Stupid F1 tricks
What do you do if you have a million dollar Formula One car, a lot of engineering talent and a bit of extra time? Apparently if you’re a Brit, you teach the car to sing “God Save the Queen.”
Face to Face with a Katydid
I was looking through some pictures I took last year around this time. I found this guy nosing around in Stephanie’s flowerpots on the front porch. He didn’t seem to mind posing or being misted with a little water while I stuck my macro lens in his face.
2007 Petit Le Mans
The anticipation is building.
In a little less than a month, the American Le Mans Series returns to Road Atlanta for the 10th anniversary of the Petit Le Mans. For those of you who don’t follow this sort of thing, it’s a grueling 10 hour, 1,000 mile event, with four major classes of cars all racing simultaneously on the same twisting 2.54 mile road course. It’s an endurance race, but the quality of competition is so high, it’s run like a 1,000 mile sprint. This year’s race will be run on October 6th, with qualifying and other support events beginning on October 3rd.
The Petit Le Mans has become a must-attend event for me for several years now. Get your tickets here and I’ll see you there!
Climbing Flash Mountain
I consider myself a decently skilled Flash developer. However, I don’t use the program frequently enough to keep up with the constant pace of change in ActionScript. So it seems that every time I start with a significant Flash project I’m faced with the decision of either sticking with the backward-compatible language choices or forging ahead into uncharted territory and learning new skills. I’ve always been the type that wants to use what’s best—not necessarily what’s easiest—so I again find myself scaling a learning curve.
Adobe’s decision to rewrite AS from the ground up was a good one. A lot of the schizophrenic weirdness of AS2 seems to be gone, and AS3 is now a proper object-oriented language with all the standard features that are expected these days. Maybe now it’ll stabilize for a while…
So here I am once again surrounded by a stack of books. Poking, prodding and testing to see how things work under the new regime. It’s one thing to understand how to use a given feature or two. The trick is to grok (did I just say that?) what the best practices are and use the tools to the best advantage.
So no pretty pictures to share this time, unfortunately. Perhaps I can put together a little Flash gizmo to post here before long though… Until then, I’m clearing the desk to make room for more manuals.