Crossposted from Crow Brings Daylight.

I keep liking ActionScript more as I’m working on it.  Still a little slower at problem-solving than I’d like, and I keep falling into the documentation cracks between simple things and more complicated tasks.  For example, starting a new project using a Main Controller construction isn’t really well documented, and there aren’t a lot of example of taking a project from start to doing something useful.  That makes it a bit difficult for me because I tend to learn best by looking at examples.  I’ll probably be setting up a quick tutorial on setting up a project to show how classes in the Flash IDE interact with files on the computer for other people like me.

Anyway, here is the UI skeleton  that I’ve done so far:

Not amazing, but I think it works well for what it’s going to do.  I’ll keep the progress updated here.

Tags: uncategorized

Crossposted from Crow Brings Daylight.

Thursday, August 27th, I received an opportunity.  I didn’t ask for it, though perhaps I should have been expecting it.

That day, my wife and I both got laid off.

It started pretty normally as days go.  I had been working on the new inventory tracker for the equipment room at my workplace for most of the summer and had a demo on Friday.  I was close to done, really happy with what had been finished so far.  But I had this weird feeling of doom that actually woke me at  5:30 that morning.  I’m not prone to these things and usually ignore them, and had forgotten about it by 9:00 when I was happily coding.

A bit before 10:00 am, my wife called me, very upset.  She had walked into a meeting when she  got to work, and they told her that she was being let go.  We talked for a bit as she drove back the the house and agreed to have lunch.  I went back to coding.

I went home for lunch and my wife and I talked about things we could cut back on, but I assured her that we would be fine:  I had a good job, and there was no way they could let me go while they needed this equipment tracker that  everyone was really happy with and was going to make tracking much easier.  Right?

After lunch I went back to work, parked the truck and hopped out.  I happened to glance down and spied a dead cicada.  I got kind of excited about that, because I had been looking for something interesting to take pictures of.  I worked at a photography school, so I was expected to have some of my photographic work hanging outside my office.  I went past my boss’s office on my way to get a container for the cicada and I noticed the that school’s owner was seated in her office.  That feeling of doom?  I remembered it now, but I tried to put it out of my head.  He being in the office didn’t have to mean anything, and it didn’t have to be about me.

But it was.

I walked back past the office with the container for the dead bug and my boss asked me to come in and sit down.

I wonder if you always know?  Do you know what a verdict is before it gets levied?  Does the nail know about the hammer before it falls?  I did.

I squinted at her, looked sideways.  “You’re laying me off, aren’t you?”  Then I burst out laughing.  It was probably not what they were expecting, but was exactly the right response for the tragi-comic day it had become.  My boss and the owner were pretty quiet until the cackling died.  They did the normal explaining when my last day technically was (Friday) and when my health insurance would run out (also Friday).  They asked if I had any questions.

Could I hang on to my computer for a while?  Yes.

Can I meet with my co-workers who would be taking over my duties immediately?  Yes.

No other questions then.

Apologies, good wishes, promises of recommendations and I was out of the office.  I grabbed the two unfortunates that would be taking over some of my instructing duties and who would be responsible for finishing the inventory tracker and making any updates.  I think that is what upset me the most, that I wouldn’t be able to finish a project I had conceived, programmed and managed.  I said my farewells to the people who were there, and who had helped me, packed up my office into the Little Green Truck and was out of work for the first time since I was fifteen.

Now what?

Bones?

Tags: life

One of my co-workers asked me how my day was going, and what I was working on, and I had a flash of insight into why I'm not very communicative with questions like that.

I have been programming a data massager * in Python for a new equipment mangement system during the past couple of hours, and couldn't get my list of string permutations that identify the models to populate. Print statements and debugging littered a tiny, tiny function that should have been over and done with in about 20 minutes. I'm poring over websites and looking at my reference books and swearing at my code, the books, the sites, God and the bat that I had to wrangle at 2:17 am this morning. Then, the caffeine kicked in, or the borken cylinder in my brain started firing and I realized that instead of doing a "!=" (not equal) comparison, I had mistyped "==" and so was never actually adding anything to the list.

Right now, I've probably lost a good portion of my readers who aren't programmers, and here is the beginnings of my incommunicado.

I don't want to blow a whole bunch of code-y nonsense at people who aren't interested, so I don't want to fully explain the problem as I just did above. So I could say:

"I mistyped something and spent the next 2 hours dealing with my mistake."

Hmm, that doesn't sound like I'm a useful member of society, does it?

"I was having programming difficulties but I figured it out."

Seems like an awful lot of words for something which is essentially:

"Bad, but now good"

Which reduces to:

"Good."

And so that's what I go with.


* Programming-wise, that is exactly as dirty as it sounds, and I have to wash afterwards.

Tags: social commentary
Current Location: Hallmark Institute of Photography
in my head: thoughtful
in my ear: Crimewave - Crystal Castles vs. Health

I've been working on my web design skills for the past month. Not my web programming skills, but the design work itself. If I want something centered, or a certain width, or to access a database, I can do that in multiple languages. But what should the application wear? Is it a high-heel and little black dress application? Hard hat and blue jeans? Naked with red lipstick? I'm not very good at dressing them yet, and I'm realizing my weakness when working with my students, because they ask me questions about it all the time.

My first realization was Don't center. Centering is the first impulse when doing web design for some reason and it is almost always wrong. It's what you do when you don't know what to do.

A person's eye tends to start at the top left (or right for some languages), so that is where the most important things should be, not the top middle. Reading is also easier if the left margin is consistent. Designs that are centered are harder to read, and because there is not a consistent margin on either side, it tends to look messy.

For a great introduction to design, use this book: Non-Designer's Design Book by Robin Williams. It might not be for the web, but the concepts in it work for web design.

Tags: web design
Current Location: Hallmark Institute of Photography
in my ear: The Future - Leonard Cohen

At Hallmark, students are currently having their portfolios reviewed after the work that they've done in Phase 4. I don't have enough photographic knowledge to be able to comment on much, but I noticed something about many of the interior shots (rooms, hallways, atriums, churches) that are being done. Almost all of them are using HDR, and I really feel that it takes something out of the image, and it makes people a little lazy. Everything becomes equally lit, and all of the details are clear. Now, you would think that having all of the details be clear would be a good thing, but in most visual arts, clarity and visibility, whether with focus or lighting, indicates where your attention should be and helps to set the mood. HDR allows you to see clearly, but it doesn't really make a better picture, and people don't usually take the time to go back in and make choices about mood and what is important in the image.

To contrast what HDR does, Gregory Heisler took a photo of George W. Bush in a conference room, and carfully lit each portion with different lights: A big light out the window, a different set of lights for the back of the room, a set for the left of the former president. And all of these were choices to highlight different portions of the image.

I'm not trying to be a luddite here and say that a good HDR image can't be created. Just that it's not enough.

Tags: photography
Current Location: Hallmark Institute of Photography
in my head: working

Sometimes, the internet coughs up strange things:

http://www.meatcards.com/

Just a little something I thought that I would pass along after seeing it on Boing Boing during a break between classes:

Tags: animation, fun
Current Location: Hallmark Institute of Photography
in my head: happy

This is why I don't build houses.

If you can't see the problem, you shouldn't build houses either.

Tags: building, fail
Current Location: Hallmark Institute of Photography
in my head: amused
in my ear: Over + Under - Joydrop

Just a little link whoring here, after getting the link from Daring Fireball:

This is how Social Media really works

The article is really just emphasizing the point that just because word of mouth in social networks online is new, word of mouth is still the same thing it has always been. Faking it, especially faking it and getting caught, just means that people will now have a new place to talk about your bad marketing efforts.

Tags: social media
Current Location: Hallmark
in my head: okay
in my ear: Massive Attack - "Angel"

I have forced myself to investigate Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. I have known of their existence for a while, since I do work with computers </em>every damn day</em>, but I have resisted actually doing anything with them. I spend enough time with computers that I don't want to have my social life consumed by the screen as well.

My students have other ideas. Much of what would be "hanging out" or talking on the phone or passing notes seems to have migrated online. Rather than fighting this trend as some people might like to do, I figured I'd see what was involved in using it intelligently. I've had a LiveJournal for a while, so I will mostly be comparing things to it. I'm not going to talk too much about the joining process for any of these, because they are all pretty easy and pretty similar. I'll be concentrating mostly on how they get used.

I started with Facebook. I'd been getting requests from friends and family (including my Mom!) for a while, and that is also what most of the students seem to be using when they should be paying attention in class. I was underwhelmed. You join. You can post links, videos and pictures, and tiny "what I'm doing now" posts. And you can add friends. But I didn't see anything especially compelling immediately. After living with it for a couple of weeks I'm beginning to see the appeal, even if it isn't what appeals to me. With LiveJournal, most posts are a few sentences. Or they have one link, and you join LiveJournal to see what your friends are doing. But short posts look a little lost in the middle of the rest of the LiveJournal page, because the paradigm doesn't really seem to be for short little posts. However, facebook does this perfectly. You can post one picture, or a short sentence or one link. And your friends check in on it. Nothing deep, nothing that needs to be thought about too much. And because your little blurb appears on all of your friends pages, you get immediate responses from people. And the more people you have as "friends" the more likely it is that someone responds in an ever-growing feedback loop that encourages you to post often and to get as many friends as you can. Almost like Pokemon. So it's feeding into people's need to be "popular" and keeping the effort needed low.

The next social networking site I tried was mySpace. This was much like LiveJournal, but there was less customization that was possible. Colors and backgrounds mostly. But it did allow long-form blogging like LiveJournal or other blogging sites. From what I see there, most people don't use the blogs to write long posts. Much like LiveJournal, a lot of the posts are very very short, and many of the mySpace pages have never been updated. They are only there for people to use to link up to friends.

Finally, I took a look at Twitter. Like Facebook, it took the form of short (140 character) blurbs, updated often. Also, like Facebook, it allowed people to be linked together by "following" them. However, I found that it provided more information than Facebook. Either Twitter doesn't have a lot of "noise" from the general public yet, or because the "Pokemon" aspect isn't stressed as much, I found it more useful and interesting. Using the new search feature, I was able to find developers working on interesting projects and other things of interest. And, unlike Facebook, I didn't have to friend them to follow what they were doing.

My conclusions? mySpace is going to die out, or decline to a niche market, much like Blogger or LiveJournal. It takes too much effort and displays too much information for regular people to keep up with. And most people aren't interested in putting up long posts about their life. Only people who are doing something really interesting or conceited dickheads like me. :)

Facebook and Twitter are going to be fighting it out for awhile, and stealing market share and features from each other. Facebook will probably get public news items and Twitter will get more social features. One may end up buying the other.

Bones?

Tags: social commentary, software
Current Location: Hallmark Institute of Photography
in my head: nerdy
in my ear: Dance Me to the End of Love - Leonard Cohen