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.
Updated debt clock to show over $10,000,000,000,000 Sunday, October 05, 2008
Dear Adobe Monday, September 15, 2008
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.
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.
Thoughts on FlashForward 2008 Saturday, August 23, 2008
I'm back from FlashForward and thought I'd jot down some random thoughts. I'm not going to attempt anything cohesive because.. well.. I didn't get a lot of sleep this week and then got back home on one of those cross country red-eye flights that seem to suck clear thoughts right out of me.
I checked The Goog for the responses of other people and saw that Caleb was blogging. He was swapping name tags with folks after the "supper club" party Wednesday night and I ended up with his name tag and one of his Fire business cards so it was cool to see that he posted some info about Jared Ficklin finally getting to play with some fire at the dinner.
Jens from Flash Magazine has a short article about the festival winners saying he'd heard that the single track format went well.. and Keith Peters seemed to enjoy it.. but Alex Bustin didn't totally agree with that.
Marty and Anthony blogged about the conference and gave a rundown of some of the sessions..
My thoughts on the conference?
Whew.. um.. this was the first FlashForward I'd been to since I presented at the SF FF back in 2004.. that was ages ago. I really enjoyed seeing the people who inspired me, pushed me, helped me, etc.. to get to where I am today. It was cool that most of those folks recognized me (or at least pretended to), and spent a good bit of time talking to me. Oh, and even cooler was being included in activities outside of the main conference with those folks. It was a real honor.
I thought it was interesting that one of the presenters asked how many people in the audience had Computer Science degrees and only about a dozen people raised their hands. The crowd hasn't changed since the early days, and I expect many of the newcomers with CS degrees are showing up at the Flex conferences. ? I came to Flash through art (yeah.. the design of my site sucks.. I know..) and was taught that to be an amateur is perfectly fine. I have no doubt that many folks out at the conference with Masters or PHDs in CS would consider most of the presenters at FlashForward to be amateurs at coding. I'm cool with that. How many inventions were made by amateurs in their basements? How many discoveries in astronomy and chemistry were made by amateurs? And it seemed like at least 4 of the presenters made a point of saying that they came from some totally different background besides CS and don't consider themselves to be experts in programming. I think it goes back to what a lot of the presenters who have been at this a long time said. In the early days of Flash everyone was learning this from scratch and it was all total experimentation. That sense of adventure and hacking is what kept the creative (and masochistic) types interested and scared away the more traditional.
The single track program worked for me because I only saw a couple of presentations that didn't really interest me or do anything for me. Having to sit through a few 20 minute sessions that I didn't connect with was fine because the rest were interesting. It's all about passion. I had a teacher in art school who told me that if you're going to survive in art you must be passionate about it. It has to be the first thing you want to do in the morning, and the last thing you want to do at night. I'm pretty sure most of the presenters (if not all.. well. . now.. Todd said he was lazy but I don't believe him) have that kind of passion about their work and it showed.
I heard a few people (both newcomers and old veterans) who were disappointed in the amount of code or "tutorial" style presentations there were. I can understand that because I'm the type of learner who learns from watching others do stuff.. but I also remembered from past conferences that the real value is in who you meet and connect with at the conference. I went to the bowling party and saw almost everyone there really enjoying themselves and talking to other people. It's those live and in-person connections with other people from all over the world that can make going to a conference worthwhile.
The party Thursday night at Ruby Skye was great.. especially if you were able to find the quiet room up on the second floor where the pool tables were. I got to talk to Rob Bateman (of Away3D fame) and it was nice to be able to carry on a conversation without having to yell over the music. But.. Now, I did enjoy that bass they were cranking out.
I checked The Goog for the responses of other people and saw that Caleb was blogging. He was swapping name tags with folks after the "supper club" party Wednesday night and I ended up with his name tag and one of his Fire business cards so it was cool to see that he posted some info about Jared Ficklin finally getting to play with some fire at the dinner.
Jens from Flash Magazine has a short article about the festival winners saying he'd heard that the single track format went well.. and Keith Peters seemed to enjoy it.. but Alex Bustin didn't totally agree with that.
Marty and Anthony blogged about the conference and gave a rundown of some of the sessions..
My thoughts on the conference?
Whew.. um.. this was the first FlashForward I'd been to since I presented at the SF FF back in 2004.. that was ages ago. I really enjoyed seeing the people who inspired me, pushed me, helped me, etc.. to get to where I am today. It was cool that most of those folks recognized me (or at least pretended to), and spent a good bit of time talking to me. Oh, and even cooler was being included in activities outside of the main conference with those folks. It was a real honor.
I thought it was interesting that one of the presenters asked how many people in the audience had Computer Science degrees and only about a dozen people raised their hands. The crowd hasn't changed since the early days, and I expect many of the newcomers with CS degrees are showing up at the Flex conferences. ? I came to Flash through art (yeah.. the design of my site sucks.. I know..) and was taught that to be an amateur is perfectly fine. I have no doubt that many folks out at the conference with Masters or PHDs in CS would consider most of the presenters at FlashForward to be amateurs at coding. I'm cool with that. How many inventions were made by amateurs in their basements? How many discoveries in astronomy and chemistry were made by amateurs? And it seemed like at least 4 of the presenters made a point of saying that they came from some totally different background besides CS and don't consider themselves to be experts in programming. I think it goes back to what a lot of the presenters who have been at this a long time said. In the early days of Flash everyone was learning this from scratch and it was all total experimentation. That sense of adventure and hacking is what kept the creative (and masochistic) types interested and scared away the more traditional.
The single track program worked for me because I only saw a couple of presentations that didn't really interest me or do anything for me. Having to sit through a few 20 minute sessions that I didn't connect with was fine because the rest were interesting. It's all about passion. I had a teacher in art school who told me that if you're going to survive in art you must be passionate about it. It has to be the first thing you want to do in the morning, and the last thing you want to do at night. I'm pretty sure most of the presenters (if not all.. well. . now.. Todd said he was lazy but I don't believe him) have that kind of passion about their work and it showed.
I heard a few people (both newcomers and old veterans) who were disappointed in the amount of code or "tutorial" style presentations there were. I can understand that because I'm the type of learner who learns from watching others do stuff.. but I also remembered from past conferences that the real value is in who you meet and connect with at the conference. I went to the bowling party and saw almost everyone there really enjoying themselves and talking to other people. It's those live and in-person connections with other people from all over the world that can make going to a conference worthwhile.
The party Thursday night at Ruby Skye was great.. especially if you were able to find the quiet room up on the second floor where the pool tables were. I got to talk to Rob Bateman (of Away3D fame) and it was nice to be able to carry on a conversation without having to yell over the music. But.. Now, I did enjoy that bass they were cranking out.
Signed up for FlashForward Saturday, July 26, 2008
I'll be going to FlashForward in S.F. this year. It's been a while since I've been to FlashForward so I'm looking forward to it, and I'm curious to see how the new single track format works out. My prediction is that it'll work out great because the "networking" aspect of the conference will be emphasized and .. well.. given the economy there will probably be a lot of networking going on.
I can't wait to see the wild stuff people are working on with all of the new features in Flash/Flex/Air. The last time I went to a FlashForward I had several of those "holy crap..... I can't believe they did that with Flash" moments and I heard the same thing from one of the developers from Macromedia. To me that's the fun of FlashForward.. seeing how far people have pushed the boundaries of Flash and getting to talk to the folks who are doing the pushing.
Oh.. and if you're thinking of going but haven't registered yet then get in touch.. I've got a discount code for $200 off.
I can't wait to see the wild stuff people are working on with all of the new features in Flash/Flex/Air. The last time I went to a FlashForward I had several of those "holy crap..... I can't believe they did that with Flash" moments and I heard the same thing from one of the developers from Macromedia. To me that's the fun of FlashForward.. seeing how far people have pushed the boundaries of Flash and getting to talk to the folks who are doing the pushing.
Oh.. and if you're thinking of going but haven't registered yet then get in touch.. I've got a discount code for $200 off.
