oddhammer

It was a day I hoped would never happen, but I sat down this weekend and updated my little US national debt clock to display over $10,000,000,000,000. I say it's a sad day because despite what some people say (that the further in debt our country is the more prosperous we are) I find it hard to believe we're better off because of the debt we've just taken on. The whole concept of "money as debt" just seems corrupt. Then again, I'm not an expert on economics. Maybe having our national debt increasing at the rate of $36 per millisecond is a good thing.

The debt clock started when a friend e-mailed me a years ago and asked how to do a counter like a clock that starts at a specific point. He needed it in Flash so I whipped one together and sent it to him and then realized I could maybe do something worthwhile by putting it out there for people to use. I did.. and it hit myspace and facebook.. and I'm currently seeing about 65,000 views of it each month. I encouraged people to download it and install it on their own servers (it's not sucking too much bandwidth, but they shouldn't have to wait on my server for their page to finish loading..) so I'm not sure how many views it's getting that way.. I know it's being used on quite a few political web sites (both Republicans and Democrats running for Congress for example), in articles, and on some personal web sites.

I don't fuss with the accuracy of it since I figure if they can pull a number like $700,000,000,000 out of thin air just because it's "a really large number" then there's no point in trying to be too accurate on anything based on numbers provided by the same folks. I like to think that over the last few years I've helped a tiny bit to raise awareness of our out of control spending.. I can hope it's not too late to sort things out and maybe someday I'll be able to reverse the clock.

Some people don't like submitting bug reports about specific issues, but would rather just complain about general problems that bug the crap out of them. For those people there is the Dear Adobe site.

I don't particularly like the idea of smearing a company for no good reason, but if the people who are using the site have submitted bug tickets and feel like Adobe is ignoring them then I guess they have every right to complain.. or just use another product. That's part of how free market economics is supposed to work? If you find a better product then use it. And if the masses yell their complaints loud enough and the company is nimble enough then it'll fix the issues and keep the business.

Here's one I found: "please allow Flash's action window to stay visible when another app is in front, sometimes you need to compare code to something else." .. been an irritation for me for years and has been reported to Macromedia and Adobe many times. It's one of those "minor" issues that becomes major if you have to use the application a lot. I'm pretty sure I saw on one of the demos or heard through the grapevine that this has been changed in CS4.. so when you have the Actions panel open and switch over to another app the Actions panel remains visible. So maybe they did react and fix that. I'll keep my fingers crossed for code folding.

ok, so this shot through the old radar way back (first of October?) and apparently a lot of people had the same reaction I did "..too... busy... will.. deal... with ... later.." because I rediscovered the Adobe AIR Marketplace today and saw that there were 27 apps listed in the Most Recent list. So I looked through those and thought some were cool and clicked on Highest Rated.. same 27 (but different order of course). So I clicked on ALL.. same 27.

I'm interested because I'm just finally getting into AIR and need some examples to show people and the AIR Marketplace has some but I'm finding there are more around. Submit them to the Adobe Marketplace if you've got them.

And if you have no clue what AIR is then go here and/or to the Adobe AIR Marketplace

I added the BlogRush widget thing onto my blog to see what the fuss is about. It looks like an interesting way to link to other related blogs and offer a different way to surf, etc.. they'll eventually put some ads in with the links, and it looks like people will be able to buy "credits" so their links will show up in the little widget, but it doesn't look like bloggers will be able to make $ off of it unless maybe there's a way to sell credits? hmm.. However, it might provide some increased traffic.

If you run a blog take a look at what they're building up here. They have a nice stats system on the backend that lets you see how much traffic you've generated, and how many times your links have shown up on other sites.

It's also based on a referral system, so if you get others to join then your links will show up more often on other sites.