Day 617

I started the day aimlessly wandering through the park with the dogs and ended the day aimlessly wandering through the Quark Express manual, trying to figure out how to make tables do what I wanted them to do. I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but I do so many different things as part of my job that I can never remember the nuances of the various software I use. By the end of my intense week of video editing last May, I had gotten quite proficient at using Final Cut Pro. Unfortunately, I haven't had a big video editing job since, so the next time I get put to the test, I'll have to learn a lot of stuff all over again. The same thing is true with printed advertising. So few people ask me to do printed pieces anymore that some of the finer points of desktop publishing escape me. I used to know Quark backwards and forwards. Now it's all backwards.

Amazingly, it rained today. It didn't rain long enough to help all the water starved plants, but it certainly rained long enough for Dot. She could tell the rain was coming when we took our afternoon walk and she didn't relax again until about an hour after the storm was over. I thought that dog training class might be canceled for a while, but by 7 PM, all signs of moisture had evaporated. The only reminder that it had rained at all was a vague musty smell in the air.

It felt like the end of an era when I heard that Steve Jobs had resigned from Apple today. I got my very first Macintosh in 1984, right after they were introduced. That first Macintosh didn't even have a hard drive. You had to load a floppy disk with the system software and then eject that disk to insert another disk with the applications. It was pretty crude and simple by today's standards, but it made the Osborne-1 computer I had used before look like an antique. If it weren't for Macintosh, Photoshop, Quark Express, Adobe Illustrator, Media 100 and dozens of other game changers, I probably wouldn't have been able to start a company like mine. So, thank you Steve, for opening some doors for people like me that might have stayed locked for a long time without you.

Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day