8 Ways to Sunday

I’ve been using Paint Shop Pro 8 as my primary image editor for over a year now, and have been very happy with it. I recently downloaded the trialware version of Adobe’s famous (and famously expensive) Photoshop CS specifically for a major scanning and restoration project, and was very impressed with its capabilities. I’ve been planning to start writing reviews on this weblog for awhile now, so I decided I may as well start with an informal head-to-head of these two excellent products. (more…)

Smelling blood in the water after a recently reported security vulnerability in the Mozilla web browser, ZDNet IT blogger David Berlind posted an entry attempting to pit the (allegedly) crippled Mozilla against Opera, another alternative web browser. He missed the real story — how small vendors and open source projects run circles around Microsoft when it comes to fixing these things. (more…)

From today’s Wichita Eagle, page 4F:

Does this make anyone else think of the the Rabbit of Caerbannog from Monty Python and the Holy Grail?

(photo by Fernando Salazar for the Wichita Eagle)

A belated, July-4th-inspired “question of the day”: What’s your American Dream, and how is it going so far?

Me, I want to be a full-time writer. I’m realistic enough to know that this will likely entail a certain amount of ad copy and some fluff pieces for lame in-flight magazines, my own creative work probably being insufficient to pay the bills. That’s okay, though; I want to get paid to do this thing that I enjoy and (so I’ve been told) do well.

My progress up to this point has been, I admit, less than stellar. I lost my way for a few years after deciding not to go to medical school as I’d planned, then got caught up in learning and pursuing a new career. Right now, I’m working with my mother — herself an aspiring author — on finishing a medical/science-fiction thriller she started just over twenty years ago. Had she finished the book in 1985, its core concept would have been considered revolutionary and shocking. Looking at what’s already written, I’m amazed at how prescient it was. With a few additions, I believe it can still be relevant, attention getting, and even controversial today. The book is two-thirds complete, but the whole thing needs re-written to bring the science and the style up to modern standards.

I’m optimistic about this book, but it’s not going as fast as I would hope. Where will this American Dream be headed by next July 4th? I’ll be very interested to find that out, myself.

What about you? Tell your story below, in the comments.

(this question was inspired by a similar one on Jen’s blog)

While browsing weblogs today, I saw a link reading “Circus Contraption” and just couldn’t help myself.

It turns out that I’d been visiting the weblog of David Edelstein, the unofficial photographer-in-residence for the troupe of performance artists that goes by this oddly evocative name. Circus Contraption offers up retro-surreal entertainment for circus fans who find that Ringling Bros. just doesn’t do it for them anymore. Edelstein describes them as landing at the center of “a William S. Burroughs — Vincent Price — Tom Waits — Klezmer — Gypsy — Vaudeville venn diagram,” if you can imagine that.

Circus Contraption tours the West Coast, mainly Seattle and Northern California. They’ll be coming to San Francisco in August. Are you listening, Colleen? You must attend a show and tell me all about it!