Not an Indian Stone

There is not a whole lot to say about Normal Illinois. It is a small town near Bloomington and I have only ever had two occasions to go there. The first was around 5 years ago or so during Halloween. That was probably the best undergrad night I had. The second time I went was today because I needed to pick up a new toy, the Adobe CS4 Master Collection! If you don't know Adobe makes Photoshop, Flash and a bunch of other fantastic products which help out with all sorts of art applications and web design. The problem is that these products are very expensive. This creative suite, which is the complete unabridged Adobe product line is $1000 for the student version. But today I was able to get it for $275.

I found a lady selling it on Craigslist. She had bought the PC version and she needed the MAC version. Even though she had not taken it out of the shrink wrap, because she had taken it out of the cardboard box it was shipped in Adobe would not allow her to return it. So she had to spend another $1000 on the MAC version and was left with the unusable PC version. And she couldn't find a buyer because most people download it illegally nowadays. But I have been trying to do everything legally as of late and got to get this fantastic deal.

Interestingly, $1000 is actually very cheap for software. At work a customer just paid me $18,000 to add a feature to one of our programs that the customer uses. Think about that. $18,000 not for the program, just for an additional feature. Of course I don't get to pocket anywhere near that full amount, but I know when I first found out about how much these things cost to develop it came as a shock.

Anyway, now that I have this suite, hopefully I'll be able to get this blog page looking good. I don't know yet if I'll be able to get any flash on here since I have no way of storing the files. I could host them on another site and link to them from here, but that sort of defeats the purpose of having this site. But with Photoshop and Dreamweaver I should be able to make a more interesting template, or at least improve the background. I'm so excited!