Personal – Page 19

MPHI

Recruiters, employment agencies, other interested parties, the general public, family and friends:

I am now employed as a graphic designer by the Michigan Public Health Institute, a non-profit organization dedicated to improving public health through education, communication, and technology. All I can say is that I’m thrilled to be a part of this organization and hope that my design work will help it to carry out it’s worthy mission and goals.

This however does not mean I’m tapped out for freelance work. I’m still available. Just be aware that I have other priorities and that my turn-around time may be a bit longer.

To friends, family, and teachers who have helped me reach this point: Thank you.

Waiting for Adobe

So I got my Adobe Flash MX 2004 certification certificates…months after I took the test and passed. I believe this may have been caused by the Adobe-Macromedia merger, as when I took the test, Flash was definitely property of Macromedia and Macromedia was its own company. I still don’t know what to think about the merger. Some of it will be good. But I worry about so much power over my creative tools being wielded by one vendor…especially seeing how spotty Illustrator has been after version 9. And Acrobat has been prostituted to the business world leaving a bad taste in this designer’s mouth. I really like the PDF file format – it really does make my life easier in many ways. But when the newest features in Acrobat are developed primarily for “enterprise” document solutions…yeah, it kind of rubs me wrong. I thought Adobe applications were made primarily for us creative types. It just makes me feel a bit left out. It’s like an old friend deciding to hang out with a different crowd and slowly starting to ignore you. Anyway, the reason for this post is that I also received a certificate saying I’m an Adobe Certified Instructor in Flash MX 2004: Rich Media Design. Okay. I only took one test too. I guess getting Flash designer certified also certifies me to teach Flash. Of course it is kind of a moot point as Flash 8 is out and I’m only certified for Flash MX 2004. The upgrade to Flash 8 is worth it from my experience at mediaRAIN. Not that I have personally made the upgrade yet. I’m waiting for Adobe apps to become Universal. I have a nice MacBook Pro just waiting for them to appear. Any day now. Like right now. Now? Pretty please, Adobe?

For further and better written commentary on Adobe, Macromedia, the merger, and Adobe’s drift away from its core principals because Marketing is in Control, please see John Gruber’s daringfireball.net.

Mother may I?

For about a good half-hour today I was very close to freaking out about possibility of loosing my blog. It started off when I took a look at what end users see when they go to comment on my site. I wasn’t very pleased as the comment “page” lost its sidebar for whatever inexplicable reason (I have yet to sort out why it acted the way it did). So a couple of productive CSS tweaking hours later I had something decent to update my blog with. So I thought to myself, “Well since I’m already updating the look for the blog, why don’t I also update to the latest WordPress build?” And thus began a half-hour of frustration of trying to track down why the blog wouldn’t work. The database was fortunately fine so I knew that in the absolute worst case scenario I could always recover the old data. I finally solved the problem via the trusty server error logs which effectively told me it was a permissions problem. An FTP session or two later, everything was sorted out. I was, once again, a happy WordPress user.

More CSS tweaks to come fairly soon as I’m still not fully satisfied (what designer ever is?) with how things look.