New York City Trip This Weekend

I am going on a bus trip to New York City this weekend so I won’t be getting any work done on Saturday. The bus trip is sponsored by the Penn College Alumni Association and will take up my entire day on Saturday. I like going to New York City as long as I don’t have to drive. I’ll probably visit the Museum of Modern Art again to draw inspiration from modern art. Maybe I’ll get some ideas for new web designs. I’m currently very focused on web design and have really cooled it on the programming. I did a few case studies of web designs I downloaded from the Open Source Web Design site. I also learned how to use the jQuery Cycle plugin to animate an image slideshow without using Flash. If you don’t think design requires any technical skill you should have seen how much trouble it was to prevent the background from appearing behind a fading image. I really should learn how to do that in Flash too.

Currently I’m reading the book “GarageBand for Dummies” by Bob LeVitus. This is an excellent introduction to multitrack recording using digital audio software. I’ve learned a lot of this stuff from studying Reason but it is useful to have it reinforced with simpler explanations. I probably won’t be using GarageBand much though because it is not as sophisticated as other audio software I have.

Last night I totally uninstalled Visual Studio 2005 because Windows Update kept trying to install a security patch and frequently hogged my CPU. I discovered that I had both the Professional and Standard versions installed which will cause you a lot of problems. However, you can use Visual Studio 2008 to work on .NET Framework 2.0 projects so there is really no need to have that old version installed. I am still unable to install the Silverlight 2.0 Tools because uninstalling Visual Studio 2005 did not help with the install failure.