Justa Montha Go

Yes, tomorrow marks the monthiversary of our nuptials. It seems to me like it's been a lot less time. Of course, we were domestic partners for a couple years already, so most of the economic and monetary situations of marriage were already with us. Still, I have to remind Steve that whether I write the check for repair of the air conditioner or he does, the money basically comes from and goes to the same place, so it's just a matter of cash flow.

Speaking of outlays of large sums of money, I finally broke down and purchased the Adobe Creative Suite Premium CS3 edition. I found it online for a measly $919 ($998 after tax and shipping). It was about time, too, since I have been using "borrowed" versions of the programs for the last decade or so and I'm tired of not being able to upgrade them. Also, the two major Web design programs, Flash and Dreamweaver, are included in the suite, and I have got to learn these if I'm going to stay competitive in the design field.

The small package arrived at work on Wednesday. It seemed so small for a grand's worth of programming data. I took it home and excitedly popped the DVD into my computer.

The first thing I saw was a warning: "Adobe Creative Suite operates best with a minimum of 1 gigabyte of RAM." My machine had only 512 megabytes. But since it didn't say "Don't load the program unless you have a minimum..." I decided to go ahead.

Over an hour later, it finally finished installing. When I opened it up, it took forever to start. I started looking around the Internet for how much new memory for my machine would be. The quote on the Apple Web site was about $400. Ick. I looked around for a place in Pasadena and discover Di-No Computers on Colorado Boulevard. They are Apple specialists and they really know what they're doing.

I asked for the memory cards the Apple Web site said I needed. The guy looked doubtful. "You live nearby?" he asked. I told him I was just a mile or two away. "Why don't you just bring in the machine," he suggested. Sounded good to me. As it turned out, the Apple Web site had been wrong; instead of a PJ4200 board I needed a PJ3200 board. We decided to max out the RAM at 2 gigs because, as I told him, the programs are just going to get bigger. And it cost me less than half of what was quoted on the Apple site.

Now my iMac is happy again. InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, Dreamweaver, Acrobat and Fireworks all load up right away (yeah, I guess seven programs for a grand isn't too expensive), and I'm once again up to speed.