Archive for December, 2004
21st December 2004
Again, I swear I’m not dead mon.
Yesterday was a hell of a day and today will probably be about the same.
It sounds like we finally made a decision on the insurance. I was dragging my feet a little, I just wanted to best educate myself before I made a decision. But I must have spent about two and a half hours on the phone yesterday with agents and Sarah trying to figure out what to do. Sarah, as a result, had a very busy first day off.
Then, there is work which made some more official announcements yesterday on what we are going to be doing. It may be too soon to just post it here since we only got a more official announcement yesterday, but I know I will be saying something soon and will get to tell all of the family over Christmas.
Then, when I got home, I got a super DUPER piece of mail. Summons for Jury Duty. I knew that there was something my life was missing and man, was that it.
So, I need to really get going into work. As it looks right now we could be heading back up to Michigan tonight. But I am toying with the idea of waiting one more day and staying through with my remaining vacation until Monday.
Talk to you soon, if we don’t see some of you first.
It is now almost an hour later, as I realized that this site was messed up for a number of days, and that I had to go through my stylesheet and correct a whole bunch of errors. Just goes to show you to not be too anxious when using “Find and Replace” in Dreamweaver.
18th December 2004
Happy 25th Justin Varner!
One of my oldest and best friends in the world, Justin Varner, turns a quarter of a century old today, so from Rotheblog congrats big boy.
Justin and I have a funny story about how we met, but first, let’s all ooh and aah over the childhood photo.
This photo is funny because you would decipher that Justin was really into his little league baseball team. However, Justin and I only played baseball together for one year. He actually was more into Soccer and Swimming, which the latter was very strange to me at the time.
The other really weird thing I found when trying to find a photo was that I didn’t have very many of us. I have all of these photo albums full of ex-girlfriends that do me no good now, but not enough of him and me. Nothing I can do about that now.
But, the story about how we met. After my fifth grade year, my family moved to Grand Haven Michigan. I made it there in time for the summer baseball league, and my world revolved around baseball.
I didn’t have any friends obviously, so I looked down the roster for the baseball team, and figured out who on the team lived closest to my house and Justin was the culprit. We didn’t really have anything in common until a little later in life, but now we have a ton of interests in common and a lot of history.
So bud, I know you are sick of hearing that story, but it means a ton to me. Your friendship means a ton to me and I look forward to our next 25 years of life.
17th December 2004
Growing older can truly be incredibly stinkish at times.
Last night we got to talk about the wonderfully delight intricacies of home owners insurance. I think I’d rather sit on an ice pick. Cartoons make jokes about Insurance being that last “rite” that you kind of cross into naturally when moving into adulthood.
My dad had some helpful insight into home insurance last night, but I would love to hear any advice from anyone else. Any bad experiences to watch out for? Additional services you thought would be good but ended up being a rip off? Like that buttered bird insurance for those situations where if a person standing exactly 101.2 feet from your house is hit with a falling buttered bird from the sky that the insurance company will pay out 5,000 dollars in stuffing and cranberry sauce?
Absurd? Maybe not. Maybe just a feeling personified when it comes to how ridiculous how much insurance you need in your daily life to survive.
I won’t get into “The Apprentice” too much right now, other than to say, Mr. Trump made the right decision, and “Stupid” - Rosa from season one has about the same amount of insight to offer as the first time round. Double standard. Listen, Kelly knew when to command and when to be quiet and follow. He took criticism and that is what will make him great, his persuasive ego. Jen, blatantly bit the hand that fed her and came off like she knew more than George when it came to how she treated her main sponsor, “Jenworth”.
When that sort of defensive behavior is not present, then you can talk about a double standard because that can be very true, but it was hardly the case this time round.
Oh, and I wrote more but didn’t finish our trip to Kentucky last weekend.
David Wray’s Christmas Party
Just for starters, look at the Lightsaber replica, metal handle and real swishing and clashing sound effects included. I thought that this photo, with the limitations of my dinky digital camera considered, was a cool one with the glow.
Oh, and the photo of the three of us is from David, thanks man. But I had a choice with another photo, and I chose this one because that way I won’t get grief from a certain someone about her sleeve falling down. Even though I look like a total loser.
Anyway. Christine and I were invited to this party during the Mid Ohio Convention the last weekend of November. I didn’t at the time know if we would hear back from David or not, but he was true to his word and we got his information about his little Christmas get together about a week later.
However, I had had a heck of a weekend with driving the prior weekend in Michigan and didn’t really feel like driving to Kentucky then the next weekend, and Christine was gracious enough to drive. She was pumped about going, and even though I was a little on the fence, her excitement is pervasive and will envelope you.
We left on time and actually the drive was a little less than 2 hours so that was a nice surprise. We got there five minutes early and we among the first couple of people there, but most of the crowd came soon after.
David’s house is crazy awesome, and not just from a geek standpoint. Two story brick with a basement, if it wasn’t dark out I would have taken a photo. Needless to say that he does real well for himself.
David also is an awesome host. From my personal standpoint, I went being a little nervous that I wouldn’t know anyone and if I would be in an outgoing mood or an introvert mood and how much that affects my time. But from the time we walked in the door he made sure we were accounted for, how we were enjoying ourselves, if we had some drinks, etc. Soon, we saw more familiar faces from the convention and we were up and rolling.
David’s house is immaculate, and I don’t think that it is just a party setting. He is a rare Type-A comic guy personality. He had many of his commissioned art pieces around his house and I even have a photo of one above. That is a Superman by Alex Ross that David actually had signed by Ross. The nice thing about Ross is that he isn’t too stylized, and has been somewhat mainstream (See Oscars from about two years ago) so the general audience can appreciate his craft.
16th December 2004
I got in early enough this morning (7:45) that I have time to type. With everything else that is going on in our lives, it sounds like things are getting even busier here at Esystems. That is great, I just know that there is never a time in my life where I say, gosh, what am I going to do with this :15 min.
I am posting photos from the Christmas party last weekend today, so that is cool.
Also, I did get that computer from Sandy Pride, Sarah’s fellow 1st grade teacher, last night. I can remember those days when I said, “What super dork would need more than one computer in his house?” Well, with five monitors and three towers in the house in two weeks I look back and think now I am “that guy”. Plus the time this week of tearing out my parents old computer parts out of their crappy Compaq case and rebuilding it in another case, the house has looking like a computer junk yard with screws, power sources, and E-IDE cables all over the house.
I don’t really wear my under pants any different, I just happen to be able to recite more of the components in each computer than the names of the students in either of Sarah’s classes over the past two years.
Which by the way, Sarah, yeah you know, my wife, my great wife. She is looking forward to the break and having time off and having time to think about the house. She has been great about getting home after she got done with the day this week and calling on home insurance stuff. Her Christmas party is this Friday so I think she is really looking forward to that. Let’s see, what else will my mom want to know?…..Hah, just kidding mom. You are the only one who actually reads this, so I love you even more for that, the little stroking of the ego makes the world go round.
I’m babbling, on to the photos.
Oops…One of the girls from the front office just came down and I spent some timing touching up a photo of her one year old son so while I am posting the photos now, I will have more of a write up tomorrow because I am out of time for a change.
15th December 2004
I am not dead. I swear. Well maybe just a little.
I have been a little stressed lately with updates to different sites and developing a brand new site for a customer. I always demand the best of myself which can be difficult.
I am still going to post images from this last weekend on the blog soon. I am going to get a new computer tonight from one of the teachers that Sarah works with, an old Compaq from 2000. Now that I have Sarah’s set more how I want it, I am going to turn this one into a server with Linux to play around with.
How do I prevent a pause in my preloader as a result of scripted sounds from the library?
For the longest time I had problems in Flash when I was using sounds. Like I discussed in an earlier topic here on the blog, I prefer to dynamically call all sounds from the library because that gives me the most control in timing in my movies. If you don’t know how to make a sound available to be called, check out this article from August.
The problem with calling those sounds is how they are loaded. When you go into the library, right click a sound instance and choose “Linkage” > “Export for Actionscript” by default, the dialog box also checks the “Export in first frame” option. So what this means is when you are writing your preloading script that is returning all of the byte information when it gets loaded, there will a long delay and then it will show up on screen with a good portion of the movie loaded. The desired effect would be for the user to see the preloader load from the beginning, from 1% loaded as it were.
Because we are checking this “Export in first frame” option, the sound actually loads before the first frame, and loads before anything else can happen. This is true with any object, from images to other symbols, that are set up for actionscript. That can potentially be a ton of information that needs to load before you can start “loading” the rest of the movie.
Well, this is how you prevent that.
Usually the preloaders that I create are movie clips that tell the main timeline to stop playing, and this movie clip is located on frame 1 of the timeline.
When the whole movie has loaded, I then tell the preloader “gotoAndPlay(”start”)” which usually also happens to be frame “2″ where the movie starts. If we want to use linkage on sounds, but don’t want to check the “Export in first frame” option, the sound has to be on the timline somewhere. This can become confusing when it comes to movie clips if you are going to drag them off of the viewable area, but with sounds it is really easy.
Look at the image above. I actually have a layer called Sound. You will also notice there is a music note looking thing in the second frame. If I extended that empty keyframe out farther you would be able to see that this is the sound I want to use located directly on the timeline.
“But the sound will start playing when the playhead rolls over it” you say. Not if you set the “sync event” to “none”. In order to do this;
1. Click the sound on the timeline.
2. Look down in your property inspector for the sync drop down box.
3. Set the sync box to stop.
4. At any time call on your sound in the movie and it will work just like you had exported it in the first frame.
The beauty of this is that when you are using your preloader, the sound size will be included in the total movie size since it is on the stage, even though it is set to “stop” and will be loaded with the rest of the movie.
I hope this fixes any problems you may have with delays in the start of your preloaders, and the preloaders starting up half way through the process. Use my contact page if you have any additional questions.
12th December 2004
We had a ton of fun last night in Kentucky. We thought it was going to be over two hours down there, but it was only about 1:45, so that was a nice surprise.
It was a beautiful house, and there were a good amount of people there, probably at least 35 at one time. I will get to that later, as well as fun pictures, one really great one of me with a glowing replica lightsaber.But to not diverge too much from the original idea of this blog, I need to write about something helpful to the design world.
This week’s topic has to do with Flash and using dynamically loaded elements from your items library and the problem when “loading on first frame” when it comes to preloaders. If you do any Flash and preloaders for movies, you should read this. It will help you out a ton, I guarantee it.
Oh, and I did about 3 hours of fiddling with PHP BB, which is a open source PHP forum. I am hoping to have that setup, but I don’t know when. But watch for that soon, as I just got the contact page up and running yesterday as you may have noticed. Now with a simple click of the button you can contact me with little muss or fuss.
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