Employers, stop asking for the impossible!

If you're like me, you're always keeping one eye on the job market, just to see whats coming up. I got this posting today: http://information-technology.thingamajob.com/jobs/Ontario/Flash-Developer/1132844
I don't expect it to be up for long, or it will be modified because I pointed out the error to the poster already.
For people who don't see it, or are too lazy to click the link, they're asking for "3 to 5 years of experience using Actionscript 3.0". If you're into flash at all you'll see the problem immediately. AS3.0 has only been out in PUBLIC ALPHA (not even released yet) for maybe 6 months, tops. And these people are asking for someone with 3-5 years of experience with it. Who are they looking for Gary Grossman?
I KNOW I'm qualified for jobs asking for AS 2.0 experience, HTML, CSS and other technologies, but I'm no expert in the 25 technologies listed.
No wonder these companies hire people and end having to pay huge money to get rid of them, they've mastered the art of bs.

Something to be said about PLANNING

I recently got the ludicrous request (which I couldn't turn down) to create 4 versions of animated banners for a clothing company. They wanted me to create 8 sizes of each banner. And deliver it in 4 days. The only thing they had was the static creative.
The time line was bad enough, but what made it worse was that they only wanted to review the banners after they were created and each individually!! So essentially only after one set of banners were created would they approve them. (I think you know where this is going.) After the first set was done, they wanted changes.. no problem. Round 2, changes again. Round 3, changes again. Round 4, now they wanted to combine changes from round 1 and 3. In the end it was 7 rounds of changes to 32 banners! I don't mind changes, but I can't stand it when a change it made to an element and then changed back 2 rounds later.
I tried to advise and make recommendations to this (massive) company. But I think it was just too many cooks in the kitchen.
Needless to say I'm bananerd out (like bananas, sorry).

Knowing your target...

Working at a creative company, and checking out thefwa.com often, I've ended up seeing thousands of website. Some good and some terrible. (Heck I've even made some of the terrible websites at the clients request, but that's a different story). But when a website hits it's target demographic head on, it makes me notice... http://www.toopyandbinoo.com/

Normally, I wouldn't give this site a second glance beyond it's nice clean and "easy-to-use" interface, but since I have a 2 year old daughter who loves Toopy and Binoo I decided to give it a closer look.

Overall, this site is amazingly interactive. It's my favorite type of website that looks simple, but is very complex. It encourages kids to click on items and follow Toopy and Binoo on new adventures. One of my favorite sections is when you dress Binoo up with old items in a closet, you see him in the mirror with a the item as they imagine it would look like. For example, if you dress Binoo in a red house coat, in the mirror it appears as Santa's jacket. This promotes imagination and my daughter loves it. We spent at least an hour on this site, and if you have a 2 year old, that is a feat in itself.

I could go on and on about it, but I'd encourage you to check it out and discover it for yourself. When viewing it remember who they're targeting. These people at Tribal Nova are really thinking. Congrats!

Hooray.. now I'm cool!

After reading numerous blogs on Jaxtr, namely Peter Elst and Keith Peter, I decided to try it out.
Well, as of a few minutes ago I got my account. Now I'm cool. Go ahead and call me by using the button on the right.

Too many cool things...

Every time I head over to OSFlash.org I come across something new I want to try. Yesterday, I came across Red5. Take from osflash website, Red5 is:
an Open Source Flash Server written in Java that supports:

• Streaming Audio/Video (FLV and MP3)
• Recording Client Streams (FLV only)
• Shared Objects
• Live Stream Publishing
• Remoting

I haven't tried it, and I don't know too much about it, but if it can do what it says it can, I'm sold. I've wanted to create a program where you can stream from a webcam (just for fun) but I wasn't going to buy any software for it, much less a Flash Communication server. This fits the bill perfectly.

Now, with Papervision3d, AS3, Apollo and now Red5 how will I ever find the time for for anything but Flash programming? My wife will be so happy!! LOL.

AS3 news

I found some convincing arguments to speed up my transition to AS3. Granted they're more visual elements than arguments, but they're still convincing:

PaperVision3d - Private beta 3d engine for Flash. Available for both AS2 and AS3, but to see the real power in AS3, view this (click on the icon in the bottom right corner for FULLSCREEN). I've just got the classes and will hopefully get something together in the future. Although I love 3d, I don't anything about modeling.

computeSpectrum AS3 method - This is way overdue; the ability to generate visualizations from supported sound files. An example can be found here. (Not the best example, and you need Flash Player 9 to view it).

Apollo is coming...

I just read on Keith Peter's blog a developer version of Apollo may be released as soon as March! Man, I'm getting sooooo excited!

This will be huge when it hits.

It's ALIVE!!

The build for my ever talked about portfolio site has started. I'm anticipating a launch at the end of the month.

It's taken some time to finalize the mock-ups, diagram the UML and collect all the assets (ie- screenshots of sites, project files, etc), but now it's all together. I'm trying to build it in a MVC design type so in the future I'll can change to look without having to change a lot of the code.

I'll post some mock ups later this week.