Eclectic Brain Salad

Sunday

I had a nice easy flight over to the conference - only an hour! For once, it was the turn of our American and Canadian brothers and sisters to have the jetlag ;-)

I got to the hotel at about 5.15, immediately seeing Jerry Chabolla, Trevor Burton and Jared Sims outside. I just had time to unload my stuff before taxi-ing it off to the rehersal rooms to do 5 hours of Phlash5 rehersals! After playing Djembe for that length of time, my hands were pretty raw, but we played pretty well (especially considering our rehersals outnumber our shows ... by 3 to 2!) and got a new song ready to play ("Photoshop is not a verb"), and it really rocked to play music and hang out with Chris Allen, Aral Balkan, Sam Aglesias, Jared Sims, Seb Lee-Delisle and of course John Grden.

Afterwards we went back to the hotel, had a couple of beers, and then got to bed at a fairly sensible time (for a Flash conference, anyway.)

Monday

In the morning I checked out John and Trevor's talk on Paperworld - their multiplayer online game built using Flash and Papervision 3D. Pretty impressive by all accounts.

Next up I saw Carlos Ulloa talk about a whole bunch of cool 3D stuff - his examples were truly impressive, and it was nice to see him again. I also caught up with Niqui Merret, and had some great conversations with Robert Shepherd about the future of education online. It was also nice to see Peter Elst and Koen de Weggheleire.

A load of us went out for lunch, then I went back to the hotel to get some work done.

Monday evening was truly awesome - the Phlash5 gig went well, everybody seemed to enjoy it, and a lot of good conversations were had. It was great to see R Blank again, and also chat to Lisa Walters about punk and hardcore stuff! I also caught up with Adam Ray - good to see ya!

Tuesday

Tuesday started a little later than I expected, and I was really dismayed to miss both my friend Tiago's After Effects talk, and Jared Tarbell. I surfaced, managed to get some more solid work done, and then carried on down to the conference centre. First of all I caught Ralph Hauwert's talk, in which he presented a whole bunch of awesome 3D stuff (that guy is pretty damn gifted) - presented in an entertaining style, looking at the evolution of 3D experiments from old school stuff on the Commodore 64 and Amiga, through looking at how Pink Floyd experimented to achieve some of the stuff they got using tape loops etc, to some of his modern work, and the limitations you need to work around in ActionScript to do this kind of stuff. I think this was the best talk I saw at the conference.

Next up was Hoss Gifford, talking about some project planning and design iteration type stuff, as well as showing off some of his latest, very cool work. Last but not least, I caught up with Marco Casario, and saw his talk on Flex techniques. It was great to see him again (I miss all my old friends of ED Flash authors!)

Tuesday evening was slightly less insane than Monday evening, although the free bar still threatened to take it's toll. After the party was over, I had a bit of a wander round with R, and the Red5Server crew (take care, Mike, Dom and Rebecca, otherwise I'll do my menacing walk on you again), and then it was about time for bed.

Wednesday

After a gentle breakfast with John and Josh Davis, it was time to toddle off to the airport, and back to reality. Thanks a lot to Shawn, Dave, Naomi, Erin, and the rest of the FiTC staff for putting on another great party conference.

I got a lot out of the conference - a lot of people sounded interested in checking out Opera Mini/Mobile/Desktop, I've got a lot of great new educational contacts, and it was interesting to hear a lot of people on the Flash side of the fance interested in seeing more convergence between the Flashers and the web standards guys, and learning more about the dark side ;-)

This is a trend I want to help further...