After the having lunch at Cheesecake factory with the wife, we decided to walk off the calamari and head over to the new REI store.  We had been looking at a new bike for me (I haven’t been on a bike in 10 years?).   I wanted a hybrid and really wanted disc brakes (if possible).    She got her Novara road bike last year and really liked it, so we just got back with a Novara Big Buzz hybrid for myself.   Also picked up a new helmet and some other accessories.  We even got in a few miles (3.2 miles) before the sunset.   Wow..  its been a long time since I road and my butt knows it (even with a new pair of bike shorts & liner).

[edit] – Updated my theme while I was at it.

You can find this in  Documents/Flex Builder 3/configuration/.settings (Mac) or My Documents\Flex Builder 3\configuration\.settings (Windows).  Thanks to the archived FlexCoders list for the answer. Google was no help on this one.

Dear Adobe – I’d sure love to be able to name my workspaces instead of choosing them by their directory location.   Looking at a bunch of directory listings when switching Workspaces is not all that user friendly.

In the case of the Diebold software, it seems like the voting card (looked like a compact flash card?) seems to be easy enough to be tamper with. Not to mention, the voting information is stored in on a central polling machine in a Access database which can be easily modified — or so it seemed from the movie (they really didn’t cover the actual specifics on how they tampered). The movie didn’t cover the security measures that surround the voting memory card and how it is cleared prior to a vote or how it is transferred from a voting location to the central tallying machine, but I’d imagine it doesn’t include Brinks Security and an armed escort. These systems are being used by lots of counties all over the U.S. and its probably regular people like you and me.

The possibility of tampering with votes has been an issue since probably the first time we ever took a formal vote. And it’s only a matter of time before electronic voting moves from the current physical electronic boxes to using the internet so we can all vote from the comfort of our home or office. So how do we really insure the integrity of the data … voting data or other? How do we ensure the public that our votes are really being tallied correctly? Maybe we can’t? Maybe the further we get removed from the vote and the counting system, the less sure we are that our votes are being tallied correctly. Seems like we still have a lot of work to do.

Anyhow… it was an interesting movie and will definitely make me think during my job.

[Update]I wanted to add that I found it extremely humorous during the movie when the representative from Ohio voted to reject the Ohio vote and then we saw statements from several other senators, etc basically saying in Congress we shouldn’t question the system that elected them. I couldn’t agree more. If we are going to question the system that elects people, we really shouldn’t have those to stand to gain/lose the most to investigate.

There is a need to protect our designs and technologies, but these recent trend of patenting concepts (w/o a built product) and then suing someone who has built a similar product is getting ugly, and our customers/users are the ones suffering, not ot mention innovation.

I had been working at MGM MIRAGE in their graphic arts department as a senior Flash designer working on their electronic marketing.  The work was not very motivating, but my co-workers were a blast and I was still doing Flash sidework where I was able to stretch my Flash/ActionScript wings and do things that were more challenging.   A few months ago, I was presented an opportunity to work as a UI Designer for Aristocrat Gaming working on the UI for their casino management applications.  It was an opportunity I didn’t want to pass up. So, as of October, I have been working at Aristocrat.  There have been some challenges since I started. The biggest challenge has been incorporating UI design into the current process.  It really didn’t exist before.  There have been some growing pains, which is to be expected. Anyhow, two months in and we are moving forward.  Its been bumpy at times, but there is a lot of support for it and it will be successful.  BTW – Fireworks rocks for rapid prototyping of interfaces.  I’ve always used it for my Flash development for it has been a super super tool for me in the last two months doing mockups.

My current hurdle is getting a grip on MS Expression Blend .  If you haven’t heard of it before, it might be because it has changed names twice already.  Blend used to be Sparkle, which became Interactive Designer, and is now Blend.   Blend is a lot like Flex Builder for Flash. Its a WYSIWYG tool for designers and it creates the code in the background (XAML and C#).  Where Flash/Flex is for web development, Blend is more targeted for desktop application development. I’ve spent a large amount time with Flash (and even Flex), so Blend isn’t too hard to grasp how to lay out controls etc.  Right now, I’m just trying to adapt all my Flash/ActionScript knowledge and find where it fits into the Blend/XAML/C# world.   Lee Brimelow has done quite a bit with WPF on his blog and has plenty of examples.  Hopefully we’ll see more examples from Lee and others targeted directly at “Flash people” so we can make a good transition.  

Maybe we can even convince Lee to write a Flash/Flex to Blend & WPF book for Lynda.com    Hopefully, once I have more seat-time with Blend, I’ll be able to post up my findings. 

I don’t own a PSP yet, but I have been thinking about it for quite some time. With the new reduced pricing (no value pack) and the upcoming hardware and software upgrades coming, I am getting to that point I want to get one.

Personally, I would love to see Flash become more like AE. I had a hard time adjusting to the Flash timeline when I first started using it 8 years ago and I always found the  Flash timeline odd, and the lack of real control limiting when animating.  Now, I have long since adjusted to this but there are still days that it just makes me scream.

So this got me thinking again that maybe Adobe was looking to bring back LiveMotion – or atleast its essence.  Adobe definitely is asking around on how to bring these two applications together and provide better integration.  Changing the Flash timeline could upset a lot of existing users.  Plenty of people are just used to working with the Flash timeline and for many, this is the only timeline they have ever worked with.   I think there are similar uses of AfterEffects — people who have been using the app since its incarnation and would not appreciate “dumbing it down” to gain more users from the Flash community.

So bringing back LiveMotion (maybe they’ll call it Flash Pro Animator or even AfterEffects Elements) makes a lot of sense to me.  Give LiveMotion a 2006 update to bring it up to Flash 8 features, fix the poor ActionScript support (from what I remember AS was painful in LM), provide some new features such as being able to import and export of both FLA and AE projects and sell it for an attractive price point.    Oh  yeah..and kill off the Flash Basic product.

Just my two cents.. take it for what its worth.