Month: May 2009

So tonight, I’m surfing the web because it’s Saturday and I’m surely not going to work hard on a Saturday, and I happen to go to CNN’s website, and this is the breaking news.

Are you fucking kidding me?

That is not breaking news; that is entertainment news at best. Am I mistaken or isn’t there some new nuclear crisis going on with North Korea. Aren’t we still engaged in combat with Iraq and Afghanistan? What happened to the swine flu? Holy shit, less than two months ago we were all going to die from it, then suddenly it was like, oh, never mind.

Are you fucking kidding me, I’d rather hear more about that than entertainment shit. Besides, now that a few people are dying from the swine flu in America nobody even gives a damn. By the way, speaking of swine flu, I just want to mention that my state of Wisconsin is now number one in cases. Take that you other 49 states. We’re number one.

Somehow, I got on a tangent there, probably because that kid from grade school didn’t sell me any Ritalin this week. Anyway, back to my original bitching… Someone winning or not winning a stupid reality TV show, whether in America or overseas is not news. It’s entertainment.

Jon and Kate having marital problems isn’t news either. In fact, anyone whether taking fertility drugs or not popping litters of children from their overstretched vaginas isn’t news and really, why the fuck is it entertainment? How many TLC or Discovery shows are there with people with way too many mouths to feed? I’d rather see some show with a couple without kids that go around and help out with homeless and sick kids. At least there may be some substance to a show like that… but of course that might make people think and have feelings and we can’t have that. Seriously though, if I gave two shits about those stories, I would pay attention and check on TV shows that are made for news. There’s Access Hollywood, Entertainment Tonight, Insider, and those bloodsucking leaches over at TMZ. Hot shit, there is even an Entertainment Network called E!. Maybe they should be the ones that report this shit instead of CNN. I don’t turn on E! and expect them to report on the war.

Some may wonder why I let shit like this get under my skin and I tell them, because this is the shit that is rotting America’s brain slowly. It’s nothing more than something to distract you from all the bullshit going on around you.

To quote the late great George Carlin (who has been gone almost a year already) “I don’t have pet peeves, I have major psychotic fucking hatreds.”

That’s right; my Adobe CS3 Master Collection is what pissed me off this time around. This bullshit started last Sunday night while I was playing around with my Flash program trying to learn some of the ins and outs of how it works since although I’ve had it for some time, I rarely used it. Anyway, on Sunday night or maybe even Monday night last week (it’s all a hazy blur) I went to open my Flash program to pick up where I left off and instead of starting up like it normally does, I get an error message. Not a nice error message like “oh we can’t start now, restart your computer and everything will work again”. No, I got this message: Licensing for this product has stopped working.

Now what in the fuck was that all about? What happened to Flash, so then I open up Dreamweaver to the same message, same goes for Photoshop and Fireworks and… well you get the idea here. Well I immediately go to my best friend Google and ask it a very simple question; What the Fuck? I get many replies and realized that this is a problem that has existed in some form since back in 2006 or so. I find this interesting Adobe Knowledge Base Article named the following:

Error “Licensing for this product has stopped working” when you start any Adobe Creative Suite 3 application”

Hey, that sounds just like my problem there, so what should I do? I know, I’ll follow their suggestions and get my Adobe up and running like a pro again right?? Wrong.
The first thing it said was that my licensing service was probably in need of an update and I should download this update and get it up to speed. No problem there, I did all that and guess what… nothing. Then I did the part where I make sure my Flex Net is set to manual and is started in my services. That’s already on. Next there were some permissions I was supposed to set on a couple different folders, which I did. Once again, not a thing.

By now it’s been almost a week and do you know what I’m feeling… major fucking hatred towards Adobe or Macrovision or whoever’s problem this is and since I don’t know if it’s the product or the licensing company I’m pissed off at both of them.

My last ditch effort offered to me by Adobe’s suggestions is to do a complete uninstall of pretty much everything Adobe on my PC and to run a CS3 Cleaner through the computer to deep clean everything out. Well there goes my fucking holiday weekend right there. There’s nothing more I like to do on a three day weekend than to fix something that shouldn’t have fucking broke in the first place.

Luckily before I get to the point of actually uninstalling all this shit I find an awesome article about how someone fixed this on a Mac. Now I don’t have a Mac, but the solution sounded like something that would work on a PC (so fuck you Justin Long) too. All I had to do was insert my original installation DVD’s and when it comes time to install, instead of running a total install, I unselect all items and then the only thing that gets installed are the shared components. Well, once that was completed I pulled the disc out of the computer and went and clicked on my Fireworks logo anticipating another failure. Well much to my excitement I got a box pop up asking me for my serial number. I entered that, then activated the product again and I’m up and running again…. 7 fucking days after this shit started. Let’s hope I never have to go through that shit again, but at least if I do, my expectations for Adobe are no longer as high as they were before, so I won’t be nearly as disappointed. Did they hire ex Microsoft developers or something?

What else is going on around here? The weather is starting to get really nice again so hopefully that will last a little longer than the last time. Last time it lasted about three days and then it went back to cold and utter shit. In fact last Saturday we actually had snow. It wasn’t a lot of snow but it was enough to slap you in the face and make you realize that you weren’t going to be wearing shorts on that day.

Well shit, I better get back to working with my Adobe products before the whole thing goes to shit again.

It’s been a little while, and I couldn’t let May slip by without my mandatory monthly blog. What would everyone do if I just totally missed a month? Unfortunately, I don’t really have anything to bitch about today. I’m somewhat in the “create new website design” mode again. I am playing around with my Adobe Creative Suite.

I ended up buying a 22” flat panel monitor last weekend online from Dell. If you’ve read my blogs in the past, you probably remember that about a year ago I bought a Dell computer and it had a 22” widescreen monitor. Just so you know, the monitor didn’t burn out on me or anything like that, in fact it seems to be working just fine. I just decided that one just wasn’t enough. Now I have dual monitors on my computer so I can hopefully get into my graphic design even more. I’ve attached a picture… and yes, it’s a lot of screen to look at, but so far, I love it.

Let’s hope something will piss me off in the near future so I can do another entry this month.