December 20th, 2006 by matt
Reading through an article about choosing and changing careers:
Job mismatch
Job mismatch is the most common justification for people to quit their jobs. Experiencing a lack of fulfillment and corresponding low motivation toward work, along with a sense that they have chosen a field of work that is not a good match for their talents, are the primary factors that have caused people to quit their jobs without having other jobs lined up. The vast majority of these who quit their jobs are stressed out, even to the point of not wanting to go to work every morning. In some cases this job stress has been so acute that it has resulted in health problems. So, to ensure a less stressful and healthier life, they have quit their previous jobs and are job hunting.
This is me.
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Tags: career, job, I+want+to+be+a+writer+and+a+photographer
December 17th, 2006 by matt
A person that I’ve met on Tabblo - a great photo presentation / sharing / publishing site that I’ve been using for a while - made a comment on one of my recent Tabblos. This person happens to be French and therefore writes in French.
My French isn’t very good, though I can get the general message usually. Sometimes I go to BabelFish to get a more precise translation to make sure I don’t miss anything.
The latest comment that I translated proves why a word-for-word translation doesn’t always quite do the job:
December 17th, 2006 by matt
Two days ago Adobe announced it’s first-ever public beta of a Photoshop release, CS3. It’s only almost public because Adobe is granting beta licenses only to currently registered license-holders of Photoshop CS2. While this makes some good sense for Adobe to limit the beta of perhaps the most popular - and possibly the most pirated - third party application on the market, it is disappointing for us mortals who cannot afford the hefty price tag of the Creative Suite products and who respect licenses and want to abide by the law.
Perhaps the most anticipated feature of Photoshop CS3 is its native compatibility with Intel Macs. Right now Intel Mac users of Photoshop have to slog through the slowness of real-time translation with the Rosetta utility. I’ve heard that it’s actually faster to run the Windows version of Photoshop CS2 in a Parallels virtual machine on an Intel Mac than running it as a Mac app with Rosetta.
For me, though, it doesn’t really matter because I still can’t afford it.
I am impressed, though, with the work that Adobe has been doing on photography applications. I have been working with the (true) public beta of Lightroom for about a month and really like what they have done. Lightroom - and Apple’s Aperture, for that matter - offer so many tools to work with RAW images as well as some additional basic yet essential modification tools that you don’t need an app like Photoshop as much as perhaps you used to. Now that I have a Digital SLR and can shoot in RAW, I find that I can use something like Lightroom or Aperture for almost all the image processing that I need to do. For more specific or detailed changes, I use Gimp, the free open-source image editor that’s a pretty decent alternative to Photoshop.
Lightroom is available as a public beta - yes, for anyone to use - on both Windows and Mac platforms. The beta of Photoshop CS3 is also available for Windows and Mac platforms. Both can be downloaded from the cool Adobe Labs page.
