Egyptian blogger and student Abdelkareem Soliman was sentenced today to four years in prison for expressing views, opinions, and bravely “whistle blowing” of religious intolerance and human rights violations within his home country on his personal blog. According to the court documents, he was sentenced to “three years for contempting religion, and one year for defaming the president.”

Free and freedom-loving people everywhere should speak out and spread the word. For the latest information, and to find out what you can do, please go to:

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.

-Pastor Martin Niemöller

I just upgraded to WordPress 2.1! Considering the kind of code that goes into blogging software like this, it’s impressive when it all gets updated without a hitch. php, SQL, CSS… some of this stuff just makes my eyes cross. I was clearly not “born to code.” But I just followed the very explicit instructions provided from the fine folks at WordPress… and 20 minutes later, I’m updated.

This newest upgrade adds some features to the editor, autosave, upload manager, etc. Here’s the big list of new features.

I’m still blown away that this is a completely free application available to anyone with a hosting service. The Open Source community indeed does some amazing things. Linux… Open Office… WordPress…

Microsoft should be worried…very worried.

While designers all sit around and wait for the actual CS3 (Creative Suite 3) software from Adobe, some of us anxiously pour over every press release and detail coming out of San Jose. Some a little too anxiously, IMHO.Take the re-design of the latest icons, said to be used on the CS3 release:

Looks a bit like the Periodic Table of the Elements, eh? Maybe a nice bit of homage? Do I really have to add another shameless plug to my Beeriodic Table? Yeah!

Most of the icons got the “periodic” treatment, including the apps I use daily… AE, PPro, PS. I guess now they’re: Ae, Pr, and Ps! Au and En (Audition and Encore) are in there also. It seems like Acrobat and Flash got to keep their traditional logos, though. Maybe because they’re comprised of letters already. And Illustrator is Ai?! Must be because of the name-association with the filename extension. And there’s some other odd pictures in there, as well. Since Adobe just bought one of my favorite video application companies, Serious Magic… maybe some of the funky icons are for slated for those “still to be decided” “Serious/Adobe” applications.

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I finally let my old work domain expire (archtex.com). I was paying for the hosting, getting slammed with spam, and… I’m not really doing much of that kind of work anymore. There were a lot of “ch-ch-ch-ch-changes” that rolled down the pike of the Brown home last summer that made me back off of my part-time architecture gig. We moved into a new(er) house, I had to finish remodelling the old one, get it on the market, home-school my three kiddos… So now I’m trying to keep one less ball in the air.

So it’s a new year. A time to try out new things… like a blog. Let’s see if I can post something interesting with any regularity.