Why Flex is a Big Sack of Poop That Should be Ground Up, Lit on Fire, Then Fed to Pigs (After the Fire Has Gone Out, Because I Like Pigs)

Why, Happy Halloween to you! I am filled with murderous rage. You might wonder why, if you did not closely read this post's title. The answer, as usual, is Flex, that dastardly devil of a framework.

So, let's do a little comparison. We've already seen what it takes to incorporate simple video into Flash and Flex. Now, let's say you have a bit of programming that you would like to turn into a SWC, which is a file format Flash-based applications use to store components. It is a self-contained file that can be loaded into other Flash applications to include its functionality into that app. It is a nice, compact, easily-transportable way to distribute code and components. So let's look at the difference between Flash and Flex in making SWC files. For our comparison, we'll assume that you have the component you want to make into a SWC all finished and available in your choice of application.

Here are the steps for making a SWC in Flash:

1. Right-click on the component in your Flash file's Library panel and select the Export SWC File... option from the context menu.
2. Select the place where you would like to export your SWC file to in the dialog box, give it a name, and hit OK.
3. Enjoy your SWC

The process for Flex is a bit different:

1. Create a custom class extending the Sprite class. This is pretty much a prerequisite for doing anything in Flex.
2. Have your custom class import the files you want to turn into a SWC, and in your custom class declare a property of the same class type as the file you want to make into a SWC. Do this for each component you want to include in the SWC.
3. Now right click on the Flex project and go to Properties. Select the Flex Compiler tab of the dialog box and enter in the compile command string specifying the file you want to convert into a SWC and where you want the compiled SWC to be output.
4. Oh right, you can't do that in Flex. Cancel out of the dialog box and go to the command line in Windows. Yeah, the command line, that thing that should have become obsolete with the advent of Windows.
5. Navigate to the directory housing your Flex compiler and use the compc command to use the component compiler to turn your file into a SWC.
6. Wait, it says that it can't find the file. We probably need to run the compc command in the directory our file is in. Okay, okay.
7. Right click on your My Computer icon and select Properties and then select the Advanced tab and then click on Environment Variables and then add onto the value of the Path variable the file path for the directory containing your Flex compiler. Follow that? Good.
8. Return to the (antique) command line and navigate to the directory holding your SWC-to-be. Run the compc command to convert your file into a SWC.
9. Hmm. It still says it can't find the file, but the file is right there. Okay. Let's try moving the file into different directories and try a series of options for the compc application to specify the location of the files to use.
10. Huh. Those are some interesting errors. Uh, let's try asking your co-workers, who are more experienced than you, if they have a solution. They're very busy, but I'm sure this will be faster than banging your head against a wall.
    
11. Okay, they're puzzled, too. Let's try including a library SWC of framework code that the application wants when we try to make the SWC.
12. Well, that didn't work. Let's try running an ANT script that will automate the process and make it easier. This worked in another project.
13. Hrm. It's not working in this project. In fact, it's still having the same problem as before where it can't find the file. Uh. Well. Uhm. Huh. I guess we'll try this some other time, okay?

Pretty easy, huh? By following these steps you too can make SWCs from your Flash or Flex files. Well, your Flash files today. Maybe your Flex files, tomorrow. We'll see what happens, okay?

Surprise!

Riding home yesterday was interesting. It was late and the sun had pretty much gone down. I had my lights on as I pedaled home. The evening was surprisingly warm and I almost regretted wearing my pullover. When I descended down the trail alongside the Platte, I instantly felt the cold air moving along the river. As I continued up Cherry Creek, the air was a strange mix of cool and warm pockets. One side of my face would be cool and the other side would be warm. I seem to remember a superstition people had about those odd pockets of warm air one encounters on evening escapades. I think they were called ghasts and you were supposed to say some charm when you walked into one lest they steal your soul or some such malevolent act. Who knew evening constitutionals could be so harrowing?

The morning had some interesting moments when Spivey came in and gave his one second notice. He's off to some other job, effective immediately. Not too classy, especially considering we're in the ramp up for a big project. The good news is I get a more favorable desk position and I will be more involved in the project. Today, I worked on a localization component, which came along quite nicely, making me feel rather competent. I also spent some time searching for some of my Dunnies. I made the mistake of mentioning how I was surprised that no one had messed with my figures, and now they occasionally go AWOL and turn up elsewhere in the office. Now they are proudly ensconced in Snake Mountain on the desk between Jun and myself. I tried to use Castle Grayskull, but they were all too short to be visible. Snake Mountain has all sorts of ledges and hidey holes that are ideal for dunnies and aliens. This little playset really brings the new arrangement together.

In other news, Isaac and I finished Gears of War over the weekend. I'm debating whether or not to go through and play it single player. Co-op is super fun and Isaac helped me get through it quick, freeing me with merciful speed from my normal compulsion to play it until finished. I also have Puzzle Quest to feed my habit. It is quite a clever game that takes the already addictive concept of a Bejeweled-like puzzle game and then weaving it together with a role-playing campaign. Combat is replaced with competitive puzzles that you play against foes. The real icing on the heroin is the way that the spells and items you pick up in your campaign allow you to change the way you play the puzzles. Spells can change tiles on the board, damage your enemy, heal yourself or rearrange elements.

So with the introduction of these games, productivity has gone way down for me (no surprise there), as any regular reader of this blog will have noticed. Right now I'm struggling to find a way to realistically limit my quality time with the XBox. One thought I had is that I will deny myself XBox until I finish one of my eternal backburner projects from work. I've also considered getting back into Chore Wars and making myself earn points to spend on XBox time, but I can't really see myself enforcing that too well. Somehow I gotta keep it in check. I can't be staying up until midnight every night. Suggestions?

Dental Visit

So, the dentist's visit went well. In a half hour or so, it was over and I was left with some light-activated fillings and a mouth full of novocaine. I then returned home and played Bioshock until the novocaine wore off. I finished Bioshock and the novocaine and am now moving into Gears of War. Isaac and I are playing co-op. And now I'm going to go play some more, okay?

Feeling the Heat

So, last night I heard in the news the name "Fallbrook" mentioned in conjunction with "death induced by fire." So, I called my sister Kadi, who lives in Fallbrook. Well, right now she is in Riverside, having evacuated her home. The night she and my nephew evacuated she ended up staying in a parking lot because the roads in the direction she needed to go were closed. Thankfully she was able to make it up to a friend's house in Riverside the next day. I looked at a map today of where the fire is. Her house isn't in the flames yet, but it is damn close, like 20 blocks or so. Pray for rain, ya'll. She's already lost one house to fire.

Saying that, it feels dumb to prattle on about my day. But I am dumb, so here goes. I went to go get my fillings today, only to find out that my appointment is tomorrow. I had take my car into work today, and will have to do so tomorrow. I miss riding my bike, especially with the weather being so mild today and tomorrow. Well, maybe I should read things rather than try to remember everything.

And finally, there was a rather good post on the Twenty Sided blog today about the allure of puzzles and games. He writes

I have never had any interest in recreational drug use. I’d rather be stoic and alert than happy and fuzzy-headed. Drugs just don’t offer the sort of stimulation I crave. But if someone ever comes up with a way to capture and purify the sensation of solving puzzles and distill it into liquid form, I’m hosed. Three weeks after the drug hits the streets you’ll find me in some filthy hotel on the edge of town, needle still in my arm, overdosed on some cheap Tetris clone.

Yeah. That's a fair description of how I'd be. Bioshock already has me injecting things into my arm ... well, in the game. Not in real life.

Snow and Lube

Man. What a difference a little lube makes. I am speaking of course of the lube on put on my bike chain. This morning the bike was whisper quiet and shifting a lot easier, which was good, because I was pedaling like crazy to get to work because it was quite cold this morning. Sunday was our first snow of the season, about 2 to 3 inches where I'm at. It was wet and melted off in the afternoon, but the lingering temperatures were still around today making me wish I had put on my ear-warming headband. Pretty soon I'm going to have to put something over my shorts when I ride. At least it is supposed to be warmer for the rest of the week.

Saturday also saw me playing waaaaayy too much Bioshock. What a game. It had me up unwittingly until 3 AM. I'm nearing the end and now have that horse-heading-to-the-barn mentality. I just want to play and play because I'm getting so close to the end. Hopefully I'll then actually do things like talk to my friends (sorry guys!), blog, and do my finances. Of course, I have Gears of War, Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, and Assassin's Creed to play after that, not to mention the XBox Live games I can play with Jim and Isaac and Elsa. Catan, anyone? Wait! No, no, no, I need to, you know, clean my dishes and pay my rent, but ... games. Good stuff. Ehrm. Time to find me a 12 step program. Can you get a high score in 12 step programs? Maybe some gamer achievements? Is there a boss on the 12th step with a weak spot you can hit for massive damage? Hi, my gamer tag is Turbid Water and I'm a video game addict.

Believe It or Not: Anger Pie!

Today had a couple of things I saw, but I could not verify. They were wonderful things. First off, on the commute in today, I think I saw a man with a big beard smoking a corn-cob pipe. I couldn't be sure because I was going through the same section of path where I encountered the very angry woman, and there is so much winding there I only caught a glimpse as I went around the corner. A corn cob pipe would be awesome. All this guy would need was a yellow rain slicker to be the Crotchety Old Sea Captain.

The other interesting thing I saw, but could not verify, is a man riding his bike around and around the parking garage underneath my building. I went down late tonight to perform some evening bike maintenance, and I saw a guy whiz by the doorway. I thought it was strange and then went about my inflating and lubing. Uh. That's bicycle maintenance, you know. Nothing dirty. When I left some time later, the guy was still whizzing around in a loop through the garage. Perhaps he is just desperate for exercise.

In other news, Flex is still the bane of my existence, though I did get a little recognition for adding the bug that was making me miserable to the Flex bug base. It is so frustrating not only to have to adjust my way of thinking to Flex's bloated bureaucratic framework, but when I run into bugs and waste time trying to figure out if it is me or the framework, I lose patience even faster.

In even more other news, I'll announce the Anger Pie Challenge! The basis of the Anger Pie Challenge is this: I thought of a namethat I really like for a pie: Anger Pie. However, there is no actual Anger Pie. This must be remedied. So, come up with your interpretation of what Anger Pie should be. Then bring it and the recipe to my place on November 3rd. I will come up with a time after people tell me what time would work for them. Ladies and gentlemen, start your ovens!

The Title of the Blog Post That I Could Not Think Of

It's getting quite chilly out there. Today was the first day this Fall that I rode in with my sexy, wonderful gloves on. It was cold enough as I came home that I thought about wearing them then, too. They are of the Seirus brand, and are waterproof and windproof and quite flexible, so shifting gears or otherwise executing fine motor skills is pretty easy. Good stuff.

In other news, I have pictures from the wedding in Orlando I went too. Mainly they're of the reception because I was in the back of the sanctuary at the wedding, and people are more entertaining to photograph when they're dancing anyway. Why don't you check them out. They are in my gallery.

Orlando

Yessir, that was a nice little vacation I had there. My flight down to Orlando was surprisingly smooth and uneventful. I stepped out of the airport and was reminded of one reason why I left there. The air was oppressive: hot, humid, and full of exhaust. That along with the sulfur water and sand spurs were some reasons to skedaddle. Thankfully I also encountered reasons why I enjoyed living there. Take Jim and Jen, for instance. Jim picked me up from the airport and they let me stay at their house the entire weekend. Jim even chauffeured me to and from the wedding. Talk about service. Also, I got to see Brian, Matthew, Chris and Heather and some other friends from Summit. I also got to see the church itself and enjoy the new sanctuary, which is quite styling.

Of course the whole point of the trip was to make sure Erin and Chad got married, and they did to my satisfaction. It was a nice wedding and reception and I may have even danced a bit, depending on how you define the word "danced". It was delightful. Also incredibly delightful were the games I played. I played a lot. Jim and I played Halo 3 until I was ready to throw a controller through the TV. We also played Puzzle Fighter and Puzzle Quest. We played the board game Runebound, which was fun, but the magical moment was when Janet came along with Peter and his brother Chris and we had ourselves a 6 player game of Twilight Imperium. I have been trying to get a 6 player game pretty much since I first played the game, and now that wish has been fulfilled. Thank you all! It felt really good to just vegetate and play games and eat.

Then I hopped on a plane and had a mercifully uneventful flight home. During my travels, I watched the movie Thank You For Smoking that Laura lent me. It is quite hilarious and well done. It made for a nice cap to a great trip. Pictures are up will be up soon enough.

Commute: a Sentence

So, I have been enjoying the magical alignment of lights in the morning that allow me to go through the bike path detour without stopping at red lights, which can be annoying, but not amusing like the lady I rode by on the way home, who let fly a "F*** You!" right after I passed her in the opposite direction, which I assume was directed towards me (but I'm not sure because of the delay and the fact that I had to ride off the path to avoid her as she came storming along, evidently blind to being on a bike path), but could have been Tourette's syndrome, and was surprising and hilarious all at once, causing me to guffaw, which probably heightened her sense of indignation or fury, wherever that came from in the first place.

Oh, and a report on my trip to Orlando will be coming soon.

There's a Hole in My Molar, Dear Liza, Dear Liza

Actually, two holes, two molars. After at least 10 years sans dentist, I finally made a visit back to the dental world for a cleaning and check up. I have a small cavity in my back, upper molar and a larger one in the molar below it. And now I have an appointment for some drilling on the 24th. Joy. The upside is that the dentist said that I had good teeth besides those two failings and I got a free tooth brush. Not too bad for being without dental care since I graduated from high school. Honestly, I think the last time someone put sharp things in my mouth was when I had my wisdom teeth removed.

In other news, they are no longer opening the construction area in the evening, but they have paved over a massive bump in the detour. But for the next three work days, that is not my concern, because I'm going to Orlando. Yeah, Jim and I are going to game it up, and I'm going to a wedding. Oh, look at the time! Gotta go get the laundry and pack.

Columbus Day Commute

In honor of Christopher Columbus' grand voyage across the Atlantic, I thought I'd whine about my commute. Actually, it's not much whining. They have started blocking off the bike path in the morning for construction on a new ramp. It means that I have to take a rather windy detour to get around it, but it is nothing terrible. Unfortunately it is supposed to be closed until April. Originally they had said November. This could make for a long winter. On the ride home they opened it up so I didn't have to go back up, a fact for which I am grateful. The ride home was nice today, if rather buggy. Also, my chain came off, and the poor thing is almost bone dry. I need to lube that puppy.

The garage door is probably also in need of some lube. Currently it is making this horrendous shrieking noise that needs to be recording for later use in a horror movie. Seriously, this noise is up there with the scream of the Nazgul from the Lord of the Rings and the noises of the xenomorphs from Aliens.

Another thing I have been noticing on my ride is the plethora of discarded clothing along the bike path. I've been seeing it for a while, but recently it has increased. I can only imagine it is from the homeless people along the trail, but I would think with winter on its way they would be collecting clothes not leaving them discarded along the ground. I also note that the article of clothing usually tends to be pants. I can think of one reason other than fire why I would remove and quickly discard my pants, but I don't want to think about it.

Pictures Galore

Well, it took a while, but the pictures from my drive in the mountains and my trip to Chicago are up in my gallery. I divided the pix from Chicago up into four sections, since there were 77 of them. They are roughly divided up by days. Anyway, check them out and enjoy.

MAX: Epilogue

I had a prelude, so I should have an epilogue, too. One thing that I thought was interesting to see is the overall strategy that Adobe is taking. They recently acquired the online word processing software Buzzword. The Scene 7 content delivery network will serve up media. The Adobe Media Player is out there now, too. They're creating an online version of Photoshop. They introduced CoCoMo which will allow Flash movies to interact with Connect online meeting servers. They showed the next version of Flash Lite that will allow the player to interact with the phone's operating system. Sense a pattern?

Talking with some other people at the conference, we agreed that Adobe is going for end-to-end vertical integration from content creation to content delivery to content deployment. With Buzzword and Photoshop Online they're starting to build an online office suite. With Flash Lite's advances, they're going to be able to essentially build phone operating systems. It seems to me that if you wanted to get rich, you could build an awesome online spreadsheet application that interacts with a desktop AIR version of the software or build a full operating system for phones and then get bought by Adobe. Already two of the winners of the Adobe AIR Derby were applications that allowed for online project management and scheduling and an AIR sound editing program. Ladies and gentlemen, start your coding engines.

MAX

Okay, let's talk about the Adobe MAX conference. It was in Chicago, and we left Sunday to fly there and got back on Thursday. The conference itself is 3 days and an orgy of software, high tech talk, free t-shirts, and food and drink.

Eight of us headed out on Sunday, but the whole company ended up out there when Sean joined us later. Half of us were staying in Hyatt next to the convention center, and the other half was in a Hilton closer to downtown. We ate lunch near our respective hotels, picked up conference badges and swag, and then convened later for drinks. Lunch and drinks were at a place called Bar Louie near the Hilton I was staying in.

The Hilton was quite nice, and Spivey and I shared a room on the 22nd floor with good views of the Sears Tower, and unfortunately the El. The beds were super comfy and the room was pretty nice. If you wanted, you could crack open the bottled water in the room for only $6. When we were leaving to catch the shuttle to the conference center to pick up our badges, we ran into this lady with two Great Danes. One of these dogs was quite certainly the biggest dog I have ever seen. According to the lady, he was 175 pounds, 6'5" on his hind legs, and a narcotics enforcement dog. I am sooooo glad that he was well trained and that I have nothing to do with drugs, because otherwise, I probably would have crapped myself. This dog was huge. His head was probably larger than mine. Ginormous.

The next day was the opening of the conference, so we grabbed the breakfast Adobe laid out at the conference center and then wandered into the general session. This was the keynote for the conference, and was quite impressive. Thankfully, we got good seats due to our running the Rocky Mountain Adobe Users Group. Mainly this was a Rah! Rah! Adobe! session with a few highlights of the vision of Adobe in the future for the Flash platform. There were some showcasing of technology, most of which was unmemorable. The good stuff came the next day. Oh wait, one cool thing is that they talked a lot about H.264 video in the Flash Player, which I helped write an article about for Adobe. David's pic from the article was even up on the screen for a bit when they showed the new Adobe Developer Connection site. I figure that people will go to Adobe to find out more about H.264 video in Flash and then read our article and bring more renown to RealEyes.

For the rest of the day, I went to sessions on Flash Lite multiplayer games (decent), automating unit testing for Flex (not what it was advertised to be), design patterns for ActionScript 3.0 (a very good session by Leo Schuman), and a case study session by BLITZ about creating a "holographic" wall you could paint on using WiiMotes (some cool stuff here). The wall was actually created for the party on Tuesday night. They were doing some pretty wild stuff with it.

The first day of the conference also was Spivey's birthday. After he played some Halo 3 with luminaries of the Web like Grant Skinner and Mike Chambers in the after hours lounge on top of our hotel, we headed out to Giordano's Pizza to celebrate. We got a really stinking huge pizza and followed the Rockies as they miraculously pulled out a win in triple overtime. It was cool that we were in Chicago for Spivey's birthday, because that is where he was born.

The next day, it was up for a session on ColdFusion-powered Ajax. It was pretty good. There are a lot of neat tags in the new ColdFusion that would make Ajax even easier than it already is by incorporating the YUI and Ext frameworks. After that session, it was back for another keynote. This time they were talking about all the nifty services that Adobe is developing or has acquired. One particularly impressive service is Scene 7. It is essentially a content delivery network (CDN) for video and images, but you can do some scary cool stuff with it. They demoed a website for building custom athletic uniforms that allowed you to load up images or select from a preset bunch and meld those seamlessly onto a photograph of a model wearing the jersey. You could customize colors and designs of the jersey too. All this was done seamlessly in photographs and with rotation. Awesome.

Then they showed Thermo. Whoo boy, this is going to make life interesting. Essentially Thermo is an application Adobe is making that will allow designers to make fairly functional rich internet applications (RIA) in a WYSIWYG environment. I can't go over all the cool stuff without running way way long. The product will do pretty much everything but the business logic and database building. You can just import your Photoshop document, convert layers, select control groups and tell Thermo what you want them to be and how you want them to interact. You can even get it to generate dummy data for you. It writes all the stuff for you in Flex. As John pointed out though, it was not following any best practices. This won't be quite the matter of just handing it over to the developer to write the back end, but it will be a very powerful tool for making functional mockups and comps. Seriously cool stuff, though.

After the session and lunch snagged from White Castle (why?), we waddled over to see Grant Skinner give his talk on 50 reasons why ActionScript 3.0 rocks. I had been in need of some convincing, and he did lay out some pretty cool reasons. There are still plenty of things that seriously irk me about it, but when you add in things like reparenting of display objects and the ability to get paragraph and line lengths as well as text by coordinates, I am well on my way to being won over. That was followed up with a snoozer of a session about advanced Flex techniques. These techniques were all about building custom versions of the Flex SDK and crap like that, which was waaaayyy over my head. Then I went to David's session on AS3 best practices, which was good to see. Sometimes he's too busy to bother about trifles of how to do things, so it was good to see it laid out here along with the rationale behind it.

Then came the super cool stuff. There was one more general session which was all about the sneak peaks of upcoming technology that could be coming down the pike from Adobe. Yeah, there were some awards for people there too, but the sneak peaks were where it was at. There were something like 14 different things they showed, but the three standouts were Flash "Next", Photoshop online, and something called, uh, seam carving.

For Flash, there are two words: 3-D and rigging. To be fair, the 3-D was announced for Flash Player 10 (Codename: Astro) in the earlier session. This is easier and simpler 3-D than Papervision, but it looks pretty awesome. The rigging was mindblowing. People unfamiliar with animation might not get this, but the guy doing the demo just drew a series of 5 circles to make an arm and then stretched 4 rigging symbols over them. Wham, bam, there you have a rigged arm. It literally happened so fast I couldn't get a picture of it. You can also do it programatically for real time interactive rigging. So. Flipping. Cool.

Also super cool was the peek at an online version of Photoshop. The demo had some amazing new tools in it, but what was impressive to me is the amount of states it could maintain in memory and the ability to preview the results of actions so fluidly and effortlessly. Really, really cool and it is all online. But also in the realm of image manipulation was seam carving, which won the audience's vote as the coolest sneak peek. This stuff is amazing. Essentially it uses an algorithm to resize images in such a way that the important figures in the image don't get distorted, but the surrounding landscape gets condensed. You can even mark the image to tell the algorithm which areas to preserve or remove. The demo showed how you could just make an object seamlessly disappear from a photo in just a few seconds. I can't do this justice with words or still images. There are some videos on YouTube that show seam carving.

Then it was time to party. Adobe put on a good show. It was a trip back to the childhoods of many present. They had lots of video games, kid food (mac and cheese, jello, hamburgers), race cars, and the like. I got to ride a Segway for the first time. They also had a great band called Richard Cheese & Lounge Against the Machine. They did lounge style covers of songs like Nine Inch Nails' Closer and the song Baby Got Back. It was pretty awesome. I'm not a party animal, but it was actually over too soon for my liking. We retired to the hotel bar to finish off the evening.

Whew. There's still a day of conference and a day of travel to go. Okay. Day 3. I had a couple of sessions that gave me no new information. One was on web standards and the other on "advanced" CSS. I went to two decent ones on using Flash and Flex together and on using Papervision for building games. The really awesome one was by Thomas Phinney from Adobe on typography. He gave some general typographic knowledge, and then he showed us some super cool stuff you can do with OpenType fonts. There are some neat features in InDesign for adjust punctuation for all caps and creating non-standard fractions, but the show stealers were the crazy fonts he demoed, such as Cranky Kid, which interrupts you like a 4-year-old as you type and Francophile, which translates part of your text into French, even while maintaining the underlying English text.

Then the day was over. I did also get my first ever massage at the conference. That was good. So was the amazing restaurant we went to that evening. It was called the Frontera Grill and it is was a Mexican restaurant run by some famous chef that Sean really likes. The food was all amazing and we had lots and lots of it. I had the best mojito there that I've ever had. I also discovered beer royale, which is a mixture of beer and red wine, which is much better than it sounds. It was also Jun's birthday, so we celebrated that as well.

After dinner, Sean and Spivey went clubbing while the rest of us walked back to the Hilton. We wandered through Millennium Park, looking at all the really cool art there. We sat for a while watching these huge towers of projected video, glass, and water. A guy came along and started doing gymnastic dance moves in the water between the towers and fell down a lot. It was all in all pretty neat.

The next day, a group of us went up to the Magnificent Mile to wander around the shops. We grabbed some chocolate at Moonstruck, but we had to get going to catch the plane back to Denver. Sean and Spivey were hurting from their nocturnal excursion, but without incident we made it back to the Mile High City. It was quite a trip, and I'll have more pictures up soon enough so you can see more of the trip. It was a blast and a caloric infusion. Next year's in San Francisco.

So, this post made up for the hiatus, right?

Uh. Not MAX Yet.

I thought that I would quickly mention my trip up in the mountains last Saturday. I went up with Laura, Gavin, Sarah, and Dash. We drove up to Vail, then over through Minturn, past the ruins of Camp Hale, down through Leadville, and then back to Denver on 285. The colors were gorgeous and it was a fun drive. The weather was great. We even got a little snow up at Eisenhower Tunnel, but there were low clouds throughout the drive making the mountains, especially the amazing Mount Massive, quite majestic and dramatic. More pictures will be forthcoming soon.

Prelude

Ugh. What a freaking frustrating day. It was all futility, wasted effort, and no results. It started with a flat and has now ended up with something fishy going on with my car payment statements. But you don't want to hear me complain. You want a report on the conference in Chicago, right? It was a lot of fun and a lot happened. Well, I'm going to hold off on that until I've done some image processing so I can illustrate it appropriately. So this is just a prelude that has nothing to do with the main body, other than I am sick to death of software that doesn't work the way it should.

Offline in Chicago

Finally! I'm at MAX in Chicago, and for some reason my laptop refuses to get online here, until now. So, I'll send a quick shout out to say that all is well and I am eating much too much. I will have oodles (metric oodles, even) of photos when I return, as well as photos from my recent trip through the mountains in search of golden aspens. Okay, this session is letting out, so I gotta go.