Toilet Augers, Expensive Software, and I am not a shipping company

No one who ever had to buy a toilet auger was happy about it. Yet another thing, along with Preparation H, Jock Itch cream, and home HIV tests that you rarely see people carrying to the checkout counter with a smile on their faces.

Anyway, this should give you a good idea of the sort of week I'm having and why I've been sort of inactive.

In other news, however, I CAN'T WAIT FOR CS5! I think I'm going to go all out and get the design package this time. It's expensive as hell, but there's so much good and useful stuff in there that I think I can justify the expense. At least it's a tax write off for my business, so it's not a total sucker punch in the wallet, but I'm still looking at dropping over a grand on the entire thing. And that's after some upgrade discounts for already owning a current Adobe product. I need/want Indesign and Photoshop at a bare minumum, and that would set me back nine hundred alone since I don't own any version of Indesign yet, so I might as well spend a little more and get the whole shebang.

The new Dreamweaver actually supports CMS's like Drupal (what this site runs on) so I should be able to actually get the themes beaten into working order the way I want without having to resort to live testing anymore.

The other thing I'm excited about is putting out an art book, thus the need for Indesign. I've used a trial version of older versions and loved the hell out of it, and current on-demand print companies actually manage to produce good quality stuff. I took a course from Schoolism on self publishing, and learned that I absolutely do not want to publish my own book through traditional channels. Yes, I could make more money, but I would have no time left for anything else. I've already got enough problems balancing my side projects and creative hobbies with a full time job as it is, so I can accept making a little less to do the on demand thing. It's the same reason why I went with Cafepress for shirts and swag instead of making, marketing, selling, and shipping all that shit myself.

I've had a few people say I should just pirate the software since it's so damn expensive, but I have to admit, ever since I started creating intellectual property, my opinions on digital piracy and I.P. have changed a bit. Hell, i don't even download music torrents anymore. I'd feel like a hypocritical douchebag if I bitched about people using my creations without permission and then doing the same unto others. Doesn't look too good for a registered business to pirate software either.