Yes. Yes I am. I’m all about the cheap laugh and Shell Oil was happy to help me out in more ways than one. It starts out with driving home in the rain on fumes. I am relieved to see a shell logo appear on the horizon. What? tonight it isn’t Shell. One light burns out and I am left with a cheap joke about gas prices. So here we go. (full-sized image here)

As I pay almost $3/gal (sorry Europeans, I know you don’t get this joke) looking up at the sign saying “hell” I am struck by the thought “I need to drive a marketing person by this sign. They might see an honest advertisement for the first time in their lives.” After realizing I didn’t really feel like spending my weekend wiping up exploded brain chunks, I file the thought away and went back to getting some gas.

On the topic of truth in advertising, if you haven’t seen the movie Crazy People, I highly recommend it. Its a very funny movie about a Madison Avenue ad exec that is overcome by the desire to tell the truth and is put into a mental institution. It was also filmed in the town where I grew up.

My last thought on this is that my partner Ray saw this differently. While I was amused about the marketing issues involved, Ray saw it as a political comment (our perspectives certainly are a product of our lives! ). You should definitely read his entry. It is funny, interesting, and as always left me angered by the right-hand side of the political spectrum. Oh yeah, and he passed by a gas station where the premium was $3.15!!!

I’m writing this while listening to the FLash Lite Breeze Presentation. Yay for more stream of consciousness writing.

The presentation is starting out with some demos of Flash Lite content. Aquan (a game I made), a 3D car view that can be spun about on the phone and went over to some information about India Games, a large-scale mobile game studio that has started producing Flash Lite content.

The presentation shifted to helper applications like FileExplorer (the same app that Russ suggested the other day) and Torch. Then bill covered some of the things people are wanting to do outside of Flash Lite like place a call, open the camera and or media file.

To place a call:

getURL("tel:5555551212")

This will bring up an OS-level popup that asks the user before actually making the connection (same as WAP, but nicer )

Media Files and Applications can be opened provided that you know the static path (which is all but a deal breaker to me)

From there the presentation went over to the Flash Lite Exchange and the Flash Lite Forum. Hmmmm.. some of the chatters are getting a bit rude now. It seems reasonable for Macromedia to show their developer resource areas. oh well.

Now we are into the question area and most of the questions had to do with feature requests for the next version of Flash Lite, Flash Lite penetration, business model questions, APIs for accessing phone information (screen size: no, make and model: yes), Platforms (PSP:no, iPod:no, DS:no).

The breeze will be archived (whithin the next week).

And now I need to get to work but I will come back through and add links and some more details later

I want to make a list of all conferences for which Flash is relevant. Those will include the regulars, but also I’d like to go beyond just “Flash Conferences.” If you are into games, GDC and E3 are still relevant. If you are into devices 3GSM and CTIA are good. What are the ones for every nuance of Flash that are good to attend? Also geography and language are irrelevant for the purposes of this thought exercise

So far I’m thinking of Flash, Mobile/device/gadget, Design, Animation, and Game conferences. If you can think of other good subcategories, let me know!

Click Here to see the permanent page and add more conferences! Once I get a good list going I will add it to my left-side navigation.

Bill Perry is going to give another great online presentation on Flash Lite tomorrow morning at 8AM (PST). According to his blog, the topic will be more on the technical side largely focusing on FSCommand2(). He also anticipates it being highly interactive with lots of questions from the audience. Hope to see you there.

P.S. Thanks so much to the rest of the world where Flash Lite is way more popular for making the presentation early in the morning. Darn you and your time zones

Yahoo! is hiring for several Flash Engineering positions, and I’m going to feature them here as I start getting them organized. Today’s feature is for an Engineering Team leader for Yahoo! Local. Despite what the job description sounds like, this will be a Flash/Flex position. The team to be led has a variety of web development skills, so it’s best for the applicant to be conversant with a wide variety of skills. They are looking for a senior, geeky Flash dev, and if you know Flex (well), all the better. If you are interested in the position (and you should be, this will be a good one) please send me your resume and I will forward it on.

I’ve been at Yahoo! for three years, and it is a great place to work. My technical knowledge has expanded a huge amount from working with such brilliant folks here. Also, the exposure to such large-scale endeavors is just plain cool. Coming from a small design firm previously, I found it just isn’t possible to prepare for the amazing amount of ideas, resources, and potential that enterprise work provides (not to mention that it is a good ego trip to know that your work is seen by a Yahoo!-sized audience)

Beyond the considerable professional benefits to life at Yahoo!, it is worth mentioning some of the neat benefits here. Free Coffee bar in every building (not a coffee pot… a full service coffee shop, but free), full gym, subsidized cafeteria, basketball courts, sand pit volleyball, and the corporate pastime, Foosball. We also have on-site DVD rentals, dry cleaning, convenience store, plus classes in personal, professional, and financial development. In the only-in-the-valley benefits category we also have on-site dental, car wash, oil change, massage, personal training, and *shudder* hair cuts.

If you are a talented Flash engineer, designer or both, and you are even maybe just kinda sorta thinking about looking for a new job, let me know. We really do have a wide variety of positions open, and besides, I just like getting to know my fellow Flash folks.

John Cleese shifts from one dot com to another and does a hilarious job for liveVault.com at a promotional site heavily using Flash video, backuptrauma.com. Cleese plays Dr. Twain Weck for the Backup Trauma Institute guiding crazed IT professionals back to reality through solutions like liveVault’s data backup products. There is even a gag video that is pretty funny.

I’m not sure how much extra business will come out of this for liveVault, but liveVault seems happy. Let’s hope this encourages other companies to do such excellent work. Anyone out there know which agency worked on that? I’m guessing we will see it in some upcoming award shows.

Edit: This site is a product of Thunder Sky Pictures and Captains of Industry. Good job!

And whatever you do, don’t press the third button!

There are a few bugs in the site, so it you have trouble navigating, just go back to the hallway area.