Allegedly gold finches are around me year round but I never see or hear them in the winter. I get so excited to see their bright yellow faces with black unibrows. Glad you’re seeing their colors pop too!

They’ve become real hissy bois since the chicks were born

It’s getting a little frustrating that every company seems to want a few dollars per month from me. I get that it is expensive to maintain servers and keep programmers on staff to write and maintain the software, but I really hate being nagged by everything I own to buy more stuff.

I also wonder how silly all of these subscriptions are. Especially for running. Do you need your Garmin or Polar watch to tell you what workout to do and when? Or should you follow a well established routine like Pfitz or Daniel’s running formula (or something more casual)? Do you need your data synced to the cloud and shared with Strava? Are the virtual “kudos” from others what’s keeping you motivated? Do you need your watch to tell you how that workout went compared to past workouts? Or should you figure out how to listen to your body and make that evaluation yourself?

Maybe these subscriptions are useful for beginners who don’t know how to do the above. I’m just a little curmudgeonly and I really just need a watch that gives me distance and time.

I’m not familiar with the full range of Adobe products. What are so the abbreviations? And what do they do?

• Ps: Photoshop (raster photo manipulation, painting)
• Ai: Adobe illustrator (vector photo creation and editing)
• An: ?
• Id: InDesign (print layout?)
• Substance: ?
• Lr: Lightroom (RAW image processor)
• Xd: ?
• Au: ? (Looks like a digital audio workstation based on the alternatives)
• Pr: ?
• Acrobat: PDF editor (there must be more foss alternatives… Though I don’t know the full range of acrobat functionality)
• Bridge: ?
• Dw: Dreamweaver? (Code editor, didn’t know this was still around)
• Ae: After Effects (video editor)

I’m also curious which of these Adobe products are considered best in class for professionals. Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom, and Acrobat probably, the rest of the products I know about have more widely used competitors.

I did my first track workout on Thursday. Felt good so went for a run yesterday. Took some wrong turns (live in a new city) and ended up doing 15 miles. Today is supposed to be my long run but I might just do a recovery run because I’m so tired!