I’m at the D-Flex meeting listening to my co-worker Jason Fincanon giving a talk on skinning Spark components in Flex.

Jason Fincanon Speaking at D-Flex

If you’re a Flex developer and you live in the the Dallas area, you really should try and make it to a future meeting.  Lots of content from the speakers and lots of people to connect with.  Bring your business cards.

Okay, I must admit I get a little goofy with some bathroom humor. I’m in my forties and I still find it funny. Forgive me. Anyway, I saw this list of fart types years ago and was reminded of it recently by someone mentioning crop dusting. To understand why that’s funny, read on… Continue Reading »

Jason Fincanon is busy again posting about Flash. This time it’s not about anything code related.  It’s about elitism amongst the Flash communities top echelon. I can’t say that I disagree with him.  Knowing Jason, he dislikes the arrogance that some people fling about.  Talented as they are, some of the Flash community developers have that air of self importance.  They cling to each other as the top dogs in their field and, with witty words, gather quite an audience.  Then you meet these people, or you try to express something to them that you feel in all earnest is something useful to the community, only to be ignored.  Of course this happens in so many areas of life, but it appears to be a growing issue in our community of developers.  Hopefully it doesn’t go beyond what we’re seeing now, but hearing it come from Jason lets me know I’m not the only one feeling this way.  And judging from the reaction of others on his blog and Twitter, I’d see there are quite a few of us.

An Alley in Anthon, Iowa

I took a little trip back to my hometown in Anthon, Iowa.  It’s pretty much a bump in the road with about 630 people living there.  No, it’s not very big.  Yes it has electricity.  It also has a grocery store, a convenience store, two restaurants, a bar, a bank and a handful of other business.  No we don’t have a mall, or a Home Depot, or even a Wal-Mart.  Anthon people get by.

The reason for my trip mainly dealt with my grandmother’s house.  She’s moving to a smaller, more manageable house a couple blocks away and was hoping someone in the family would buy her current house.  My wife and I are very interested.  It’s a nice home with lots of good memories in it.  Made of redwood, it has hardwood floors, a basement, a second story and a very large and open attic.  Being on the older side (probably over a hundred years old) it has room for some updates and probably needs some work here and there.  But it’s definitely livable.

The picture I added to this post is of an alley in Anthon.  Frankly, it makes the town look even more rural than it really is, but I thought it was a nice image of a small Iowa town.

Jason Fincanon has written a follow-up to his previous post called Getting Started with Spark Skins: Transitions. It’s a bit more advanced than his previous post and shows the wonderful power of Flex transitions.

Recently charged with implementing a Flash component called 3D Wall Pro from Flashloaded, I quickly ran into a snag of sorts. A bug if you will. It came up because of the particular way the images needed to be laid out, according to the designer’s specifications. The designer wished to have the images displayed with minimal gap between the thumbnails. On a click, the image zooms up and the eight neighboring images still have an edge inside the view space (Figure 1). The thinking is that you can then navigate one image over at a time if need be instead of clicking the full image to zoom out then click. Continue Reading »

Here is a great article at Smashing Magazine titled “The Definitive Guide to Using Negative Margins.”  A very good read, except for a quibble I have about the doubling up of an element to create beveled text.  Just a quibble, though.  I must admit that I felt a bit dirty using negative margins in the past.  Now, however, my conscience is clean.

My good friend and co-worker, Jason Fincanon, has found time between updating the 2nd edition of his current book and working full time to publish an article for InsideRIA about skinning with Spark.  You should definitely have a read if your even remotely interesting in skinning for future Flex applications.

http://www.insideria.com/2009/07/getting-started-with-spark-ski.html

Good news.  Internet Explorer 6 support has been dropped from the very popular YouTube.com.  If this is the start of a trend, let’s hope it rolls right through IE 7 as well (not gonna happen soon, I know).  Losing the support for browsers that do not support web standards is nothing but a boon for the web as a whole.

My wife alerted me this morning to a $12 charge on our credit card.  The company that issued the charge is called Complete Savings.  I hopped on the Internet and started doing a little digging, and I immediately turned up some good returns.  It turns out that when you sign up for Pizza Hut delivery online, Pizza Hut feels it’s okay to sell your credit card information to 3rd parties.  Complete Savings, without our acknowledgement, signed us up for a discount program and charged our credit card $12.

We only used Pizza Hut delivery once and I can say with confidence we will not be using them again.  Now I have to wonder what else will be charged to my credit card.