Wow, I was just reading the blog and I realized I haven't been talking about anything personal in almost a week. I don't know if this is good or bad, as I have yet to take the temperature of the audience (I hope to make a voluntary questionaire soon, so I can understand who y'all are and what you like about the site and what you don't) but Expos and linguistics aside, there's more stuff going on.

Most pressing is my application to Berkeley's School of Information Management & Systems. It's due by the end of the day and I'm doing a lot of work in Photoshop to finish it. Dear god, why Photoshop, you ask? Because SIMS, and nearly every other school I've looked at, thinks they're on the cutting edge by supplying their application in PDF format.

Now I ask, what are we expected to do with PDF copies of an application? Print them and handwrite or type the form? Handwriting is usually not the best route for a grad school application, especially if it's not a humanities degree or you happen to have less than stellar penmanship. Typing is so old school, I don't even know where I would go to find a typewriter right now. Anyhow, that leaves Photoshop's little-known ability to open and rasterize PDF files.

I've converted each page of the application into a 400dpi black and white photoshop file (24 megs apiece uncompressed) and am using the text tool to paint in my data. True, Illustrater is more suited to the task, but I don't own Illustrator, so there it is. It's a pain, but the results are nearly perfect...

Anyhow, next week is jam packed. I have an interview with Yahoo!'s UI department on Monday, a few school-related meetings on Tuesday and Thursday, Macworld Expo on Wednesday, a client project to work on, classes to get ready for (first day of classes is a week from Tuesday), my Carnegie Mellon application (due on February 1, but I'd like to get more lead time on it than I did for this one), and of course, some sort of social life, so I don't feel my winter break was in vain.

Oh, and some time this weekend I'll be putting up new AOLiza conversations, including a real doozy from the dorms.