Authentic Boredom is one of the first to come out with the “big in ‘06″ predictions for the web. He does a pretty good job of it too.
The quick skinny:

• Page refreshing - out
• Fisher Price look - out
• Lucidia - staying
• Drop shadow, gradient and dotted line - staying
• Rounded corners - staying
• Tags - In
• Helvetica with negative letter spacing - in
• The grid - in
• Mobile - in
• Fluid Layouts - in
• Javascript & DOM scripting - in

Read the article for his wild card. Bold predictions for the savvy designer, 2006 edition ~ Authentic Boredom

With the holiday season comes up, lifehacker has solved a problem that I have always wanted to solve. Make the perfect bow

Carol from Drinkatwork.com has a great article: Drink at Work: The Drink at Work.com Editorial on the So-Called “War on Christmas” Go read it and consider this:

Ideas like good will, hope, giving, humor, love, fellowship, family, joy and honesty. All the stuff we’re supposed to pay attention to all year round, but forget until it gets cold as balls outside and you realize you can buy a DVD player for a dollar. Does it really fucking matter if I say “Merry Christmas” to a Muslim graphic designer or “Season’s Greetings” to a Baptist hunter?

Two days, two crappy coffees.

Yesterday, I ordered a gingerbread latte. I hate gingerbread. My brain obviously thought gingerbread sounded like pumpkin spice, and my tastebuds confirmed that it wasn’t.

Today, a spiced caramel coffee. I guess a latte would have been better, but putting straight drip coffee over caramel syrup and a cinnamon stick is not what I was looking for.

Tomorrow… I’m sticking to made by me coffee.

Several items of note:

• I have started a technology-based blog. Technola.net is like granola, all the variety of bits, only with technology. Take a look. It’s currenly in beta right now, so don’t be too harsh.
• I have suddenly come to the realization, after reading a particularly well written blog post which I cannot recall at the moment, that movie theatres are ripping us off. They charge us outrageous ticket prices (that’s from the studios, they say), they charge us more for snacks (that’s how we make our money, they say), and then they make us sit through 20 minutes of straight up advertising. That has to be bringin in some money, so either lower my ticket cost or give me better snacks cheaper.
• Estheris applying for the PhD progam at William & Mary. She’s pretty confident that she’ll get in. It was kind of funny. She called me today, to try and sell me on the idea of her going to get her PhD. She know that I’m alreay all for it… what a silly girl.
• Today was “Customer Service Training pt. 1 of 3″. Ugh! The videos were a little outdated and while we are covering good material, it seems kind of pointless. There are some departments on campus that will never change, and there are forces on campus that will stop us from making any useful changes. I think that some good will come of it, including an online directory, but it’s really soul sucking.
• 2 weeks until my parents come from KS. Very excited.

That’s all for now.

Yesterday in my surfing, I came across a report about Google Desktop Search (GDS) being vulnerable to a CSS hack that would reveal all of your personal information if you use IE. [here]
I have GDS at work and at home. I would put it on Esther’s Mac if I could. In other words, Google could own me.
Google did the right thing.
They patched GDS and now the problem is solved. [here]
I have to give some mad props to Google for doing that. It shows how a responsible company reacts to issues that effect their users in dangerous ways. Google is good. MS is bad.
This is a great segue into the other news.
Firefox 1.5 is now out. Mozilla.com [ not ORG ] is where you can get this secure browser and guess what… it plays nice with GDS

As of December 3, Macromedia was no more. As of December 5, Adobe has rolled out their new stream lined product line.

As some of you may know Adobe and Macromedia have merged, [here and here]. I thought that with the recent release of CS2 (April 27, 2005 [here]), it would take atleast until the first quarter of 2006 for them to bundle together the products. I really thought that they would have merged the competing products, such as Dreamweaver and GoLive. It looks like they are going to do something similar to the change to InDesign. They kept the horrible PageMaker on for years, slowly weening people over the the real software. I think that they will eventually absorb the Macromedia acquisition into their own line of products, but that will take a few years.
Adobe bought Macromedia, at least in my opinion, to stop Microsoft from making an inroad in the graphics business. I know that Microsoft has been trying to with the development of Acrylic and Paint.net (independant I know, but MS will snap that up soon), and I think that it was smart for Adobe to get Macromedia when it did, but can consolidation be that great?
When I was in school there were feuds between professors about which software packages where superior. There were two camps, Adobe and Macromedia, both firmly entrenched from years of work experience with each respective product. This wasn’t for every product the companies produced. There were concessions, Photoshop for image editing, and outsider Quark for page layout, but in the arenas of vector based images and web software, the glove came off. It was very interesting that in two software classes I was forced to learn Freehand in one, and Illustrator in the other, doing essentially the same assignment in both. I know that this cross training was good, I think that it prepared me to be able to use any product out there (sodipodi, anyone), but at the time it seemed duplicitous.
The funny thing is this: In education, the technology trickles down. We learned Quark, becuase it was the “standard” and InDesign was “too new” and “untested”. Everyting that I had heard from the outside world was that InDesign was the way to go. So while the Adobe and Macromedia product lines are slowly being consolidated, what effect will this have on Graphic Design education? Will two programs continue to be taught when the endgame is to have one? Is InDesign finally ready for classroom approval?

Husbands vs. Robots
Originally uploaded by jeredb.

Last night, while slightly bored, I came with with an excellent presentation to defend marrying a husband or having a robot. I think my point was very well made. Check out the slideshow.