 |
|
|
|
|
Woke
up early this morning, and headed in to the office to meet with Justin.
Yes yes yes. It's Saturday. And the two of us are being geeky and spending
the day at work.
Oddly
when I woke up, I was in a rather terrific mood. I got some coffee and
even though there was a light snow falling I was humming and singing and
skipping a little bit to the train. I was also doing that little head-bopping
thing where you sort of shake it side to side. I felt great, and I wish
I knew why so I could repeat the sequence of events that had me skipping
down the street. It was 9:15 AM on a Saturday morning! What the hell...
|
|
|
|
The
odd thing about downtown Chicago, early on the weekends: it's a ghost
town. Barely anyone on the trains at all. When
I got off at Clark and Lake, get this: I saw someone moving around on
the tracks! I realized that it was a CTA worker, cleaning the walls. Funny
- I've only recently begun to use the trains more (used to only need the
Metra out to the suburbs), so this was the first time I had seen anyone
actually "down" on the tracks.
 |
| |
 |
The
kicker was that as I walked by, this old guy was standing smack
in the middle of the station. Sorta blurry, but you get the idea.
He was a rock! Just staring, straight at the guy cleaning. I guess
he was as fascinated as I was. :)
For
a brief moment here, the guy on the tracks, the old man staring
and me taking pictures... we were all doing our own thing. And that
thought made me smile the while rest of the walk to the office
|
|
|
At
work, I walked Justin through a Flash/XML photo gallery that Ben and I
created for the Emmis stations. This is a variation on what I was doing
before (which involved using Flash's built-in Combo Box and List Box),
and I learned a ton making it. Instead of using Flash's components, I
ended up using the createEmptyMovieClip
method.
I
got a lot of assistance from this
thread at the start. It seemed like Little Girl (who is anything but
a little girl) was always one step ahead of me... either asking a question
or offering a solution. While I still miss all the rich, valuable information
that used to be on WH (and I really hope it comes back in some shape or
another), TwelveStone
has been a fantastic resource to spring up in its absence. Many of the
WH gurus (along with many of the ruffians) migrated to StinkFist's forum,
so if you're looking
for help (or looking
for diversion), definitely check it out.
The
idea behind this Flash/XML player is to allow our webmasters to easily
update content (changing/swapping images and captions) without having
to muck around creating new pages. Ben and I made a test gallery for Q101,
and we're looking to create skins for each of the stations. That way,
each one will have its own branded look and feel, but all the webmasters
will need to do is change out the XML (and produce the images).
Check
out the Q101 Gallery here. The cool thing about Q101's gallery project
was that I got to work with Ben on it, and got my hands dirty with XML.
This was a lot more ActionScript than I'm used to, but it felt great doing
it. And to top things off, Stu was one of the main photographers at the
Twisted Concert. He did a lot of the backstage shots in the gallery (above).
Stu took an ungodly amount of film, and only a small portion of it made
it into the gallery. He's a great photographer, and if you haven't seen
his site you you should go
take a peek right now.
We went through my code, and I showed him a bit about how I set up my
layers. Justin's worked with Flash before, but asked me for a bit of a
refresher. In exchange for today, he's going to show me a bit about what
he does. Hopefully, I'll be able to pick his brains about php and MySQL
and all that database stuff that seems so alien to me. When Justin looked
at how I set up my ActionScript - he said that I would have no problems
getting into database work, which I took as a strong compliment.
The
main point of today was to help Justin get strated on his own Flash Gallery,
for his niece. I watched him spec up what he wanted, and together we modified
the Q101 version and repositioned everything. Fun stuff!
Afterwards,
we swapped notes and tried brainstorming on our site idea. I have to admit,
I've lost a bit of steam on the subject, but we seem to keep circling
around what it is, exactly, we want to make. I'm afraid I'm being the
wet blanket, but I think Justin understands my apprehension. At one point,
he said that we both have to be absolutely sure we're sold on the idea
- there's no point in doing a ton of work towards something we're not
interested in.
Right
now, we seem stuck revolving around concepts. For coming on to three years
now, Justin and I have talked about collaborating on something
off and on. I feel like we're close - and once we figure out what we want
to throw our energies towards... it's gonna rock.
Since
the one semi-decent bar was closed inside the Mart, we headed to Uptown,
a small place right up the street from Justin's house. Stu joined us,
as did Emma and we hung out for a bit. I downed about four beers and took
my leave rather early. Came home, had some food, and then went promptly
to sleep. While I was at the bar though, I had a good idea for a poem
(and remembered an idea for another poem that I had, on the train
to work). I had some intention of trying to get some writing done, but
that quickly faded as I walked in the door.
|
|
|
|
