Current Reading and Exploding Fruit

Our ceiling is currently spattered with smoothie, looking in many ways like a murder scene. I think the difference is that I’d have more motivation to repaint and cover it up if I had indeed mutilated and killed. The culprit was a little, innocent looking fruit drink. You would think that you’d have to leave something like that for days before an explosion, but this was bought from a Starbucks around 9pm then left on the side the next day. We came home to find fruit flung around the flat.

I really had no idea how excitable and violent a little fruit drink could be. I guess I’ll know to be more careful next time… or at least film it.

I’m finding that a downside of living round the corner from Foyles and Borders is a tendency to get excited and buy more books than I have time to read. I’m trying to get through the following over the next week or two:

• The Designer and the Grid
• The Best Software Writing 1 (Joel Spolsky)
• Adobe Illustrator CS2: Classroom in a Book
• Foundations of Atlas: Rapid Ajax Development with ASP.Net 2.0
• The Lady in the Lake (Raymond Chandler)

The Joel Spolsky book is really enjoyable – reading after a recommendation from my brother. Many technically oriented books simply have no style. This is a collection of technical articles that break the trend.

I also realised that I’m much more familiar with Photoshop than Illustrator, so I’m making a concerted effort to work with both products together (hence the official training book). I tend to find that even in familiar areas you can pick up lots of useful information by following the path of someone else.