Birnam Designs Blog -- sharing tips, resources, ideas, and more on web development and design

Two years ago, I would have told you it was impossible. One year ago, I would have scoffed.

After freelancing for twelve years (minus a few months here and there in the very early 2000s), I will soon be a fully employed Senior Creative Developer. Beginning tomorrow morning, Nov. 15 of 2010, my new home-away-from-home will be with the wonderful folks at Modea. I’m absolutely thrilled about my new position, but that doesn’t mean it was an easy choice.

I’ve really enjoyed being a freelancer. Being in the freelance community. Feeling like I am apart from the system. Working to build my own name. And most importantly, working directly with a ton of really awesome people. It’s that last bit that made the decision so hard. I don’t like goodbyes.

I’ve been very privileged to enjoy a large number of repeat clients. A huge number of my projects are with clients I’ve grown with over the last decade. These people aren’t just clients. And they’re not just friends. They’re partners. And they will be missed. If the reader happens to be one of my clients — thank you, from the bottom of my heart.

I am extremely happy about the new future I have in store. As I mentioned, I will be acting as Senior Creative Developer. Modea is a rapidly growing company, with a lot of great people, and a lot of interesting projects. I’ve been contracting there for the last six weeks, and it’s been a joy. Thank you, Modea, for honoring me with a job offer.

And so it begins, a new chapter of my professional life, in about - oh - eight hours. Bring it.

p.s. A note to my clients: my contact information hasn’t changed. Please get in touch if you need files or resources from our past projects. And please, continue to view me as a resource for advice and answers.

I don’t have a Vista horror story, everything has worked remarkably smoothly. That’s not to say there haven’t been any glitches, just that my overall experience has been very positive.

One minor problem that I’ve had is with Dreamweaver — the 8.0.2 update didn’t install. It turns out this problem is only with 64bit version of Vista, and is actually a problem with the InstallShield wrapper around the update file. Fortunately the fix is simple enough — even though it is fairly difficult to locate!

Adobe outlines the problem here, and provides the update file without the wrapper.

That’s not the end of the story, though. Unless you run the file with administrator privilege, you will get an error as soon as you run it. It’s a little difficult to run it with administrator privileges, though, because it’s an .msp file and “Run as Administrator” doesn’t appear in its right-click menu or properties dialog. To get around this, you need to open a PowerShell or command shell with administrator privileges, and then run the file from there.