aM laboratory

I havn’t done anythine like a lab in a long time. Maybe I need to stop working on project all of the time and start playing around again?

I’ve been playing around with AS3 over the past few days, and now it’s time to try and do something meaningful with it. I’m going to redo my portfolio site. This outta be fun.

Since FuseKit doesn’t have an AS3 version, I’m going to use the Boost Animation System. It looks pretty full featured.

The hardest thing about AS3 for me now, is not typing an underscore before movieclip properties.  And the alpha property is now 0-1 instead of 0-100. I guess it makes more sense, but I’ve got years of learning to undo.

I think that I’ve found my perfect job posting. Sr. Flash Engineer at Yahoo. Would be nice if I qualified, however. Well, at least the qualifications fit with in my new “damn-I’m-out-of-touch-get-back-in-the-game-learning-plan.”

Found via the Zeus Labs blog. Which is a great Flash blog altogether.

This cartoon was passed around my office in email a few years ago, and I still have a print out pinned to my cube wall. I look at it every day and every day it seems more true.

There is a fully updated site for it now, with new panels and the ability to create your own with draggable panels and editable captions. Spiffy. You can also purchanse it on a t-shirt from CafePress.

Here’s an in-depth analysis of it. It’s all so clear now!

Growing tired of Aero, I bought and installed a copy of WindowBlinds yesterday. I picked out a good theme, turned off DWM and started my work day. My laptop seemed faster, Flash still worked, everything was fine.

Until I tried to connect to my XP machine via Remote Desktop. I have to do this since my employer’s Citrix security check won’t pass my laptop with Vista. It would connect and begin logging on, and then the connection would drop. My wireless connection even dropped a few times. I rebooted both computers and nothing would fix it. I even had DEP terminate a few processes.

Unloading WB completly fixed the problems. Crap. Well, back to Aero.

Update: Well, maybe that wasn’t it. I couldn’t get my laptop to stay connected to my network tonight. I had installed Parallels the day before WB to play around with Ubuntu, but apparently it’s virtual network driver doesn’t play nice with Intel’s wireless driver on Vista. Now that it’s gone, everything is normal.

We rode the Sherman Branch trail for the first time Sunday – and what a great ride it was! After riding only Whitewater for the past two months, it was a refreshing change. Lots of switchbacks, jumps, berms, etc. We completed all of the loops and rode the “Roller Coaster” an additional time for a total of around 13-14 miles. But 14 miles here is a lot different than 14 miles at Whitewater – you’re constantly pedaling here, there aren’t very many down hills to coast down. I could barely walk out!

Found a map of it in the Tarheel Trailblazer’s forum.

I’m looking forward to going again next Sunday.

I’ve done a lot of work on Player4 over the past week and a half. I’ve almost gotten it to the point where I can begin creating web sites with it. Just a few more tweaks and then I’m ready to start redoing my portfolio site with it.

I’ve added:

• page transitions
• deep linking
• keypress registery framework
• simple accessibility framework
• themable site backgrounds

There is still a ton of work before this is ready for any kind of e-learning use, but it’s well on it’s way.

Since I havn’t really said what Player4 is: It’s a Flash framework for easily creating web sites by using simple SWF files and/or XML for the various pages. It’s not very small (220k right now), but there is a lot of stuff availible that will save countless hours of AS coding.

This guy caught a 1lb 4oz piranha in the Catawba river. This is like 5 minutes from my house!

“I don’t know anybody who’s ever caught a piranha,” he said. “But I especially don’t know anyone who has one on their wall.”

One more reason not to swim in that river.

I’m not quite sure what Virb is supposed to be. But I’m fairly out of touch with the online world. Seems like it’s a classier MySpace – atleast it has the potential to be. It’s more arty/designery anyway.

I made an account for myself and imported this blog (I think it’s supposed to pull new content periodically via RSS), but it imported two of every post. I can’t seem to find time to update my real site so I wonder if I can even update a profile on that page?

Found it via Robbie Player.