Panic Software are those lovely and brilliant folks who make Transmit and Coda, which I use every freaking day of my life and with a great deal of gratitude. [When was the last time you considered your life enriched by a piece of software?] Apparently Transmit was listed among the “70 Tools Freelancers Rely On Most” on FreelanceFolder.com, as was Coda, of course.

I just had time to skim the article, and still came away with some great new open-source sw recs: an invoicing program called Bamboo, and GIMP, an image manipulation program, among others. Now I am practically joined at the hip with Adobe Photoshop, so I’m not really looking for new image manipulation sw. But I’m thinking I can recommend GIMP to my friends and familly who want to remove red eye and straighten horizon lines.

Finished my Christmas shopping and picked up a maneki-neko piggy bank for my nephew Lucas, who adores kitties. I originally wanted to get him a copy of Wabi Sabi, a book about a cat by that name who is searching for the meaning behind it. But the book is sold out simply everywhere. No mind, I will pick it up for his birthday in a few months. And good for the author and illustrator of Wabi Sabi — it’s a beautiful book and they deserve to have that success heaped upon them, for sure. I am including an image of a maneki-neko here for the uninitiated, but I want to make sure to give full credit to the artist Mikoto over at Red Bubble, where you can buy a print or a t-shirt with this image. I liked how the ¥ and $ symbols are helping to spell out “YES.” Clevah.

Word clouds are wonderful things, especially for someone like me — I’m very visual, but also someone who loves words and reading. Word clouds also just so conveniently create a snapshot of meaning and emphasis.

Up until now I had only seen word cloud plug-ins for blogs and the like, to show what was abuzz at any given moment. But there’s a site, wordle.net, which will generate a word cloud based on your text input, a URL or a del.i.cio.us user name. Try it out, it’s a lot of fun.

I create this word cloud by cutting and pasting a rather large collection of favorite quotes I had accumulated over the years. This word cloud is also hosted at wordle.