How I Roll

I've been trying to eat better, what with my surgery and all, so that I can have some energy and get better. So I decided this morning to hit Burger King before work. That's Burger King #12976 on Bench Road, for those keeping score (not that anyone is). So I get their cheesy bacon wraps because they sound good, some "hash browns" (tater tots) and cheesy tots with some coffee. I head into work. On the way, I pop a tot in my mouth and find that it's sour. Same with the "hash browns". Same with the browns inside of my cheesy wrap. Since I've tasted oil as it's starting to go rancid, I know the taste. It needs to be changed out. It's one of those inevitabilities of fast food. I know, I worked fast food.

So I get to work and call, hoping that too many other people's breakfast won't be ruined. I'm not sure who I spoke to, but when I told her that they needed to change the oil, she began arguing with me that it was new oil and there was absolutely nothing wrong with it. I can understand her hesitation to admit that the oil was going rancid in our sue-happy nation, but I was making a courtesy call. I wasn't demanding money back or a fresh order. I just didn't want other people's breakfasts to be ruined like mine. It was my one little good deed that we all often do but never think about.

But she argues with me about the oil. I can even picture her motioning to the other staff to change the oil--though I have no real proof of this; I just like the image in my head. If she had said something like "It is on our checklist and I'll make sure that it's done. Thank you." I would have been happy. Instead I get the run-around for being nice. I wasn't going to show up with a news crew and start a Chili finger situation. I was even over being irritated about my ruined breakfast until I talked to the employee.

So what of it? What's the moral of this tale? Don't eat at Burger King? Not really. I've eaten there a ton of times over the years and rarely gotten the wrong order (and then usually it was because of a new employee learning the ropes) or had a problem. I just needed to vent in hopes that someday when that employee is in the drive-through at McDonalds and gets some fries out of oil about to turn, she doesn't get hassled for a courtesy call. Then I'll be able to call the burger wars not on taste or price or selection, but on common customer courtesy. Because the Burger King that I called sure as hell doesn't understand their customers or courtesy.

Well, appendectomies seem to come at the absolute worst times. Not only have I been rendered useless when it comes to painting (which was what was on schedule this week) but also moving heavy crap (which is on schedule for next week). At least I'll be able to clean the apartment and not feel like a complete loser while Marni slaves away at the house. At least she's had some great help from her Dad and Walt (both are absolutely awesome!). Her dad, of course, came to see the show and brought the Bullock brood--or as much as could come, and Walt's just an all-around wicked-sweet guy! He's also in the play I directed as inspector George Jenkins, so you should definitely check it out this final weekend!

So they've been over at the house working, Marni basically every waking moment and moment that she's not on stage, and everyone else when they can help. And I've been sleeping. A lot. It's pretty much what I've done for the last couple of days. Slept. Which makes me feel like crap knowing that everyone else is working their butts off!

One of the worst parts of it is that I wasn't feeling well enough to go see my show. I couldn't tell my actors that they rocked, couldn't watch them rock the house. That's one of the most depressing things. I'm just so exhausted...and I'm not even doing anything. At least I don't have much pain other than the incision area where they had to get through a little muscle to get to the appendix (I have muscle!).

Marni's been absolutely wonderful, as you can imagine, though it is wearing thin on her since she's overwhelming herself a thousandfold with the stuff that the both of us were overwhelmed with before. She's strong and will make it through, though. Only two weeks and we'll be in San Diego with Steve and Randy and then on to Hawaii.

Of course, we have to move out of the apartment, which is almost all big stuff that we haven't been able to take in small loads here and there, clean the apartment, get the bills/mortgage/etc setup for autopay, and get the house into at least enough order to be able to leave it for three weeks without feeling like we're grotesquely unprepared to return.

So here I am, sitting at the computer, waiting for Marni to come home from painting with Walt so that we can go visit my mom and show her that I'm really, truly okay and not going to die any time soon (until I see the bill, maybe). At least I had a dream where I was in a Chinese emperor's household and worked in the kitchen. I basically moved prepared dishes from the kitchen to the table and placed them in the proper place. That was my entire function in life 24/7. The pasteries and dishes were amazing! It was a banquet for millions, it seemed. The entire dream was in Chinese with subtitles, so I knew what was going on. Whenever the Emperor finished eating, he would have all of the remaining food sent to the poorest districts and distributed.

At least I'm having interesting dreams even if I'm not anything remotely useful.

 I really like the Fail Blog.

 

Scrapbooking Fail

 

Adlink Shortcut Fail

Final Sales Fail

Safety Fail

Utility Commission Fail

Security Fail

Naming Fail

Design Fail

Signage Fail

BBQ Sauce Fail

Well, this weekend counted up the three theatre weddings of the summer! The first was Marni and I's wedding in June, then Ted and Trina's in August, and finally Cassandra and Nicks this last weekend. Marni and I are attending a non-theatre, family wedding next saturday as well. We also ended up at a birthday BBQ with Regina for her daughter Jitaya's birthday last night, which was a ton of fun!

I didn't get many pictures (and the ones I got were really bad for the most part because the iPhone camera combined with my shaky hands makes for bad pictures!), but I did get a few.

Feeding the Cake

They were sweet when feeding each other the cake, which was par for the course with the weddings this summer! No messy cake fights. I guess I do still have one wedding left to attend...

Dance

Cassandra and Nick are such a pretty couple. As you can see, another photographer was stealing my thunder. She actually had a camera and was trying to edge me out of the competition.

At Nick and Cassandra's wedding, there was a girl (one of Cassandra's sister's friends) who was wearing a long shirt as her outfit. The pictures don't really do it justice since she was part of a group each time I took a picture (rather than a focused close-up). But it was a fun outfit that caused many a jaw to hit the floor. It didn't hurt that she was stunningly beautiful as well.

Shirt Girl

Here's a better one of her.

Shirt Girl

It was, of course, very fun to watch the reactions of the wedding goers as she did the electric slide around the room in a shirt that was seemingly threatening to ride even an inch high enough to shock the world. She was an expert at deftly managing it, though it was obvious that as soon as she walked into the room, many many guys' eyes were on her. I had to take a picture because it is one of those things that I not only do not get to see everyday (ie. not everyone gets a run-in from the late 60's shirt-dress fashion re-trending), but something that people wouldn't usually believe unless they saw it. I really wish my phone took better pictures and that I could have gotten pictures of the people's faces! She even dove to get the bouquet.

I wish I could have gotten pictures of Regina and Jitaya, though. Jitaya was as beautiful as ever (especially when she had the microphone and was suddenly self-conscious about singing "Who Let the Dogs Out"), and Regina was stunning as always. Cutest Mama/Daughter combo in existence! (And Regina caught the garter as well!)

The wedding was a blast, though, with much dancing and fun to go around (as well as a chocolate fountain and lots of nummy food. Ted and Trina's wedding had excellent food, too. Kinda made me sad that we couldn't afford food at ours...but not sad at my pocketbook now!

Nick was appropriately happy with the whole event (and more so about running away to Canada, I'm sure!).

Pleased Nick

I wish I could have gotten photos of Ted and Trina's wedding since it was absolutely beautiful as well. All-in-all, it's been a pretty great summer for weddings! Next summer should be nice as well, with Rob and Virginia and Jamie and Wayne on the wedding block!

So I'm using Google Chrome and testing out WordPress, Joomla, etc with it...and it seems to work very, very nicely. In fact, it is quickly becoming my favorite browser (and that's only from a few hours of using it!).

When it comes to browsers and usability, I tend to like the simpler side of life. I do wish it had an AdBlock option by default, though. I'm sure it will be added quickly enough either as a plugin or as a splinter project called something crafty like Ad$FAIL.

One of the features that I really like as a web developer (you never suspected I was so crafty, did you?) is the Inspect Element feature. It's quite a handy feature, being able to see how each element fits into the page (and how it is being interpreted by the browser; which is even more handy). It's not as full-featured as Firebug from my little bits of testing, but then if casual game development is on the lower tier of game development, I'm a casual web developer (if even that).

I've had it crash a couple of times on different pages, though not on ones I expected it to crash on (Joomla or WP WYSIWYG editors). One was Plurk, most likely because the AJAX pipeline was kicking the hell out of the JavaScript VM in some manner. But a reload fixed it as it re-instanced the tab. The other was on MySpace, most likely because of some horrible coding mechanism embedded somewhere in one of the awful stylesheets I saw.

When it comes to Browser UI, I'm a minimalist and like it to look shiny (it is minimalist but not shiny). Moving the tabs to the top makes sense from the application POV (file folders should be shown like that), but it also takes me a bit more time to get it there. It does, however fit a great usability guideline of having an infinite ceiling since I can jam my mouse up and not have to target a "tab top".

Hopefully tomorrow I'll get to do a bit more playing with and actually give it a real test-run. I did find the auto-installer interesting and kind of nice. I kind of hoped that none of the malware sites would pick up on its techniques. "You don't have the right codec to watch your pr0n...install now!"

I recently had a moment to revisit the examples included with the Flex 3.1 SDK and realized that there is really no need for an alternative toolchain because it already exists. Perhaps people did not go through the samples; perhaps they did not understand the batch or shell scripts. I'm not sure, but using the examples, most people should be able to put together a basic Flex app and understand the toolchain.

I might sit down and explain it a bit more in-depth since that is obtuse, but everything is there to use it.

I've noticed a couple of people who are having difficulty learning Adobe Flex because the (online) documentation is highly Flex Builder-oriented. This makes perfect sense since Adobe has released Flex for free to the world. They need something to make a little scratch back (some would argue that they've been bleeding us dry for way too long, but I really do not agree with that fully).

So I decided to put together a simple, free Flex toolchain. It is not nearly as friendly as Builder, nor does it have Builder's excellent features and support. It also doesn't have the excellent documentation that can be purchased separately from Adobe (and which I believe every Flex developer should have in their arsenal).

But, considering people are having such a difficulty with setting up a working toolchain, I thought I might just give it a go. Here are my primary requirements:

• Free. All tools and scripts should be free for end-users.
• Run external programs from within the editor. There are several free editors, and the point here is to run it through a project editor which will generate the index.html as a test site and copy the generated FLA's into place for testing...and then loading it up in the browser.
• Same as above, but with an AIR launch option.
• Editor with language configuration for MXML and AS3.
• Run from a Jump Drive (ie. no registry changes, etc).

Those are the five primary requirements currently. I'm going to get started on it; who knows how long it will take since my life is becoming very, very busy very, very quickly with Cash on Delivery starting soon.

Meanwhile, get up on your Flex dev skills with the 60-day eval of Flex Builder from Adobe and a little reading material.

Adobe Flex 3: Training from the Source
Price: USD 40.84

71 used & new available from USD 5.35

Well, Marni and I will be painting on the morning of the 9th at the Old Town Actor's Studio on Main. If you don't know OTAS, they are a new acting studio oriented towards providing entertainment that rarely gets performed in our region. It was started by my friends Jamie Romine, Angeline Underwood, Sherri Dienstfrey, and Skip and Camille Carter!

We're heading to the Farmer's Market and then to OTAS to paint. Their first rep shows are Mass Appeal and Dying City.

Then I get to head out to visit with mom and work on the show I'm directing at the Westside Players: Cash On Delivery. I have auditions here soon (Tuesday) and am looking forward to working with some of the excellent talent available as a director again!

Well, Marni and I will be painting on the morning of the 9th at the Old Town Actor's Studio on Main. If you don't know OTAS, they are a new acting studio oriented towards providing entertainment that rarely gets performed in our region. It was started by my friends Jamie Romine, Angeline Underwood, Sherri Dienstfrey, and Skip and Camille Carter!

We're heading to the Farmer's Market and then to OTAS to paint. Their first rep shows are Mass Appeal and Dying City.

Then I get to head out to visit with mom and work on the show I'm directing at the Westside Players: Cash On Delivery. I have auditions here soon (Tuesday) and am looking forward to working with some of the excellent talent available as a director again!

It seems that everyone, everywhere is blogging and tweeting and IM'ing to their heart's content. I've done my fair share of it in the past as well. I'm still seeming to do it as well. I've moved around a bit, and often left my previous .plan/blogging legacy to rot wherever I've been. But I decided to go back and look at the things that I have haunting my hard drive and try to find a place to talk about the new things that I'm looking at and interested in. Right now that is Unity, Torque, BlitzMax, id Tech 3, and Flex.