Microsoft Office 2007 Review

I do my best to be an early adopter when it comes to geeky stuff. My most recent download? Microsoft Office 2007. It just barely came out and it's been about four years since the last Office release (I could be wrong but I think 2003 was the last release). I've had Office 2003 for a while but it's not a lot different than Office XP or Office 2000 in my opinion. I was anxious to try out the new 60 day demo of '07. Thanks to my blazing fast cable connection, the 720 MB download took 12 minutes- not too shabby (about 1mb/second). The install went smooth but I'm not sure that the second part of the download, which made up about half of the 720 megs, was for. The first half installed everything.
Anyway, the new interface is pretty consistent throughout the various programs. Word, Excel, Outlook and Powerpoint all have a new navigational interface. No more File, Edit, View, etc. Now they have tabs with different shortcuts and options across the top. It's very intuitive and makes a lot of sense.
One of the biggest differences that you notice right away is the new look. Everything has a very slick and modern look to it. Maybe Microsoft has taken a hint from Apple or something, but I really enjoy the look of the layout, splash screens, backgrounds and menus.
<-- Composing an email is entirely different than before, too. As you can see in this screenshot, there is a Windows button on the top left that has a lot of the root features like open, save, print, etc. Email composition offers the same tabs as Word, making it easier to apply formatting to your emails- something that most people don't do much of but maybe that's because it wasn't very convenient in previous versions of Office. Also in Outlook, when you mark a junk mail as 'not junk', it automatically puts it into your Inbox. I always thought it was dumb that when you used to mark an email that had been filtered into your junk box as 'not junk', it would leave it with the junk.
The last thing that stood out to me was the new quick search feature. I use a Mac at work all day and I love being able to search the computer and network very quickly and easily in any window. Along with Office '07 comes a quick search feature that lives up to it's name. Google had a desktop search feature that came out a couple of years ago that indexed your files and allowed you to search quickly but I eventually stopped using it. This one seems very similar and seems to work really well. I can't say I'm gonna miss the little dog. That dog would dig and dig for what seemed like hours and rarely found a bone. Tchau, puppy.
All in all I'm very pleased with Office 2007. I'll probably go ahead and get it when my trial runs out. A 60 day trial is great, though. I'm not sure if it's done as a marketing tool, but I really like the fact that it's twice as long as most trials. Props to ol' Willy Gates on this one. Nice work.

PS- I hope to have a Vista review soon but I haven't gotten the official version yet. I had the beta but it didn't work that well so I uninstalled it.

A lesson from Chris Fenison

I often scour the internet in search of stunning photography and great wallpaper. Chris Fenison's work has graced my screen many times. I wrote him to ask him how he achieved a certain effect in one of his photos and to compliment him on his work. He replied almost immediately and shared his wisdom. I gave it a try and here's what I came up with. Very cool what playing around with some layers can do. If it isn't obvious enough, the edited version is on top with the original photo underneath. Quite a difference. Not as cool as Chris' photo but very cool nonetheless. I hope he doesn't mind me sharing his technique but here it is in his own words:

" [In] Photoshop duplicate background layer, change blending mode to multiply, gaussian blur it (radius of 10 or so), duplicate that layer and change blending mode to screen, duplicate the background layer again, run unsharp mask (pretty heavy, like too much), change blending mode to overlay or soft light, move layer to top, play around with the opacity of the top three layers.

Confusing huh? Really the trick is to master the blending modes and apply filters to duplicated/blended layers. Start with overlay and soft light blending modes and go from there."

Thanks to Chris and all those who willingly share their talents. Photography is tons of fun. Photoshop makes it even better.

Pirates, John Grisham, Legos and Frosting.

Katrina and I finally watched the much talked about 'Pirates of the Carribean 2: Dead Man's Chest'. We watched the first Pirates movie a while ago and thought it was pretty good, nothing great but not bad. The second one, though- my goodness. It was about 7 hours long and full of horrible looking creature people, the most offensive of which was squid grill- a gnarley sicko with a squirmy tentacle face. Nasty. He was unpleasant to watch and the movie seemed to last forever. I still don't know why Davie Jones' heart was in a chest somewhere on an island and he controlled the giant sea monster... or something. Anyway. Two thumbs down from the Rasmussons.
I downloaded an audiobook last week called The Testament by John Grisham. I generally enjoy Grisham's work but I've never read any of it- just watched the movies. I guess I'm still not reading it, just listening to it, but it's quite enjoyable. It's 12 hours long and I'm about half way through. I just listen to it in the car and I'm completely drawn into it. I have a hard time getting out of the car when I get to work or get home. The book is great so far. I'm very curious to see what happens but I would already recommend this book to anyone looking for a good book to read. So far it's very clean, too.
Tonight the kids and I hung out while mom and Grandma went to the movies. They're not back yet but we had a full night. As soon as they left we started making cupcakes. While they baked we made pudding. Before that we played legos. After that we played hide and seek. Anders likes to hide under blankets and giggle. As soon as you finish counting he yells, "Here I am, Daddy!" unable to control his excitement. Kinda ruins the game but he has fun. I made a sweet airplane with the legos. I used to play with legos for hours and hours. I have to say- I still got it. My airplane was flippin' sweet. That's about it for now. I'm going to add some photos of our blessed evening now. Rock on. Nils.
PS- I'm really not thrilled with Blogger's interface so these are out of order but you get the idea.

Lost

It's terrible. Just after moving in to Katrina's mom's basement, Katrina and I lost her engagement ring in a collaborative effort. She took a nap on the bed (which was a guest bed at the time) and then got up and left the room. She placed her rings on the bed. Later I took that bed down to put up our own bed. In the process, I saw her wedding band in a pile of bedding. I didn't see the engagement ring anywhere, though. We haven't seen it since. We've torn apart the room three times, checked all the bedding various times and... nothing. I just finished looking through the bedroom again and it's depressing. It's been about a month now. I just called Tom, Katrina's brother, who said his brother in law has a really nice metal detector. We hope it will help. Katrina got matching rings for her birthday but they're just not the same. Plus the engagement band was awfully expensive. Katrina knows. She paid for most of it after we got married.

The Prodigal Blogger Returns

NILS - So I haven't posted anything to the blog in quite a while, but I have been busy enough to justify my absence, I think. It's been a great couple of months, though. My new job is going really well and I finally finished one of the company websites. I also am designing their higher end racing simulators, so they'll look like little mustangs that you sit in and race. I'm also starting to design the logos and artwork for the various gumball machines and skill games that we produce so maybe in a few years you'll see my artwork in every Wal-Mart, Old Navy and other gazillion stores that buy our machines. That would be pretty cool. I'm just about to start on the racing simulator website for work, so that should be fun. It's really cool to see how the work I do directly impacts the company for good, though. By no means am I the greatest web designer or graphics guy but they were in such need of someone with a moderate skill level that they're really liking my work. And there's plenty of it, too.

Also new in my life is my sweet new ride. I like cars- like every guy. So any new ride I get is going to be fun. My 91 Honda Accord Wagon finally earned the label of 'unsafe' recently so I had to get a new car quick. I was driving the accord home from work and slid into a curb pretty hard in the snow. It must have knocked something loose because it really drove weird after that and started making really loud noises. I tried to drive to work the next day but had to get off the freeway after the first exit because I feared for my life. Enter Katrina's car dealing brother, Tom. He doesn't sell cars for a living but he buys them more than many dealerships. In this case, his brother-in-law left for a mission and failed to sell his car. Tom ended up with the job of selling it but it was out of our $6,000 price range so I wrote it off. Tom decided to pitch in some money to help pay for it in order to get it off his hands. Long story short, I'm now driving a 2001 Acura 3.2 TL for $7,000. Nice. I realize a car is a car, as long as it gets you from point A to point B, but this car makes it a heck of a lot funner than my old Accord did. Plus it's an Acura, which is made by Honda, so it should be a trusty car for a good long time, and a safe one, too. Two words: Heated Seats. Aaaah, they're great. Now the 1.5 to 2 hours a day I've been spending commuting to and from work are so much nicer. Also, when we move into our new house, I'll still be spending 1 hour/day in the car, so the 29 mpg is nice there, too. Not to mention the 225 horsies under the hood :)

The coolest new thing to happen since I last wrote, though, was our recent ultrasound. First of all, I think ultrasounds in and of themselves are pretty darn amazing. It's like a really expensive pair of x-ray glasses. We went into the doctor and saw our little.... GIRL! She was awfully squirmy, which was pretty neat to watch. We were both completely shocked because we just knew it was a boy. Or so we thought. Needless to say, we're really excited to know that we're having a little girl- it's gonna be a lot of fun. It's also much easier to talk about our little girl rather than 'the baby'. So we're really excited. June 2007. Child Numero 3 :)

In other news, I finished Paul Chilton's website once and for all (even got paid) so that freed up some time. I also finished Jon Saline's website. That's very good. That frees up some time to start on my next website, which is a collaborative effort with my brother, Grove, who is extremely talented. We should be starting that later this week. To make life even greater, I was only able to enroll in two classes this semester- due to lack of availability mostly. I'm slightly unhappy about this but mostly relieved. Full time school and full time work and side jobs and commuting and church and family and hobbies... it's all too much some times. It's great to get a break in one area. I plan on spending a lot of my late nights working on the basement in our new house, so it's convenient to have less school right now.

Last but not least is our upcoming home remodeling project. We've decided (at least for now) that we're going to remodel the kitchen of our new home before moving in. We're also going to re-carpet, repaint and replace all fixtures and door knobs. Wow- that's a lot of work. Luckily we're with Katrina's mom right now so we don't have a big mortgage to pay for at the moment. I'll be doing a lot of the work myself, which means a lot of trips to Saratoga Springs after work and long Saturdays there, too. Honestly- I love that kind of stuff. What I don't love is being away from family, though. So we'll have to work something out to entertain the kids while we spend shifts up there. It'll be awesome to move into a virtually 'new' home. Once we're in, the work begins on the basement. I drew up a 3D layout of what we're thinking of in Google's SketchUp software. Pretty cool for free software.

I guess that's the gist of my recent days. If any of you read this whole post, good for you. I have a tendency to post huge books due to infrequency. By the way, if Dave or Holly Lesue read this- I really like your blog. You guys blog how we should. Short and frequent posts with lots of pics. Very nice. Well- it's homework time. Yippy friggin' skippy.

Peace Out. -Nils

New House!

We bought a house last week. It's very scary to me, but also exciting. We broadened our search to Saratoga Springs and found this house in the Harvest Hills development. That's the one right by Smith's and Redwood Road, so it's not 10 miles down by the lake or anything. We aren't going to put any of our townhouse earnings down, so we'll use the money to finish the basement and make some improvements to the upstairs. Two words: Brass doorknobs. They must go. Anyhoo, we're hoping the loan will go through within a month or so.

The last week was birthday mania here at the Rasmusson compound. Anders turned 4 on the 6th, Addie turned 2 on the 12th, and I turned 29 on the 14th. Geez, I'm such a geezer. My last 20's birthday...let me wipe away the tear. All take note: next year I want a surprise party for my 30th. I can't believe my kids are that old. Anders used to be in my belly, and now he says things like, "Mommy, Dear Heavenly Father made our tummies soft, because that's how he made us". He thinks the "Dear" is part of Heavenly Father's title.
Addie's coming out of her "I hate Mom" phase, which I'm enjoying. She still confuses the heck out of me about 40% of the time. I can't figure out what she wants and she screams at me. Speak, child! She's getting much better with talking, she has words for most things, but hasn't started putting words together yet. The other day she did say, "juice...eh...eh, NO!" when asked if she wanted juice. Little Addie. I love her.

The above pictures are of them at the mall on Addie's birthday, and of them playing Elefun on Anders' birthday with Dad and Uncle Greg. Just in case any of you are considering buying this game, don't. It's really so much less climactic that one might expect, and you have to refill the stupid butterflies literally every 15 seconds. LAAAAAME!

Alright, I'm done. Peace out, brothers and sisters. I mean that in an eternal sense, not a hip one.