I spent years using illustrator but now that I am dead set on a FOSS path I decided to learn inkscape. I was following this nice wiki article on inkscape for illustrator users
The one thing that I really miss is the gradient mesh tool. Just about everything else is fine for me, but that one feature made illustrator so awesome. It looks like some people are working on it for inkscape so it may happen sometime but in the meantime, blah.
Tonight, I followed this guy's tutorial

on building a rock with inkscape. I think the tools are pretty neat still, althoug it is hard to train you hands to do something other than what they are used to.
I remember reading an article about this somewhere .. of course now I can't remember the municipality. The highway superintendent said they could use paint, which only lasts a year, or some kind of tape which lasts much longer but is more expensive. He said the tape was so much more expensive than paint that it was still cheaper to repaint the roads every year. Score one for technology, I guess.
- Z
They must. It's how they waste the city's money - just like they stretch the repairs through the ENTIRE summer and half the winter every year.