saulrosenbaum.com / 2008 / May

‘T’ spends her weekends working at a no-kill animal shelter in Fairless Hills, PA (It’s inside the PETSMART near the Oxford Valley Mall).

Sadly they have a bunch of loving animals that have been ignored, abused, or discarded - I’m mortified when I hear the stories of these loving and affectionate animals, it just reinforces, my general opinion that most people suck. Stop in, play with a few of the cats - they appreciate the attention, and if you are so inclined, put in a application for adoption (or foster). HFTA takes donations via a PayPal link on their homepage.

Hope For The Animals
PO Box 877
Morrisville PA 19067
Phone: 215-945-6204

Tagged: cats, dogs, shelters

‘T’ and I went gallery hopping last saturday, and by chance stopped in at Phillypaws, a impressive animal shelter on 2nd street. ‘T’ spends almost every weekend volunteering at a similar (albeit smaller) shelter so it was pretty interesting seeing the differences. The animals where very sweet, and if I could I would adopt every single one of them. The fellow pictured above, was a real charmer.

PAWS Adoption Center
(Open Mon-Sat: 11 am to 7 pm, Sun: 11 am to 6 pm)
100 N. 2nd Street (at Arch)
Philadelphia, PA 19106
Ph: 215-238-9901

Tagged: cats, iphone, shelters

Damn TV! and their never ending marathons, I swear Tuesday will be better…
For your ear(s) enjoyment a very haunting piano cover of NIN’s ‘HURT’ I found on Muxtape.

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On the shore, dimly seen thro’ the mist of the deep,
Where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o’er the towering steep.
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?

Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam,
In full glory reflected, now shines on the stream
‘Tis the star-spangled banner. Oh! long may it wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

Happy memorial day - I’m planning on enjoying the amazing weather here in Philly, My heart and well wishes goes out to all of our men and women of service, who protect my rights, freedoms, and ability to do so, stay safe, come home soon, and again thank you.

The last MacHeist included a copy of Pixelmator, an interesting graphics editor that leverages Leopard’s Core graphics capabilities, it certainly has it’s pro’s, it’s real fast, has some pretty neat built-in effects (although it’s questionable how useful some of them are for daily design and web development) best of all it’s processor light, and smoking fast (compared to Adobe’s Photoshop). It’s cons are all about usability - the interface is dark, and IMHO over-styled, the effects controls, odd and non-precise.

Even standard tools are counterintuitive - take the crop tool for example, among it’s useful ratio presets, 16x9, square, and custom, it’s this last choice that makes me sad, open a 300x600 image, choice the crop tool, select custom, enter in 185x70 and crop the image - guess what size your new image isn’t, I’m assuming the custom settings are also a ratio, so frustrating. I’m all for unique and clever UI’s but when your building in a category with a dominant player (like Photoshop) you really should take some cues from that app, in regards to standard functionality.

So the jury is still out if it’s an actual keeper or not.

So this morning I thought I’d partake in some ‘retail-coffee-therapy’ and head over to Starbucks for a ‘Skinny Vanilla Latté’ and on a whim I took my laptop, glad I did, what follows is both factual and timely:

Her: Oh nice laptop, I hear Apple is the new Microsoft…

Me: Ha, sure (rolls eyes, turns away)

Her: You do realize I was be ironical (sic)

Me: Alanis Morrisette would be proud

Her: (well she said nothing I want to type here, but she DID leave)

Now of course I could have been friendlier, I could have also corrected her - I’m pretty sure she was attempting to be ‘sarcastic’ rather than ‘ironical’ which sadly (for her) isn’t a word. Her life would have been much simpler if the english language had kept up with society and we had Sarcasm Marks, some graphical adjunct to quotation marks that specifies:

“This is a quote spoken in a sarcastic tone, please accept it in the spirit it was intended.”

Think of how handy that would be, emails would take on a brand new dimension, court transcripts would have flavor and attitude, twittering would be clearer (because like MOST twitters, I assume almost EVERYTHING is sarcasm). Sadly the graphical glyphs of the proposed Sarcasm Marks would have helped ‘HER’ but I’m assuming that with the acceptance of the proposed marks, women like ‘HER’ would adopt a pithy hand gesture to indicate ‘I AM ABOUT TO BE SARCASTIC, OR AT THE VERY LEAST MAKE AN ATTEMPT AT SARCASM’. Of course all the punctuation in the world wouldn’t help her vocabulary, but that’s a different post.

I think it’s a great idea, and if I knew what governing body made such decisions I’d start a campaign, but for now I’ll just draw the marks on my keyboard and smile knowingly.

So yesterday was my birthday, woo-hoo, my darling wife whisked me off to spend a night in a fancy-pants hotel, spend a day looking at ancient art/artifacts (I’m totally an art geek), and exotic tree-frogs (we’re BOTH wildlife geeks), it was a pretty great day even though the weather was pretty nasty. I even learned a little something

If you see a tasty little frog (lets say he’s green) and you want to pick him up and lick him, DON’T - because he’s probably not as tasty as he looks.

The whole day was low-key and leisurely, exactly how I like to spend my non-working days - we concluded our day out with a delicious seafood dinner (her: Pistachio encrusted shrimp, me: Seared Ahi Tuna with dark soy and wasabi) and a VERY rare indulgence for me, dessert (her: Twice-baked apple pie ala-mode, me: Caramel drizzled bread pudding) might have been the best dessert of my entire life, seriously.

I’m a homebody, honestly, that’s not an exaggeration, I barely, if ever, leave the house or the studio, I’ve created my own little closed universe, and I like it that way. One of the benefits of that is I’m almost never exposed to colds or flu - that being said, in the last 10 days I’ve babysat two children, eaten out 3 times and gone to the farmers market in the city - not too surprisingly I’m sick, miserable and sick..<cough>