popping up as a paid sponsor in my gmail RSS feed

Русское Телевидение - eTVnet.ca - Все Передачи через Интернет Полный Архив. Три Дня Бесплатно!

A Russian site claiming Canadian domain, a US telephone number, and which sells the "Ethnic Televison Network."
I begin to feel as though I'm living in the Gibson future depicted in Virtual Light.

There was a time that I was a virtuoso in Adobe Illustrator.

For a long while, I worked with Illustrator all day, every day, for the four days a week that I (mostly) worked my way through college. At the time I was so impressed with the Illustrator UI model that I was beginning to wish Adobe would make its own OS; I felt it would trump MacOS for usability. This was the "pre-Photoshop 6 world," you see...

But my one-time prowess has dulled mightily, and even the muscle-memory that is still devoted to chorded keystrokes is betrayed by Adobe's revisions to longstanding keyboard shortcuts, while keeping 80% of them identical. I also find that I'm having a hard time hunting out changes both subtle and gross because my entire fucking UI is in Japanese. So...

Bless these folks' hearts:

• Computer Arts - Keyboard shortcut cards

Update: After finally getting the drawing the way I wanted it, I find that MS Word 2003 is not willing to import .EPS graphics. It demonstrated this to be by crashing grandly when I tried it, somehow eradicating text that I'd written an hour ago, despite the auto-save feature of Word being set for "10 minutes." This also happened to be the text where I'd had an epiphany of not only how the system I'm designing should work, but how to concisely define it.
So now I'm relegating that drawing to the in-app tools that MS Word has, which suck, and trying to remember what the hell I wrote. It was marginally clever. Honest!

trade with china is politically tainted; in other news, water is wet

China: U.S. trade ties are 'politicized' - CNN.com:

"China-U.S. relations have been a political football in contention between the two parties," a commentary in the paper said. It cited "rising protectionist sentiment in Congress" and proposals to impose tough tariffs on Chinese goods as a way of forcing China to make its yuan -- and its exports -- more expensive.