It's a sweet Bullet Sunday at home as I blog in-between trips!

   
• Fault. Just how much more hardship is Louisiana supposed to endure? Hurricanes, floods, recession, and now an oil spill? I'm sure Pat Robertson must be positively orgasmic, seeing as how he has decided to speak on behalf of God and tell everybody it's New Orleans' fault. No word from the hate-mongering old fuck on what "God" says is the cause of the flooding in Nashville. My guess would be the 700 Club's Nashville office being located in the city, but far be it for me to speak on behalf of the Almighty. I'll leave that to douchebag televangelists.

   
• Funneh. When President Obama delivers a standup routine at the The White House Correspondent's Dinner that was funnier than Jay Leno's bit, it has me hoping he gets his own late-night talk show in seven years...

Though I must say my favorite part was when Obama took a moment to pay some words of respect to our troops. Quite a nice change from his predecessor.

   
• CS5. Color me completely shocked. After I finally managed to get Adobe Creative Suite 5 downloaded, everything else was gravy. Unlike every other installation of Creative Suite, there were NO issues this time. Installation was painless. Nothing got screwed up when I uninstalled the previous version. Everything just works. This is a pleasant change from when I installed CS4 and ended up having to reformat my hard drive and start over from scratch in order to get it working. TWICE. Thank you, Adobe...

   
• Merged. The latest casualty of airline consolidation? Continental Airlines, which is apparently merging with United. I used to love flying Continental when they were part of the SkyTeam Alliance because they had a direct flight into Cologne, but had to drop out when they left my mileage program. Now my worry is that the ever-decreasing competition amongst airlines is going to drive up prices. Tickets are already running much higher than I'm used to, and if things go much higher I'm going to have to drastically cut back on my travel.

   
• Bits. In case you missed it, my "Blogography Bits" leftovers blog had my reactions to the stolen iPhone drama, and Senseless Flash Injection, and crappy blog hosting hostility, and even a comic book meme this week.

   
And now I'm off to eat candy for dinner. But don't judge me for that... I had candy for lunch, so it's okay.

Last night was when Adobe allowed their customers who purchased Creative Suite 5 to download it. Since I spend almost my entire day working in either Photoshop, Illustrator, or InDesign, this is a pretty monumental event that affects nearly all of my professional life... and a sizable chunk of my personal life too. All-in-all, they've added some amazing features that will make what I do a lot easier. But they've also made some mistakes of such astounding obviousness that it has me wondering if they bothered to beta-test the apps before release. Oh well. I guess you can't have it all.

Alas, the best new tools and hot new features are no substitute for creativity and good design.

All you have to do is watch television for an hour to see that.

Even with all the special effects and killer graphics available today, most television commercials are annoying crap that I can't wait to fast-forward through. But every once in a while a good commercial comes along that I actually want to watch. I dunno what it is about this latest 1-800-CONTACTS ad that strikes me funny, but it does...

It's as if companies are finally getting a clue that their commercials have to entertain if they expect people to want to watch them (especially in the age of DVRs). Sure there have always been great ads every once in a while, but they're really upping their game now. Like that great commercial from Old Spice... or those funny commercials from Ally Bank... or the amazing Betty White ad for Snickers... and now this one from 1-800-CONTACTS. All money well-spent.

Of course, we have a long ways to go before we can reach the awesomeness found in Japanese commercials...

And for those of you with the pizza toppings song permanently stuck in your head... you're welcome!