I’ve always enjoyed blogs like Gizmodo, Engadget, etc. But is it just me, or are they all about cell phones now? If you’re a big phone person like some people I know, you probably get into this stuff. But to me, it kind feels like what it would feel like if Motor Trend magazine changed from a magazine about cars to a magazine about scooters.

Have we forgotten about desktop computers, laptops, operating systems, software, TVs, stereos, game consoles, and all other cool electronic gadgets that still exist out there? Why have cellular phones become so embedded in our culture that it’s all anyone wants to talk about and fight about?

What ever happened to Mac vs Windows? PS3 vs Xbox? Is it only amazing to me that people seem just as competitive about their phones as people used to be about Mac vs. Windows or Ford vs. Chevy?

Yes, I have an iPhone, and I like using it for a lot of stuff while I’m out on the run. Having my music, email and phone all in one device is really convenient compared to a few years ago. Back then I had a phone that just made calls, an iPod that just played music, and because my iPod was too small for all of my music I also had a 60GB HDD I carried back and forth between home & work. I could only get to my email on a computer. So I will admit smart phones have changed the way I do things, but I still care more about what’s new with desktop/laptop computers and I don’t care if you think your Droid or Blackberry is better than my iPhone. I don’t think my phone is better than anyone else’s, all I care is whether or not it makes the things that are important to me easier. It’s not a status symbol, it’s not a fashion statement, it’s a tool.

How do you feel? Is your phone more important to you than your computer? Does it matter more than your car, your tv or your home stereo?

We started little Max in daycare last week, and the center is in the same office complex where I work.  Liz is starting work at around 6 every morning, so I am getting Max ready in the morning and feeding him breakfast.  He usually gets up at around 7am on the dot, but today he decided to get up early at around 6:15 – I think we were both woke up by a slamming washer or dryer door, Mama was being a little noisy this morning.  But no biggie, Max and I decided we’d take this opportunity to get to daycare & work early for a change.  We had our breakfast and departed at about 7:30.

Thanks to a big ol’ accident on 35W, we sat at the exit getting out of Burnsville with no way to turn around for a good 30 minutes, and our total trip was about 90 minutes so we were actually a good half hour later getting to daycare & work than usual.

Happy Monday.  Not only is there a daycare in the same office complex as where I work, there’s also a bar!  Pretty tempting, even at 11am on a day like this.  Uff!

I’ve been getting tech news and other random news from the site digg.com for a few years now.  I’ve always liked the site, but the latest redesign is absolutely awful.  I’m constantly getting errors, I don’t like the “My News” page that it starts with because it’s all useless junk…and there’s no longer an “Upcoming News” section.

I think there are a lot of people out there who feel the same way, and digg is clearly taking a big hit right now.  You can definitely tell that their large user base has left because the top stories don’t have nearly as many diggs as they normally would.  Not to mention most of the top stories are useless junk submitted by large publications like Time rather than by basic members of the community.  Digg has clearly sold out to the highest bidders.  It now is just a platform for syndicating paid content.  I have an RSS program for that.

Fortunately, Fark.com is still a favorite source of mine, and I’ve been checking out reddit.com for the first time, which has the essence of what made digg good before.  Reddit just doesn’t have as nice of an interface.  It’s obvious we’re witnessing the death of a once-great website.

So long, digg.

I ran a required update for Acrobat Professional on Thursday, and spent the morning dealing with an unusable Acrobat Pro.  Every time I would export a PDF from InDesign, I’d get the below message and it would force quit:

Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional cannot be launched at this time. You must launch at least one other suite component (such as Adobe Photoshop) before launching Acrobat 8 Professional.

For one thing, there was a suite component open (InDesign).  So the message makes no sense.  Even with Photoshop open, it would call up this error and quit.

Fortunately, I started using Apple Time Machine recently since I finally have a backup drive.  I was able to easily restore the previous version by just selecting the Acrobat Professional application folder, going back a few days, and then clicking restore.  This was my first excuse ever to use Apple’s Time Machine to restore something, and I must say this is incredibly awesome software.

Others without a backup might not be so lucky, and will have to follow the instructions here or wait for Adobe to fix it.  If you want the immediate fix, it sounds like you’ll have to hunt down your serial number which is a pain.  Or you could just reinstall from scratch and not update.

And I thought Adobe was bad at alert messages.  Seen today in my Google Adwords account:

On January 1, 2005, AdWords system will be unavailable from approximately 3:00 AM to January 1, 2015 3:00 AM Eastern Time due to system maintenance. Please note that your campaigns will continue to run normally during this short downtime. We apologize for any inconvenience.