No, I don't mean the outside. The house is vinyl sided. Most of our interior walls are in a flat eggshell finish. When the Pasche's moved out, the walls showed a lot of dirt, especially around areas where things hung on the walls. Originally Michelle had planned that we would paint them a little at a time. It was easy to do our bedroom. You can close that room off from the kids. The first floor would have been weeks of work: one wall at a time after the kids go to bed for the evening. Usually by 8PM the last thing Michelle and I want to do is paint. So I proposed we just get the kids out of the way for a day and have painters swarm in and do it all at once. Many painters have been busy in the area. The wait to get on their schedule was going to take a few weeks. Meanwhile, Michelle has been itching to put up pictures and knickknacks. After today, she should be able to make the house feel like a home with decorations and personal touches.
MV called a little while ago and said Verizon has just done a signal test on our phone line and we are out of range for their ADSL. The line signal test was a no-go. Extreme bummer! I can only hope things get better on the cable modem front.
Several cool things have happened on the technology front this past week, particularly in the Apple domain. They have released their newest updates to their iPod line. They now come in three capacities: 5GB, 10GB, and 20GB. 20GB in something the size of a box of cigarettes that weighs under 7 ounces! That's roughly 400 CDs or 4000 songs. Besides the capacity options, they've improved them to sync addresses and schedule events with the calendar and address books on the Mac, eating slightly into the PDA/Palm pilot market. They also made them compatible with the Audible standard for audio books. This was a major win for them in my opinion. I couldn't believe the iPods had all that cool technology but couldn't play a simple audio book. Even the Franklin eBookman can play audio books. Lastly, there is now software that lets them be used on Windows PCs.
The LCD based iMacs now sport a larger 17 inch screen. They have a new major release of MacOSX: version 10.2 aka Jaguar. In addition to the many new tools and services offered by Jaguar, the toolbars along the top of the all the Apple web pages reflect the slightly updated look and feel of their GUI. The buttons look less gummy and more like translucent plastic.
Outside of Apple's announcements, I was excited to see that Real has finally released their RealPlayer for MacOSX. This has been a major annoyance for Mac afficienados. Finally the most exciting software announcement (for me) was Adobe's announcement for Photoshop Elements 2. I had downloaded their earlier Elements package but it was only MacOS 9 compatible. It intentionally refused to run under MacOS X, complete with a little dialog box effectively saying “We know you're running X and we don't do that...”. I plan to get the new package as soon as it's ready. It did common photo manipulation tasks more easily than the GIMP did. You can't beat the GIMP for it's price though...Free. For both the RealPlayer and Photoshop, I was starting to wonder if their creators were ever going to release updated versions for Mac OSX.
I was reading the Gospel from today's Mass. In it Jesus talks about taking on his yoke. It seems counterintuitive to take on a yoke to ease your burden. A commentary I read today drew the following analogy. Imagine if the effect of sin on man was akin to removing a bird's wings. Intuitively putting wings on a bird would add weight to the bird. And yet, it is that “burden” of the wings that enables the bird to fly. Thanks to St. Augustine for the wonderful analogy.