can’t see any difference?

No, I haven’t lost weight or changed my hair.

I have new word processing software and this is me writing on it! I’ve been using Text Edit (like notepad, the chisel and cave wall of writing tools) since I got m’iMac and I have hated it. It is the difference between drinking from a mud puddle and a glacial fed river, you can survive on dirty water but there is no joy or refreshment in it. Ok, so the new program has not helped my metaphors at all.

I have issues with pirating, I’m not all high and mighty about it or anything but I am on dial-up (and I have no choice!) and I have neither the bandwidth nor the patience to download anything more than the occasional donkey show. Kidding! I just wanted to see if you were paying attention. I also have no idea about bits and torrents and such so the entire process is quite above me. Aside from all that I really don’t mind paying for something I will use… which is why I also pay for my music. I could go on about that but then I’d be getting all preachy and I hate that shit.

I looked at Adobe’s Creative Suite 3 but to buy it would cost me over 1200$ and that is a million miles out of the financial question. I mostly wanted it to do business cards, brochures and such for work, if I were a serious graphic designer monkey and making mad monkey money off of the software then certainly it would be an investment. For me, not so much.

Then I discovered iWork on my computer. It was just a sample version but I gave it a test drive and discovered that it does pretty much all of the things I need it to do...and a few things I don’t. It consists of Pages (word processing and simple graphic design), Numbers (charting, graphing and such) and Keynote (fancy powerpoint-type presentations) which I am excited to try out but I don’t know what exactly (if anything) I’ll do with it yet. I bought the software for a whopping 79$. And frankly I think a lot less software would be pirated if it was sold at a halfway decent price. Sure there are a lot of things that CS3 contains that iWork doesn’t, but there is certainly not a thousand dollars worth of difference...at least not for me.

There is a learning curve to new computer programs, especially for me, but it’s coming together. It takes time and patience and I am not exactly overabundant in the latter so I tend to fritter away the former to distract myself from my frustrations and inabilities. I already know more than I did a few days ago and in a week I will be better at it than I am today. I’ve spent a lot of time in Pages working on my business cards and brochures. It’s hard to get those creative juices primed when you’ve let them dry up. If I can figure out how to do so I will post a pic of my new business cards so you can all see (despite the generic hideousity of my blog) that I do have a slight sense of style and some graphic ability.

So that my friends is a big part of what has been occupying my time… that and loading all of my CD’s on to my computer which is becoming a post in itself. If you’ve never heard of Bonepony, you will soon... and no, it's not like a donkey show. And in other computerly news I got myself a handy dandy convenient rotating hub. What is that you ask? I have no idea, I was just reading it off the box. It’s a thingy to plug my extra thingies into. I have a port for my modem, one for my mouse and one for my keyboard and then there are two on my keyboard but that is not enough to plug in all of my stuff, printer, camera, pod etc. Now I have four spare ports so I can operate everything at once. My brother and SIL put a USB powered massager in my stocking at Christmas but it wouldn’t work off of my keyboard ports. I have just discovered that it buzzes along like the happy little bee it’s supposed to when plugged into the new hub. Hubba Bubba! I think I’ll go try it out now and massage my… wrists.