With all the work we’ve got on at the moment, I’ve not really had the time to post lately. Of course my new iBook’s consumed quite a bit of my free time as well: learning how best to do things in OS X, getting the necessary applications set up how I like them, and generally being all “Ooh, shiny new toy!” about it.
My new cats have been keeping me pretty busy too; if I’m not playing with them, feeding them or changing their litter trays, then I’m trying to stop them causing havoc around the place. For instance, this morning I caught one of them trying to climb inside the combi boiler – I managed to grab her just as her backside was disappearing through a previosly undiscovered small hole in the top of the boiler.
Incidentally, althhough I keep referring to them as “the cats”, their names are actually Sugar (black and white, complete cuddle cat) and Spice (all black, fluffy bundle of energy). Not really my sort of names, but that’s what they were called when I got them, and I thought I’d stick with those as it’s what’s down on their Blunkett-esque ID chips (I’d probably have gone for Patty and Selma, or maybe Sherri and Terri). Anyway, it’s meant to be bad luck to rename a ship, so perhaps the same applies to cats too….
A couple of people have suggested I post photos of the cats, but to my mind that’s just a little too sad. I mean, really I’d have to go the whole hog and put together a garish page dedicated to them on Geocities, with perhaps a mawkish poem about how great cats are, along with 30 animated gifs of cartoon kittens chasing balls of string.
As for work, I’d love to whinge about some of it, but I my thin veneer of professionalism prevents me from doing so. That said, the last couple of weeks have been a bit more interesting as I’ve been doing some work in Flash for the first time in ages. My Flash skills are somewhat rusty, not having used it since version 5, so it’s taken me a while to get up to speed with the changes in MX 2004. Thankfully the Actionscript is all fairly object oriented nowadays, which makes life a lot easier.
I’ve got mixed feelings about Flash after a fortnight of using it; on the one hand it’s got some really useful, powerful features, but on the other hand it makes other fundamental tasks difficult or impossible. For example, one’s made to jump through hoops in order to query MySQL – presumably Macromedia are trying to push their commercial remoting products.
I also find it surprising that there’s no way to generate an image using Actionscript. For the project I’m working on it would be great if users could design something using the .swf, and then export the frame to their browser as a .png file. But sadly there doesn’t seem to be any way to do this. Perhaps I need to invest in Director… Pah!
I’m also having to resist the urge to use Garage Band to create a soundtrack for the Flash file. Surely my freeform jazz odyssey could only enhance the user experience?
