Last weekend we took the cats to the vet for annual injections. I locked the cat flap and shut the room to their room the night before so they wouldn’t disappear. First thing in the morning I went down and fed them. The room looked like a bomb had hit it. They’d managed to knock a massive box of cat food into their water bowls (no idea how since it was firmly lodged on a bookshelf), spilling water everywhere and soaking the box through. I think they may have been fighting a bit since they aren’t used to being shut in an enclosed space.

I went back to my room, went downstairs again about half an hour later – to find that they’d all disappeared. Somehow they’d managed to unlock the cat flap and escape. Sigh I panicked, because we had to leave for the vet about fifteen minutes after that. But luckily we got two out of three back in time – luckily the weather was quite crappy and they didn’t want to wander far from home. Chief had to be taken to the vet separately on Tuesday though. But it might have turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as three cats at once (especially ones as intelligent as these) are quite a handful.

They got on fine at the vets – Halo has to have suncream on his ears (who knew cats with white ears can develop sun burn and skin cancer fairly easily?), and Sin might have problems with his teeth in the future, but for now they’re just fine.

Saturday I went out for a meal with Joe, and Sunday was spent doing various household chores (thrilling), although we did cook a nice Sunday lunch and I made a chocolate and strawberry tart for dessert. Lovely wih some Ben and Jerry’s Phish Food frozen yoghurt, if not very healthy!

Monday evening I went to the dentist, and have to go back next week for an appointment with the hygienist. I could have been looking after my teeth better, so I’ve invested in a Braun toothbrush (£80 on Amazon, £160 RRP!) which sounds great. Also investing in Listerine, although I have read that it’s bad for you to use over a long period of time – who knows? I’m spending a lot of money on stuff at the moment; 2010 is definitely my year of spending. I still have my eye on a few things from Amazon, memory cards for my camera, a new computer – possibly an iMac – for my parents, lots of stuff for the cats and a new garden. I should be saving money for my holiday though (28 days to go, yay!).

Tuesday evening I spent with Rich, and we played quite a bit of Dominion. I won one game out of about three or four, probably because it’s a strategy game and my strategies as quite short term rather than long-term I like the game, but I don’t think I’m getting any better at it!

I was tempted to blog the other day but just wasn’t inspired. I even tried searching the net for blog ideas- they were mostly rubbish, and either extremely tongue in cheek or completely useless. On the plus side, it’s given me a good idea for a subpage! Or maybe I’m just looking in the wrong places – where do you look for blog inspiration?

I’m still as tired as ever – yawning constantly etc – but I’ve found that if I get home and make myself busy doing stuff rather than just lying on the sofa, then I seem to be able to muster up enough energy to keep going. The days are absolutely flying by, partly to do with the fact that I enjoy my job so much, but also because this year is shaping up to be a great year in general. I know I’m not going to achieve everything I want to do, but it’s been pretty successful so far

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The cats weren’t particularly pleased to see him, particularly as he wanted to play chase and kept wagging his tail and trying to follow them (he was on his lead though so he couldn’t get far).

He’s extremely well behaved though, compared to Pom, because he’ll sit quietly in the car rather than trying to scramble for the window like Pom does. Maybe it’s because he’s still so small – only about nine weeks old and smaller than Chief, the smallest cat (see pic above). He’s still being toilet trained but not doing too badly at it. I think it’ll take some time for everyone to settle down at home, since Fuzz is now getting on for a cat (10 this year) and Pom is quite old for a Pomeranian and gets a bit jealous. It’ll be interesting when I go back home and see what they’re all like together.

This weekend we also went to the Riverside Festival, which is basically a mile of fun fair, stalls, games and other attractions. Wasted quite a lot of money but it was good fun I like fairs and things like that, even though I don’t really like/go on many rides – it’s just the atmosphere and the crowds and ‘differentness’ of it all because you don’t know what you’re about to see next.

Can you tell I’m tired? Today I was at work from 9-5:30, then went to make an appointment at the dentist (at least a 50 min walk there and back), then stopped off at the pub, then came back home to upload pictures and blog. I’m so ready for bed right now even though it’s so early!

If you’re interested in seeing more of Pepper/a bit of the festival, there are some more photos on my Flickr photostream.

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I ended up getting him this Acer Aspire, which is great value for money and, as I put it, ‘should last until he dies if he takes care of it’. (I’m such a good daughter, heh. He thought it was funny anyway). It’s not everyone’s ideal laptop, but it’s pretty up to date and lightweight, slim and has an optical drive, which were his main requirements. Since this was really his first computer use since the late 1960s and early 1970s when they were the size of rooms and had cards to punch, I was impressed by how fast he picked everything up.

Within a day he was asking me how to make websites – like daughter like father eh? – and I did a really bad job of explaining. Whilst I’ve taught eight year olds, sixty five year olds and a variety of ages in between, I haven’t actually tried to explain any concept of web design to someone who doesn’t even know that copy/paste exists. But he’s quick, and he was playing chess, using Google to look for commercial equipment and watching videos on YouTube without a second thought just a few hours after getting ‘Charlie the Second’ (Charlie the First is actually an electronic chess set, go figure). I’ve also had several very random emails, and missed several non-emails owing to the fact that apparently neither of my parents can write my email address correctly. My dad also has a habit of deleting every email he receives after he’s read it, which makes my inner hoarder cry. Luckily he wasn’t paying attention when I told him how to ‘purge’ emails, so they’re all still recoverable.

I also bought him a mouse in case he wasn’t comfortable using the (multi-gesture) touchpad, but he’s mainly using the touchpad. The only real disadvantage for him is that the laptop doesn’t have integrated Bluetooth, but then there are tons of extras we can buy for him in the future. We always have a lot of difficulty buying him presents he actually likes because he tends to just buy what he wants, and anything beyond that is way out of our price range (Aston Martin anyone?). Initially my mum was concerned that he wouldn’t use the laptop and it’d be a waste of money, but I reasoned that she and my sister would use it, or I’d steal it so it would be ok – except on the whole ‘birthday present’ concept of course. Actually, the opposite has happened and he keeps whining about how addicted he is and how it’s taking over his life. But that’s good, because now he understands why all the other family members spend so much time on the Internet. Mmm, lovely shiny Internet.

So, what are your experiences with matching technology and people? Are your parents avid computer users or have they never been near one? What cute or silly things do they do?

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So, Monday was the big launch that we’d known about for a few weeks. I had trouble keeping my mouth shut about all the new features and the ‘new’ Flash Catalyst etc. etc., but I did a pretty damn good job. My role is to do a lot of stuff surrounding marketing, writing etc. for the company (which is partly an Adobe reseller). Me and Em put in a ton of work, seriously so much it was ridiculous, and so our manager invited us to come in after the sales training to grab some of the food from lunch. As we were helping ourselves to food along with the Adobe guys, the designers came in for training and we were encouraged to stick around for the ‘amazing horse thing’, which did turn out to be pretty cool (easy selection of a horse including mane and tail), moving it across the image and using content aware fill to fill in the background – it is really simple and incredibly accurate. The guy then went through some of the other new CS5 programs, but sadly spent rather a lot of time on InDesign, which is a program I doubt I’ll ever use. Then it was time to ask questions. I’d spent the last couple of weeks living and breathing Adobe CS5, and I was curious about some things, so instead of looking kind of vague or dumbstruck like most of the others, I immediately launched into questions before they decided to kick us out.

I asked them how Packager for iPhone worked, because they literally devoted only a line or two of marketing to it and in my mind it could be pretty massive. For those who don’t know, Packager is a feature in Flash Professional which allows you to create native iPhone apps – pretty impressive considering, in Adobe’s words, ‘Flash is not allowed on the iPhone’, and Apple hates Flash. One of the guys kindly went into the menu and showed some of the features of it – he said it’s very ActionScript based, which is to be expected, but it also has some really good options – in his words, ‘We do a lot of the work for you’. From the menu you can check a box to say whether the app should be sensitive to the iPhone being moved around and all sorts of other stuff, and has fields to enter your Apple iPhone developer number and such. The app is then saved as a .ipa file. I have to say that the guy was slightly boastful, slightly edgy about this, saying that ‘As far as we can tell, there’s no way Apple can figure out whether an app is made using Packager or not’. I think the reason they aren’t pushing it heavily as yet is because they’re worried about Apple ‘blocking it’ in some way or another, and to be honest I’m not surprised. If they can get away with it it will definitely prolong the use of Flash.

I was also curious about Flash Catalyst, which is a visual editor for Flash – no coding. I downloaded the beta for this a few weeks back and was anxious to see how different the final version was. With a lot more tools and features, it would also help to prolong the life of Flash. But sadly, I couldn’t spot any differences. I asked how different the beta was to the final version and the guy didn’t know, but said that the look and feel would be identical. Hmmm. I literally told him that ‘You need to make a visual editor for Flash that’s like Flash Catalyst but on crack’ and he looked half amused and half bemused and said ‘I’ll pass that on to the team’. Haha. They should hire me as a consultant or something.

The session was winding up then, but I decided to make a final comment. I said something along the lines of, ‘I’m pretty impressed that you guys are fighting back and not letting Flash die, I thought you’d just give up but you’re really pulling out all the stops.’ (In hindsight that was pretty damn cheeky considering my manager was in the room and Adobe is like our second biggest seller or something). The guy frowned and he had a closed off look, replying ‘Flash is not going to die because of HTML 5. It’s going to be a long time’ – presumably he meant a long time until HTML 5 becomes an issue. Somewhat optimistic I thought, but then if Adobe is going to all this effort, it’ll be interesting to see how it all unravels. Since I’ve been following Adobe since I first started using Photoshop 7, I’ve leant more towards the Flash/Adobe side of things, partially because Flash is just so impressive in a lot of ways (though yes, it does have its flaws). Sadly I didn’t get a chance to grill Adobe more, and it was a very off the cuff thing because I had no idea I’d have the chance to ask questions (it was the geek alternative to a celebrity book signing or something), but I’m glad I did. I trotted back off to launch work with a full stomach, a free CS5 tshirt (to wear in bed only I might add!), and the satisfaction of questions being answered. All in a day’s work.

Oh, and for the record, they don’t get free copies of CS5, but they do get a generous discount (and yes, I did ask!)

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