Weekend

[prog]

Helped M with her final clean-through of her presence at Minas Morgul. I washed the dishes so that she could take most of them; she chose to leave behind sizable portions of dishes, furniture, games, and other stuff that was technically hers, which is pretty nice of her. After that we ordered pizza and talked about things. All was well.

On Saturday morning, M, assisted by a friend and the friend's mom, had mostly moved out before I even woke up. I waved bye-bye to the friend's mom's pickup truck as it backed out around noon.

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The rest of Saturday I listened to NPR coverage about the Challenger while cleaning my room, a task made epic by the fact that I had dumped two big boxfuls of junk on my bedroom floor the previous night so that M could use the boxes for packing. It's junk that needed sorting through anyway, so it pains me not. Then I went to a Chinese New Year's party, where I consumed many dumplings and learned to play Mah Jong, which is actually like Rummy, or Gin.

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Today I have applied for a money market account at NetBank, which seems to be the favored institution among those who haunt the Motley Fool message boards. If approved for it, I will take the Fool's advice and transfer the majority of my current funds into it, leaving only enough in my checking account to pay bills and keep my petty-cash needs happy. If that works out smoothly, I may follow up by closing my Wainwright account alogether and using NetBank for checking, too, since the interest rates it offers are so much higher. (This is generally true for any online bank versus a traditional one, and the Fool's articles on banking were very rah-rah about online banking primarily because of this.)

Not thinking about CDs or stocks or other long-term things for the time being. This seems like a good start; I like the feeling that I am finally evolving beyond the week-to-week financial system I've been using since graduating from college, which is more appropriate for a hand-to-mouth lifestyle than the situation I'm in today.

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Lately I have been wondering about software for digital cartooning. Ideally, I'd like to be able to use my Powerbook and little Wacom tablet to emulate the pencil->lightbox->crow-quill protocol I have been comfortable with in my previous cartoon work, and then expand from there into directions that only digital media can go. Today, friend JohnN, a freelance animator, pointed me at Macromedia, which offers an apparently non-crippled 30-day demo of Flash for download. I've completed several of its online tutorials and am pleased to see that it works well with both my Wacom and Mac OS X.

Flash didn't occur to me as an option before this, because it's principally intended for creating Web animations, and not static images... though nothing's stopping you for using it for that purpose, I guess, so long as your needs don't rise to PhotoShop levels of hairiness. Well, I have a month to decide how well it works.