2008 FITC follow-up

crowd around multi-touch gameIt's taken me a few days to decompress and restore to the organized chaos of my life. Okay, that's a sham – it's all chaos.

I live for this type of interaction with ideas and people within the industry, even if I do utterly suck at interacting with groups of people where I don't know anyone…. See, living in a small town in rural Pennsylvania – I'm bitter. So I have to stick with God, Guns, and Booze….. Oh wait. I can't drink…. uhmmm never mind. But living in a small town is very isolating from what is happening in the real world and it is very easy to completely lose touch with trends within my chosen field of Web and Flash design. So let's count the things I now want to work on:

  • Multi-touch display
  • Adobe AIR applications
  • Getting better with AS 3
  • Experimenting with AS 3 programming (like particle and 3d effects)
  • Figure out ways to create interesting artwork in Flash (look at Erik Natzke's work and wonder no more)
  • Build myself a new website
  • Redevelop my blog and have run in Flash using AS 3
  • Build RIAs with Flex 3
  • I still would like to build better games
  • Get into building components
  • Be able to truly reuse my code
  • Get more into OOP

Now, all I have to do is wait for cloning technology to get to the point to where I will actually be able to do all of these things before I ascend.

I had every intention of living, eating and breathing Flash while I was there too. I took all of me dev files for my new Flash site, and never even touched them. I ended being too absorbed in Toronto and other things to even sit at the computer while I was there in the evening. Many nights, after unwinding a bit and eating dinner, I just sat and watched TV while scrawling pages of ideas down in one of the notebooks I bought for doing just that – I think after all was said-and-done I had 20 plus pages of ideas and thoughts of what I could do both for work and personally with many of the things I was introduced to and learned more about.

On the way back on Wednesday I stopped outside of Lincoln Ontario at this marina where this is an old beached boat, and shot a few images which I have been meaning to do the past 4 times I have passed it on the way back. It's pretty cool, and there were some immense geese hanging out being loud too. On a creepier note, I noticed afterwards that there were these little wafts of smoke coming up from trees all over the place along the freeway – at least I thought it was smoke. I finally got a closer look at one, and they were ginormous swarms of bugs. Billions of bugs milling about in tall strands above some trees – but it only spanned a 5 to 7 miles stretch along the freeway. Weird as heck. I have never seen anything like it, and the road was too busy for me to be able to risk trying to fumble around to get my camera out. I liked it better when I thought it was twilight zone wisps of smoke.

I don't know what lies in store for me in 2009, but I could easily do worse than head back up north for FITC 2009.

As a side note: Thanks for another stellar FITC Shawn! 

%d bloggers like this: