I’m a horrible blogger.  That said, I’m going to be taking this site down for a complete revamp and upgrade to WordPress 2.5 here in a couple of weeks.

Stay tuned… and in the meantime, hit my Twitter stream for updates.

It appears that all my family in the Minneapolis area as fine. My parents and brother are out there as well. We’ll be flying out tomorrow, so I guess we’ll see if it’s affecting travel into the area.

As promised and after a lot of phone calls to their customer (dis)service line, Adobe’s gift box arrived for me this morning.

In it was the free upgrade I was entitled to as a late purchaser of the Adobe Web Bundle 2.3 (for those who’re wondering what that is, it’s Adobe Creative Suite 2.3 and Macromedia Studio 8 all wrapped up in one big box). Apparently since Adobe didn’t bother to bundle both Fireworks/Contribute and InDesign in any bundles together (save the $2000+ “Master Collection” with all the video crap thrown in), the free upgrade path for Web Bundle is one copy of CS3 Design Premium (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat, Dreamweaver, Flash, etc.) and one copy of CS3 Web Standard (Fireworks, Flash, Dreamweaver, Contribute, etc.). Both of these include Bridge, Version Cue, blah blah blah…

So, my Mac Pro is like 3GB lighter in disk space, but it’s a whole lotta happier with Universal versions of this stuff.

Adobe finally got it right with these here CS3 discs… it’s one DVD for the install rather than 3-4 CDs. My disc-swapping hand thanks you Mr. Adobe.

I got word last Friday evening that my paper was accepted unanimously by my committee and therefore I am “all done” with my Master of Science in Technical Communication.

I’m not going through the graduation ceremonies, preferring to have a kickass party rather than paying to rent a gown and hood and whatever other ways they find for making graduation an expensive proposition. So, I just wait for my diploma to show up in the mail, I guess.

Feels good to be done.

So, after much debate (it is a $90 game after all), I broke down and bought Guitar Hero II for the XBOX 360 last night. Then promptly played it until about midnight.

I never got into Dance-Dance Revolution, but I must say GHII is really really fun. I can see it’s applicability to having some friends over, having a few beers and playing GHII. It’s really a game that a lot of people can find fun and it’s not terribly hard (though the “Unlock All” code seems exceptionally difficult to enter in the 3-second window). Add to that that a lot of the songs are from “my” era (hair metal from the late 80s and 90s) and it’s a kick.

Definitely highly-rated. Tho the dork they got to sing “Mother” (Danzig) really needs to learn to sing.

Well, my paper on Usability Inspection and Usability Testing is done. If it’s accepted by my committee, I’m done.

For those of you who’re still reading this with zero updates in months, here’s a bit of a status update in “shortcut” format…

I’m…

- Going back to freelance
- About 1000 words away from my Master’s degree
- Busy for the next couple of weeks
- Horribly terrible about updating this blog until the previous situation slows down
- Thinking about doing something else entirely with bregar.com

Until next week…

This is perhaps the most bizarre flip out I’ve ever seen. I’m just really sad Simon wasn’t there to comment.

UPDATE: Looks like YouTube removed the video.

UPDATE Part Deux: Looks like you can watch it here.

I’ve been offloading some of my books lately through Amazon Marketplace. It’s actually been going well and I’m getting some dead trees off of my shelf (to make way for new dead trees, that is). The way Amazon Marketplace works is they list the books (you know the “12 used and new available from $1.99″ next to the “Checkout” button) on their book pages, then when it sells they take a cut and send the rest to me. I ship the book to the buyer.

Here’s the math for my recent sale of Danny Hillis’ “Pattern on the Stone”.

Buyer’s price: $2.00
Amazon Commission: $2.49

Yes, that’s right. Amazon took a two-fiddy commission on a two dollar book. Tony Soprano would be proud. Now, I’ll probably end up even after the shipping allowance and shipping are applied and it’s worth 50 cents to me that the book isn’t going to end up in a landfill, but I thought it was kinda funny.

Next up, “eBay increases fees to 110% of final auction value + 30 cents”.