Another digression from travel. My install disks for adobe photoshop cs3 and lightroom 1.0 have gone awol. current versions are cs4 and lightroom 2. now, you might think, this being the age of the internet, that adobe would keep old versions of their software available for download, and we're only talking last-year's versions here. i tried their contact support page and it took a week for them to get back to me. before the week was up i called adobe and was told that cs3 and lightroom 1 are not available for download. the alternative is to order replacement media, which adobe charges usd$20 for the privilege. absurd, a disk costs pennies. i can understand a bit of cost in handling the request, say around $5 would be ok with me, but paying another $40 for software i already own is stupid. also, since i'm on the other side of the world, having the disks posted to me would cost another bundle--and let's not even get into singapore customs charging 7%. all adobe would have to do, like every enlightened software company, is provide a link for customers to download their legally-purchased software. that's all i ask. bah, damn adobe, wasting my money and my time. i was able, for instance, to download dragon naturally speaking from nuance's website after providing my contact and serial number, even though i was getting v9.5 and the current version is 10.0. egg on adobe's annoying face. some other download sites provide cs3 and lightroom for download, which i will try when i get to kuala lumpur where internet connections will be faster.

while we're on the subject of adobe-bashing, i will add that i removed adobe's terrible pdf viewer, adobe acrobat reader. this piece of bloated nagware always annoyed me. no one needs 90 mb to read a pdf, not to mention the software doesn't support many useful things, like annotations, and is always nagging me with preparing the document for something i have no idea about and updates and such. i'm using PDFXViewer instead, a free, compact, fast, and more feature-rich program that doesn't interrupt my work with stupid dialogs.