Finally…
The politicians in Pennsylvania finally did something right. The Penguins are staying in Pittsburgh.
Thank you!
Amazing Grace… a must see.
Last night, my company (Good Steward Software) bought out all of the tickets to a showing of the movie, "Amazing Grace". There were 125 tickets which were given out to friends and family. Needless to say, because there was free stuff involved, the theater was packed. I was really excited because with a 17 month old at home, Carrie and I don't get out much! So we were able to procure the services of a baby sitter for Maggie, and we got to go out on the town (or at least the movie theater) for a few hours.
I didn't really know what to expect for a few reason... first, I had no idea what the movie was about. Second, I'm not a huge fan of historical movies. I like movies in general, but my favorites are usually more action filled, or gut busting comedies. Ok, fine, so I like to be entertained when I pay the 8 bucks to see a movie... sue me. Anyway, I went in not expecting much... and left truly inspired.
The film tells the story of William Wilberforce, who began the movement which eventually ended the slave trade in England in the late 1700's. What is truly amazing about this story is the persistence and determination that Wilberforce maintained throughout his life. The battle that he faced was one that didn't last a few months or even a few years. This fight, the fight that Wilberforce knew to be right, began in 1790, and ended with the passing of the Slavery Abolition Act shortly after his death in 1833. Even after being laughed at so many times, he never gave up. That, my friends, is heroic.
There were so many great lines in the movie too, but my favorite was spoken by Wilberforce to who would become the Prime Minister. He said, "We are still young enough to believe in the impossible". I hope I never get that old.
been there, done that… bought the t-shirt
Last week I had the privilege of attending the 360Flex conference in San Jose, California. I didn't really know what to expect since I am new to Flex, but it turned out to be a great trip. I learned a lot about Flex and now my head is filled with ideas that could benefit from this great technology. Hopefully in the next few days I'll post some sample code from the conference (Written by Tom Ortega) that I'm adapting to use a HTTPServices written in Ruby on Rails. Trust me on this one, it's cool stuff. I'm sure we'll all be seeing more of Flex in the near future.
During this trip, I also had the opportunity to visit the Apple Campus in Cupertino, California. I'm a relatively new Mac user, but I was still really excited to go there. I did buy the one T-Shirt that I have wanted since I found out that it existed. It simply says, "I visited the mothership".
I love that. I have to give much credit to the Apple marketing folks because they come up with some great stuff. I came very close to buying a second shirt:
For those of you who don't get it, 'Redmond' is referring to a certain Company based in Redmond, Washington. I wish I could come up with stuff like that!
Flexable Flex
As I am writing this post, I am sitting in the auditorium of the EBay Town Hall in San Jose, California. No, I'm not here to try to get my money back on a scam auction I was involved in... (another story, for another time!), I'm here for 360Flex. For the last 3 days, Ryan B. and I have seen some very cool new technology at work. It's called Flex, which isn't really new, since it's at 2.0, but it's becoming evident that as a web app developer, it opens a lot of doors to some things that were either not possible or very painful to do before.
Anyway, we've seen some of the development team from Adobe show off some of the things that they have done, and it's quite amazing. Here's a sample. So I'm seeing some of this stuff and realizing that this could completely redo some of the things that I do. In the hotel last night, I slapped together a Flex front end to a Rails back end web services... and I was able to do it in less than an hour. And I didn't even know what I was doing! And just like that, I've got a rich front end that looks identical on any web browser out there. Super cool. I'll probably stick a post up here in a few days that shows how to do it.
P.S. We also made a stop to a certain company store. more later.