So bad week, broken computer, and way too many religious movies on TV have made me miss out on a lots of very bloggable news items so I thought I'd condense the most memorable ones into a single post and save myself a lot of trouble. Firstly I found out that the mighty Amazon is offering bucketloads of free (promotional) MP3s online. You might not find anything you like listening to but, like, it's free. Also free is the 3D reworking of the classic Total Annihilation, TA Spring. It looks decent enough but mostly it's another chance to play TA (which I hear is possibly one of the best RTS games ever made) and, like, it's free. While you're waiting for all this free stuff to download why not play a bit of "Guess the Google", a game that asks you to guess the keyword from a set of Google Images results, genius. Speaking of genius (or genii), here's Zefrank showing Condi Rice some undying love. Howl's Moving Castle looks awesome like Hayao Miyazaki's other works. I am tremendously looking forward to it but perhaps not as much as the Xbox 360 which will be unveiled on MTV in 2 weeks. So I'm offline (well at home anyway) for a week and when I get back I notice someone has tried to destroy Bugs Bunny (pictured above)? Good thing someone is doing something about this. Speaking of cartoons, don't you think that this car belongs in one? Jessica Rabbit would surely dig it. Update: here's a truly offensive yet very funny spoof of the new Extreme Bugs Bunny. Not office safe in any way.

It's surprisingly difficult to find a good, free image editor for Windows; how refreshing then to come accross the wonderful Paint.NET. With layers, history (undo), photo editing tools & export to most common formats it will do a good enough job for most people. While the website sure reminds me something the app has one of the most stylish and friendly GUIs ever seen on a freeware app. Microsoft could do worse than make this available as an official update to Paint.

After a week of strugling my computer is finally operational again. For some reason my computer decided to reboot to a blue screen continuously only for my harddrive to fail 2 days later which was rather lovely. Thankfully my new 200 Gig harddrive now softly purring under my desk while Windows XP all patched and setup. Pfew. Ironic that my computer would decide to meltdown just a week after I boasted how reliable current PCs were. Using an unpatched XP with Internet Explorer did remind me how bloody annoying pop-ups were. So good to get back to Firefox...

It's been said before: cheap, fast, good -- pick two. Hugh shares some of his great great grandfather's wise words on that here, "People remember the quality long after they've forgotten the price." And that's true whether you're being expensive or cheap, so if you're going budget make sure you can do it right.

I always enjoy stumbling on really remarkable and the Belgian health department's Teenage Mum ad is just the type of stuff that rocks my boat. Basically a fake ad for a Sims type game, it will be interesting to see how effective it is but I'd say it's pretty spot on for the target audience. The execution is absolutely brilliant and it sports some of the best "faux-in-game" graphics I've ever seen. (Found on MeFi)

This is quite interesting. While I have no idea what the film will actually be like I can say with certainty that the US movie site is rather awful while the UK version is brilliant. Maybe the UK developers where more in tune with the original work?

Bulldog Broadband's site is an excellent example of good use of black. Strong branding, clear product offering and great typography make this one stand out (and 20 quid a month for a 4Mbps pipe isn't bad either). Now if it only worked properly in Firefox.

After a pretty short wait here is (are?) Google Maps UK with London tube map support (apparently, haven't checked that). Here's us in the UK but I guess I'll have to wait a while for Google Maps Cyprus. If you want to see how the 1337 use Google Maps check this out.

The dust is slowly settling over the announcement that Adobe is buying Macromedia (Mike Chamber's blog entry on that here) and some facts are emerging. First off the name of the new company will be Adobe Systems Inc, so effectively Macromedia is no more. While it's still early days we can pretty much guarantee is there are going to be a few casualties in the product line-ups of both companies. Adobe is probably going to lose GoLive while on Macromedia's side it is doubtful that Freehand and Fireworks will survive. This might take a while to happen but one thing's for sure, Adobe is going to closely integrate Acrobat with Flash. If you know of my love for the way Adobe has handled the Acrobat Reader then you can understand how happy I am about this. This segment in their press release is quite telling: Through the combination of our powerful development, authoring and collaboration tools - and the complementary functionality of PDF and Flash - we have the opportunity to drive an industry-defining technology platform that delivers compelling, rich content and applications across a wide range of devices and operating systems. Not that it's relevant but the difference in importance shown on their respective websites is quite interesting. Analysts see this event as a good thing while the community (the majority of which rely on both companies' tools) seems less happy. The Adobe and Macromedia communities are usually quite polarised. I'm very sad to see the Macromedia name go as I was quite a bit of a fanboy. In fact, I'm wearing my "experience matters" t-shirt as I type this. Snif. UPDATE: Kottke does a much better round-up here. Hey, he does this for a living.

Oh shit, this is big... Adobe is acquiring the entirity of Macromedia for $3.4 billion. I'm not sure how I feel about this. And neither does William, "All we need now is for Microsoft to acquire Adobe." Indeed. I must say this caught me completely off guard, more on this once I get my composure back. More here... The combination of Adobe and Macromedia strengthens our mission of helping people and organizations communicate better. Through the combination of our powerful development, authoring and collaboration tools and the complementary functionality of PDF and Flash we have the opportunity to drive an industry-defining technology platform that delivers compelling, rich content and applications across a wide range of devices and operating systems. UPDATE: I'm feeling better, the motion sickness is mostly gone now. If people got all funny when Macromedia started offering the Yahoo! toolbar, it will be interesting to see how the community reacts to this. What does that mean to the future of things like Flash Paper, Freehand and Fireworks? UPDATE 2: Mario Klinegmann (Quasimondo) has this to say about the merger: Still don't know if I like it or not - but I really hope that Macromedia's great corporate culture will survive the merger. What will probably not survive are some competing software packages: Freehand vs. Illustrator, Dreamweaver vs. GoLive, Fireworks vs. Photoshop. And I think that there's not much guesswork necessary to decide who will be the surviviors in those battles. Flash will have not much to fear as I doubt that LiveMotion will rise from the grave.