I was checking out the ads for Flash template sites on my site tonight and it reminded me of something that I meant to blog about long ago.  Early this past Spring I got a call from an old friend of mine who wanted a photography site (a flashy one..) set up.  I was super busy, but I wanted to help him out so I agreed to set him up with a site.  He takes some amazing outdoor shots, and has been to some nice spots.  Check out his site..

Anyway, back to the Flash template thing.  So remember this was when I was really busy and all, so I told him just to pick out a template from one of the sites and I’d drop his photos in and all would be good.  I figured It’d take a couple of hours tops.  And so he went and picked out a template, bought it, downloaded it, and e-mailed it to me.  I opened it the evening before we were going to get together and work on it and immediately knew I was in for more than a couple of hours.  What I found was code from the Flash 5 (maybe even 4) days, the library and layers were all one flat structure without folders, symbols in the library weren’t named in any logical way, it was built to ONLY have the exact number of photos and categories that were already in it, the original SWF was around 5Mb, and on and on..  It was a freaking mess….  but it worked.  And that’s the important thing. 

My buddy was able to look at the original SWF, tell me what he wanted changed, and after an evening and a couple of hours in the morning it was all working and he was happy.  There are a ton of things on the site that could be improved, but that can happen later.  The Flash template was a starting point, and that’s all it was supposed to do.  Even though I had to spend some time fixing the template (somewhat) to my standards I still saved a ton of time by using it.

ok, I've been under a rock too long apparently, because I stumbled onto flashfilterlab for the first time and spent a couple of minutes editing the dancer in the box. It took a minute to figure out where things are and how things worked, but literally within a couple of minutes I made the changes that I wanted to make and was having fun with it. I'm sure this was the buzz at some point, but I've been consumed with projects lately.

Ahh.. it's fun to see stuff like this and remember back to the early days. My how times have changed.

Back to work.

So a few years ago I bought a GMC truck.. back when they were doing that fine zero percent financing deal, and one of the options that came along with it was a "flex fuel" engine. At the time I thought that was a sweet thing to not rely on 100% gasoline, but of course there was no ethanol mixed fuel anywhere near here, and it looked like there never would be. I don't drive much, but the gas mileage for it was decent so I just enjoyed a ridiculously overpowered and undergeared speed demon and kept my mouth shut about it. Is it fast? yeeah.

Anyway, so fastforward to today, and suddenly E85 is the big deal. BP is now "Beyond Petroleum".. huh? And GM has a nice Flash site to promote E85. Check out the "video cobcast".. check out out the transitions.. it's a whole site in Flash, which is kind of odd these days..

Oh, and they have a "cornulator" that says if I switched to E85 I'd save 10 barrels of oil each year.

The only problem now.. well.. according to E85fuel.com the nearest gas station offering E85 would mean burning about 2 gallons of gas each time I filled up. I'd like to do my part.. but dam.