So the big news today is that Adobe is buying Macromedia for $3.4 billion in stock. Although I’m not a huge fan of flash, it does have some interesting uses. Certainly Flickr has found a nice use for it. I wouldn’t want to get rid of flash, but I also can’t stand all flash sites. I guess I’m just picking on flash because that is probably Macromedia’s most wide spread product/technology. They certainly have plenty of other products.

So what is Adobe going to do with this? How about the ability to play flash content in Acrobat Reader? Adobe has shown that it is perfectly willing to take a reasonable document platform and turn into a huge ugly mess of features (maybe they were looking at MS Office for inspiration?).

Over the last few years I’ve grown increasingly disappointed with Adobe and their products. At work we use FrameMaker 7.1 for our books that we print. From FM we generate PDFs that then go to the printer. Sounds like a relatively straight forward process right? If only. Just last week I spent a whole afternoon working with our editors trying to figure out why some solid black lines were turning into dotted lines when going from FM to PDF. After going through all of the different variations possible in this process we finally discovered that FM simply doesn’t render these lines correctly when they are too close to a graphic. Fortunately one of the editors (kudos to Robert) was able to make this work by adjusting the tint level on these lines.

Hopefully both companies are doing this because they believe things (products, technologies, $$, etc.) will be better off this way. We will all have to wait and see if that is really the case, but at this point I’m having a hard time seeing this as “a good thing”.

Long story short, connectivity to the server hosting my blog is having issues. I’ve been assigned another IP address in the mean time, so that could at least get to it. I took this time to upgrade WordPress 1.5. The new default theme is certainly nicer than the old one, but it still has many problems. Eventually I’ll work up a template closer to what I had before.

In the meantime, access to my blog will likely be spotty until these issues get worked out.

I’ve been a fan of Information Society for years (late 80s ?) and still enjoy their fun techno beat every now and then. But I can’t remember when the first time was that I heard them, or even what song it was (although it was probably What’s On Your Mind/Pure Energy from their self titled CD). So I’ve always like my original history with listening to them was some how lost in some section of mind that no longer wants to be actively used. At some point I got around to purchasing their self titled CD (back then I bought on tape first) and their next two CDs, Hack and Peace and Love, Inc. and enjoyed them both immensely. I enjoy listening to music (though Sarah is the real music buff in the family, she knows everything about 80s music), I was just always drawn to Information Society (InSoc), something about that catchy techno-pop style.

I never got to see them in concert (heck, I’ve only been to one major music concert and that was for the B-52′s), which was a shame. I need get to see a few bits of a couple of videos on MTV and most of the appearance on MTV’s dance show (what was that called, Club MTV or something like that?), so that was my only InSoc fix beyond just listening to their music.

Fast forward to the mid to late 90s, during which time the InSoc that I remembered was no longer together. But I did discover their “official” website eventually and got to read through all of the little history bits that I never knew about. Most of it was from when they were still more of a “local band” and weren’t known well outside of the areas they played in. Kurt did release more work under the InSoc name, but it was very different than their previous work and I never really got into it. There’s even still an active InSoc news group which gets interesting posts from time to time.

This brings us up to the last year or so. VH-1 has a show Sarah likes to watch called Bands Reunited which tries to reunite old broken up bands to bring the members back together and play one last show. Usually their are successful, but not always. So rumor has it that Bands Reunited is going an InSoc episode, but the feeling is that Kurt would never go for it. A few months later I come up home one night and Sarah tells me that they had InSoc on Bands Reunited that night, but that they Kurt didn’t show so the band didn’t play at the end of the show. I was bummed that I missed it and of course they haven’t re-shown that episode since. So if you’ve got a copy of it some where leave comment, I’d like to see it.

So tonight I started thinking about all of this again, and came across a detailed report from Kurt’s point of view on the Bands Reunited InSoc episode. As much as I’d like to see InSoc play again, I can respect Kurt’s decision not to.

Ahhh how I miss the days when the old InSoc was making new stuff.

The man who practically invented late night television, Johnny Carson, died at the age of 79.

For many of us folks on the web Jeremy gives Yahoo a rather personal feel because we get to have a little peek inside via his blog. Back in October he went back to the Yahoo Search team. I’m not sure exactly what his new position really is in relationship to Yahoo as a whole, but it certainly seems like he is becoming more and more a public face on trying to make Yahoo better.

To that end I propose a name change for Jeremy. This popped into my head the other, probably as a typo more than anything, but I think it works. One of the simple ways to make the Yahoo logo stand out is to write it like this:

Yahoo!

So this lead me to typing Jeremy’s name a little different the other day:

JeremY!

Strange, no doubt, but that was what came out with the result of so much Yahoo mixing up with Jeremy when I read his blog.