So last night I went to the Flex 3/AIR Prerelease event with Ben Forta here in Nashville. It is always a pleasure to see Mr. Forta talk… as is anyone with a great British accent. He talked about the new features in Flex 3 and some of the plugin stuff for PS/Fw/Ai look really sweet. The ability to easily skin Flex apps is very enticing to me.

I think the AIR stuff is what excites me the most. I have always wanted to be able to create desktop apps but never wanted to learn a “Real” programming language to make this happen. The ability to work in Flex and HTML/CSS and have it become a desktop app is sweeter then sweet.

All in all it was a great turnout for Nashville… about 80-90 people… and it is nice to see the Flex community start to grow. This is the year that I really will start to get into Flex and learn it!

Thanks go out to:

Matthew Wallace with 615Flex for putting on the event and having the foresight to get REAL beer.

Aaron West with Nashville ColdFusion User Group for co-sponsoring and for providing the space through Dealerskins.

The Dealearskins Guys for supplying Shuffles for giveaways (Aaron West, Andy Matthews, Cutter Blades) and Especially for Andy for thinking up of the meeting venue.

Dave Ramsey’s crew for furnishing the pizza and subs and the obligatory Total Money Makeover Books

And of course Adobe for sending Ben and providing giveways and refreshments… oh and wonderful products for us to come around and geek about!

Pictures to come… I forgot my digicam so I have emailed Brett Davis to see if he can email me some of his.

wow!

From Foxnews.com (which I don’t read because I hate FoxNews… it was emailed to me)

Angry Employee Deletes All of Company’s Data

Call it a tale of revenge gone wrong.

When Marie Lupe Cooley, 41, of Jacksonville, Fla., saw a help-wanted ad in the newspaper for a position that looked suspiciously like her current job — and with her boss’s phone number listed — she assumed she was about to be fired.

So, police say, she went to the architectural office where she works late Sunday night and erased 7 years’ worth of drawings and blueprints, estimated to be worth $2.5 million.

“She decided to mess up everything for everybody,” Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office spokesman Ken Jefferson told reporters. “She just sabotaged the entire business, thinking she was going to get axed.”

It didn’t take Steven Hutchins, owner of the architectural firm that bears his name, much time to figure out who’d done it — Cooley was the only other person who had full access to the files.

Police arrested Cooley Monday evening and charged her with causing greater than $1,000 damage to computer files, a felony. She was bailed out the following afternoon.
Related

Hutchins told one TV station he’d managed to recover all the files using an expensive data-recovery service.

As for the job, Cooley originally wasn’t in danger of losing it. The ad was for Hutchins’ wife’s company.

The firm told FOXNews.com that Cooley no longer is employed there.

Source

THIS!

Yes after 9 years as a palm user I have succumb to progress and have purchased a Blackberry. Now I just have to wait for it to get here!

One of my long-time friends Richard Blakeley… I say friends because I have met him before and have been watching his life unfold via LiveJournal for about 7 years now… has gotten himself into some “trouble”. He has worked at Gawker for a couple of years now as their video-boi and does hilarious videos and photoshopping for them.

Well this year at CES they decided to pull a prank with a tv-b-gone on the exibition floor and then all blogging mayhem let loose.

Confessions: The Meanest Thing Gizmodo Did at CES

Needless to say this was way overblown and the real thing is that bloggers feel like they have to defend just because they want to have respect and crap like that. The funny thing is that Gizmodo was there as press, not bloggers so really it was the press acting up… not a blogger.

I first heard about this when reading John Chow’s blog post about it. When I saw 3 words “Gizmodo, Prank, Video” I immediately thought BLAKELEY. This is what he does… stupid dumb but artfully hilarious videos like this. He has been doing it for years and why would he change now? It drove traffic like crazy and traffic means $$ in this sport. So it worked.

He was on rocketboom the other day explaining himself and I think it is a great interview. I love the terrorist scarf, I have a red one. Funny side story on that… Blakeley mentioned he got a terrorist scarf at urban outfitters in NY and my sister happened to work at UO at the time in NY and I asked he if they still sell them. She said yeah and then about 2 weeks later I receive a red one in the mail. She took it as I really wanted one and she bought it for me :-) Sweet but I have never worn it once.

http://www.rocketboom.com/vlog/rb_08_jan_17

Links:

Gizmodo: The Meanest Thing Gizmodo Did at CES

Read more here:
New York Times: Over the Line at C.E.S.
BoingBoing: TV-Be-Gone mischief at CES
CNet: Bloggers behaving badly: Gizmodo messes with CES flat screens
CrunchGear: On Gizmodo’s douchery and blogging
Beltwayblogroll: Grow Up, Gizmodo Goofballs
Mobility Site: Gizmodo: What were they thinking?
Gear Diary: Total and Utter Crap: Gizmodo’s Stupid CES Prank on Motorola and Us Bloggers
ZDNet: How to temporarily “kill your television”-and everyone else’s, too
ZDNet: Gizmodogate: Get a sense of humor folks
Tech.co.uk: TechBloggers disrupt CES but prank backfires
Austin 360: Gadget site rattles trade show with TV prank
ZDNet: Gizmodo prank trashes CES presentations
Fake Steve Jobs: Gizmodo admits blasting out TV screens at CES
Scripting: The debate about the worth of podcasting
MacDailyNews: Video: Gizmodo turning off TVs - lots of TVs - at CES
CNet - CEA’s take on CES Gizmodo prank: Banned!

DreamHost had a $7.5 mil bug in a cleanup routine the other day that went ahead and charged everyone as if it was 12/31/2008. I couldn’t imagine the stomach sinking that would go on when you realize that as a developer.

You can read about it at their blog

http://blog.dreamhost.com/2008/01/15/um-whoops/

I just logged in to my site stats and noticed a HUGE increase in visitors today. It looks like someone “stumbled” my site on StumbleUpon and I have seen an increase in traffic of 640%!

Wow!

A High schooler in Newville PA has gotten detention for none other then running Firefox. Click on the image below to see the note home to his parents.

Click to view larger size

I did a guest post over at The Bootstrapping Blog about time management and the bootstrapper. Go on over and take a look!

I love Gmail, it is THE best email application out there both web and desktop and it just keeps getting better and better. It is that time of the year when our 401(k) plan sends out a document talking about the Safe Harbor matches for the next year. Well our HR lady emails us out a PDF from the plan administrators and instead of downloading it I decide to click the “View and HTML ” Link.

I notice that some of the text is a little garbled but that is usually true with the PDF conversion because there can be images and all kinds of stuff in the PDF. I decided to switch over and download it so I can print it off in the native format. To my amazement this was actually a scanned document that was just an image converted to PDF. yeah no text whatsoever.

What this means is that Gmail is doing an OCR on the paper and displaying it. That is AMAZING that they go to that lengths to make your user experience better.

I <3 Gmail!

I don’t know but I used to love 60 Minutes… but now I just get angry at it. They are up to their old tricks again with an installment this last Sunday called “High Tech Heist”. It is scaretactic-reporting at its best worst. It is suppose to be about the TJMaxx data breach from a few years back but all they really did was to tell you that:

a. Every bad guy can IM someone and buy your personal information

b. Wally World knows your SSN

c. WEP is of the devil

What!? Yeah it was a bunch of oldpeopletechnobabble that didn’t make much sense at all. They get some wannabe geeks to run a sniffer and call them a hacker and then throw in a professor and an FBI agent who can use Yahoo IM and you have the makings of a crapload of geezer reporting.

See if for yourself

http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/i_video/main500251.shtml?id=3538299n