wheniwas19: April 2007

FiTC. Over for Another Year.

My body nearly gave up on me this year. I missed the entire first day (nearly) due to exhaustion.

Declan had some weird croupy cough Saturday night, so we brought him to emergency as a just in case. We were there from 10pm to 2 am. Now that's good, efficient healthcare.

On to FiTC;
- Craig had a nice dinner for some of us at the Korean Grill.
- Grant and Bobi came over to meet Declan and for some BBQ.
- I saw some pictures that looked suspiciously like Gmunk, Hoss, Marcos and Colin in a hot tub.
- Watched the sun come up with Dale, Marcos, Simon and Shawn.
- Someone made the mistake of saying "Hugh's more Scottish than you." To Hoss. HOSS! Seriously. I just kind of looked and thought, "That's not even close to true."
- Tink's newly bald head makes me want to rub lotion on it. C'mere you silly bastard!
- Shawn didn't make me pay for anything. Which is really nice.
- Mario and Alexandra once again show themselves to be truly nice people. And honestly, Mario's sincere enthusiasm just gives you more energy.
- Josh is one bad-ass poker player. So is Mario. Who knew? So I only won one game.
- Had to watch Lordalex explain once more that, "yes, really, my name IS Lordalex." That's always fun.
- Joshua gave me a nice print.
- Shawn yelled at me. I might have deserved it.
- John continues to rock. Even with short hair. Chris rocks, too, just not as hard or as well as John. It's not personal. It's a fact.
- I finally remembered Phillip and Keith's name(s). For some reason, I continuously forget both of their names. So I feel better. And they too were good sports about my particular personal foible or forgetting some names.
- No chance to wrestle Bradley, but give it time. And Chicago.
- Met Aral and Niqui. Two very nice people. First I called Aral "Raul" (honestly, when he spelled it, i thought that's what he said). And I thought Niqui was Autralian. Turns out, South African. At least she was a good sport about it.
- I DID forget more names than I remembered, but still it was great.

Another year gone. Another boatload of braincells given their pink slips.

Labels: fitc, flash, flashinthecan

8 Months Old. Not 9. 8.

I just noticed I made an error in the age of our boy. For shame, Hugh. For. Shame. Our little, getting bigger every day, bundle of joy is 8 months old today!

UWindsor

I recently finished up a project for the University of Windsor, hereinafter referred to as UWindsor. It was actually a very smooth project and I liked my team immensely.

If you know of me as a Flash Developer (or have read previous posts of this blog), you'll know I love using XML as a way of handling content. Thanks to a heads up from Alex Davis, I've started using XPath in Flash. Jen deHaan has a nice little article here explaining it's usage. It really is a time saver. No more looping through childNodes yourself.

Anyway, UWindsor wanted a site to pull in prospective students by showing them the university from the student's perspectives. Using testimonials from current students gave a voice to the site that would have been sorely lacking otherwise.

You get to the site from an email from UWindsor, since they control the url, we added in their first name as a greeting using base64 encoding and decoding. In this example, aGFuZGJhbmFuYQ== becomes handbanana.

The two guides, are equal on the main page. once you select either path "The School" or "The Scene" that guide increases in size, reinforcing the path you chose.

It was apparent early on that users are used to picking what they want when they want it. So we provided users with a video gallery of all videos used in the site.