…and someone missed me. Jefrey pretended to not miss me, but now he won’t stop rolling on me.

Here’s the view from our room, and me hanging out in the back yard of the inn!

Tomorrow is the start of the Grace Hopper Celebration in Keystone, Colorado!

I’ll be there with 7 other women from MSU, networking with all different industry and academic leaders from all over the country. This is my second year, so I know from experience that this will be an awesome experience. Going to GHC last year pretty much got me my interview with Google last year, and it lead to me being chosen to attend last year’s Google Workshop for Women Engineers. I’m hoping to see a few of the ladies from that attending as well!

I’ll be back late Saturday, so everyone hold down the fort in NJ for me…

For all of you semantic-philes (just me?), or iPhone users trying to pick out a dictionary app (just me?), I recommend WeDict. I downloaded the “lite” version back when it was the only version (now there is a new one for $5.99 that allows you to download other dictionaries to it, but the reviews are sort of scattered).

My Masters research is in latent semantic indexing, and Dr Peng and I have been talking a lot about the ease of WordNet. WordNet is a lexical database at Princeton that really breaks down the many meanings and synonyms of a word, which is useful when programming a semantic search engine.

I also recommend Sega’s Monkey Ball, but for completely different reasons.

I work at an independent bookstore in Montclair. We sell books online to keep in business because, well, people prefer to buy books cheaper and without having to physically pick it up off the shelf. We sell on multiple sites like Abe Books (which was just bought by Amazon). We used to sell on Amazon, but we were kicked off for low ratings. These negative ratings all stem from us having to cancel orders for valid reasons. The books were either:

1.) Bought in the store between the time you check out online and the time we process the order the next day, or
2.) Stolen (which happens often) or misplaced (finding a missing book at MBC is like finding a needle in a hay stack sometimes).

If you absolutely NEED to buy a book online, here are some tips you can use to feel better about getting the right price, not having to spend gas, AND support independent booksellers that keep your neighborhood unique and cultured:

1.) See if any local bookstores have a website. MBC does!
2.) Call local booksellers (or even bookstores all over the country) and ask them if they ship books. We get calls from people all over the world asking if we have a certain book and we ship it right to them for just the cost of the book and shipping.
3.) If you MUST use a third-party bookseller site (I prefer Abe over Amazon), look for the notes on each seller. Some will say that they are an independent bookstore (yours might even be there) or a charity. Pick those over individual sellers that just lower their prices to under a dollar and ruin the market for professional sellers.

It’s really easy to go to a Barnes & Noble and drink Starbucks and buy 3 books for the price of 2 or whatever they have there. You need to become more conscious of the markets in your area or else your town will start looking like downtown Montclair - full of empty stores and people wishing that what once filled them would come back (Soda Pop Shop, anyone???).

Oh, and if you stop by and we don’t have your book or you don’t want to pay more than half off a used book, don’t get an attitude and threaten to go to Barnes & Noble or Amazon.com - well, you can, but I guarantee you that I will have something snarky to say about your face/outfit/voice/taste as soon as you leave. I’m the sass master.

…unfortunately it’s going to cost $599 to upgrade, and I only got my version of CS3.3 on July 12th (I know, burnnnn). See, I bought my first Apple computer this summer, and so I had to buy the Mac version of CS, and I needed it immediately. My work depends on it!

I talked to an online Support guy on Adobe, and he said that I missed the grace period for the free upgrade. For security reasons, he would not tell me by how long I missed the date (which probably means the period started July 13th). I guess I’ll just have to hang my head low and save up all my pennies, nickels and dimes so I can enjoy consistent UI and tabbed palettes.

I’m such a sucker.

Jimmy and I wish we had digital cable so we can watch G4TV’s Attack of the Show. Jimmy Google searched one of the hosts, Olivia Munn, and told me that my “friend’s website is the first thing that comes up!”

Take a bow, Lukasz!

Yesterday was the day for the big announcement of Adobe CS4. As an owner of the Design Premium Package of CS3.3, I was invited to take part in Adobe’s web seminar discussing what’s new. Here is what you can look forward to, and the reason why I might shell out nearly $500 to upgrade…

Fireworks
Fireworks is not part of Design Premium! Not only that, but it has CSS support and tabbed palettes! TABBED PALETTES! Now you can have multiple documents open without the mess of lots of windows, finally, and you can easily export your prototype designs to Acrobat for easy commenting and review by clients.

Dreamweaver
Dreamweaver has some cool new workspaces tailor-made for specific job types, like developer or designer. When you open an html file that references other styles or pages, Dreamweaver now has a “related links bar” that lists those files for easy access. It’s also easier to navigate through code and see “live views” of your code instead of having to open it in a browser to see how your page looks so far.

Flash
A lot of new features in this version are adopted from After Effects, which a lot of people will be excited about. The best feature is the object-based animations that make motion-tweening MUCH easier and quicker. The time it will take you to make will dramatically decrease with this new version!

Photoshop
Tabbed palettes are added, but that’s not nearly as awesome as some of these new features:
-Vibrance, which allows you to contrast a photo or change the color scale of a photo without affecting the fleshtones.
-Vector masks for optimized feathering.
-Improved dodge and burn tool
The best new feature that actually made me cheer out loud was the content-aware scaling This awesome tool allows you to scale a photo without losing quality or stretching important aspects of the photo. You can see examples on the Adobe site. In the seminar, the presenter took a photo of surfers on the beach and stretched the photo horizontally. Photoshop added sand and water to allow increased width, but it didn’t stretch the surfers.

Illustrator
Illustrator also has tabbed palettes, and the capability to create artboards. With artboards, you can have multiple pages open in the case you are making a multi-page element. The gradient tools are more elegant as well.

InDesign
The coolest new feature with InDesign is the interactive button support. You can create a presentation on InDesign with the interactive buttons for clients to change a page. This presentation can be exported to Flash with page transitions, making it easier to interact with clients. You can also create Adobe AIR applications.

Adobe really took into consideration the idea of interactivity with clients, because better communication allows more productivity. Adobe also realized that productivity and time is not always about CPU speed - it’s about how we interact with the applications. Now, most of the applications in the suite have a consistent, streamlined interface.

I really appreciate the thought behind this update, and am wowed by a lot of these new features. I’m just pissed off that I bought CS3.3 only 2 months ago, and there doesn’t seem to be a grace period of eligibility for free, or at least discounted, upgrade.

If you’re not reading about Katie and Mark’s cross-country trip yet, I suggest you do it now.

This was the reason only one person showed up to our workshop.