I have my system all back to normal, I think. My hard drive is much smaller, but its quiet. I can hear my fans now. Before all I heard was the hard drive.

Since my HDD crashed I got another 30 days try out on BBEdit 7. Thats cool because I wanted to use it a bit more. I really like the CVS tools built in. I would buy it, if I found $180 just laying in the street. Thats a crazy price for a text editor. Even if its one of the best. I'll go back to GVIM when the demo runs out. The only thing I don't like about VIM on Mac is that the fonts are rendered very badly. I can hardly read anything in it. I use my text editor about 8 hours a day. It's very important to have a good one. BBEdit is almost as good as VIM, except it has too much GUI in the way. GVIM has almost no GUI, and that makes it fast and easy. I should switch back to VIM soon so I don't get too used to BBEdit.

Anyway... Life is back to normal and things are getting back into the rut again. New Years is coming up and the winter is starting to drift in.

I spent most of the day today fixing my Mac. I replaced the hard drive with one that I bought for Jane's Windows system. Since she has an iMac now she did not need her old Windows system. I ripped it out and stuck it into my Cube. Its only 10GB, but its really quiet. I like it.

I did learn the power of the "boot as Firewire target". Since I could not boot my Mac, I connected it to Jane's using her Firewire cable. I turned on my Mac and held down the 't' key. Then my Mac drive showed up in her Finder. I copied all my files to her system for a backup. After that I swapped the drives, installed the OS, installed the updates, and got my system all running nice. Then I restored my files from Jane's system using the Firewire again. Its much faster than the network.

I love my Mac.

Woohooo! Christmas was really cool. I got all kinds of cool stuff. I am having a blast here in the snow. My hard drive crashed on my Mac, but thats ok. Jane sold $500 worth of her Lady Jane's Boots! She is going to buy me a new HDD. Well, I'll be home soon. I'll write more later.

Its Christmas Eve

I have been using Adobe Photoshop Elements for about one month now (trial version). I will have to say I really like it. It is only around $70 and it gives you about as much as Photoshop has at $610. I am very impressed with it. In fact I received a paid copy for Christmas.

So far it has done everything and more that Gimp can do, and it does it faster and easier. Gimp is a great program...For Unix/X. In Mac System 10, Gimp is not so good. Too much clicking to get anything done, plus the fact that it just does not fit into the Mac Aqua interface.

I build web sites as you know. Elements has just enough functionality that I can use it to build my web sites and not get bogged down in extra options. I can build a styled header and menubar using its preset filters and layer styles. I can touch up images or combine different photos to use in the web site body. As I have said, its quick and easy.

I am very much sold on Photoshop Elements. I highly recommend it to all.

Last night I downloaded Adobe GoLive! to check it out. I have been playing with it today for just a bit. I think that I'm too set in my ways to be able to use it correctly.

So far, and this may just be a setting somewhere, when I create a new XHTML page it puts invalid HTML into it. Its own validator will error on it. I guess its just a default template somewhere that I need to fix. The Layout and the Preview do not render CSS very well. It ignores padding and margins on some elements.

The way I do a site is I create three files to start with. The first one is the site header. The last one is the site footer. I make a index page that uses PHP to include the header and footer into it. All other pages will do the same. That way I only have to edit one page when I change the header or footer. I'm not sure how to do this with GoLive!.

I have not ruled it out yet, but I'm almost giving up on it. I write the HTML out by hand anyway. I need to use some of the drag and drop stuff and build the site without using the source view to see if it will build a proper site. Then I will validate it at the W3C to make sure GoLive!'s validation is correct. But not right now. I'm tired of it already.

I'm hoping that it will help with site creation, and make me more productive, but the learning curve is very high. Going from typing in source to drag and drop is quite a leap. I will have to do a full project with it to find out for sure. Maybe my next web site project I'll do that.

Does anyone have a browser only build of Mozilla? I don't want the Mail and Newsgroups. I don't want the the IRC chat or the Composer. All I want is the browser. I would build it myself, but I found out that it requires Metrowerks CodeWarrior Pro 7. Why they didn't use Apple's Project Builder I don't know. Anyway, if anyone has it let me know. Thanks!

I fixed my phone! It was the inside wires. I'm going to have to trace down the one thats bad and fix it up. Gesh... Wires sure dont last very long in this house.

So I finally did it. I built a new web site for Kenoyer.com. Updated the look and feel to it. I'm going to add some more stuff to it later. I have plans for it. Big plans.

So today was another crazy day. Both cell phones have been out of service. Our land line phone was on the fritz. Most of the TV channels are gone. But, my internet still works! woo woo. That was one hell of a storm the other day. It will probably take weeks for stuff to get back to normal.