On January 24, 1984, Apple officially released the first Macintosh, 2 days after airing one of the most famous ads in TV history, directed by Ridley Scott. So happy 25th, Mac!
Archive for the ‘General’ Category
Wow, I’m on Adobe TV
Adobe has posted most, or possibly all, of the sessions from MAX, including as it turns out mine! Pretty cool. So if you would like to watch it, you can do so on the Adobe TV site.
How To Ask a Good Question and How To Be a Good Student
When I started the blog, I made a promise to myself that I was going to avoid becoming one of those bloggers who spent all day simply posting links to other sites and blogs. However, sometimes it’s just plain necessary.
First off, I’d like everyone to read How To Ask Questions the Smart Way. Yes, it’s kind of long, but please, take a few minutes and read it. As many of you know, I spend a lot of my time moderating and responding to posts on several Yahoo groups, and not a day goes by that someone doesn’t violate a few of the simple guidelines presented on that page. Routinely, people post questions that are way off topic, or have bad and/or meaningless subject lines, or are so non-specific or so poorly worded that they are meaningless.
I should note that I’m not posting this because somehow I think it will make things easier for me. The vast majority of the time, if a question is really badly written or way off topic, I’ll simply ignore it. So really, having people read the article and start asking better questions would most likely end up in more work for me, not less. But the point here isn’t me. The point is that if you learn to ask better questions, you’re much more likely to get better answers more quickly.
Second, one of the blogs I read daily is Scott Kelby’s. Kelby runs the National Association of Photoshop Professionals and is the best-selling computer book author out there. In fact, I will, without reservation, recommend any book he’s written.
Several months ago, he had a great post on how to be a good student. This is very similar to the “good question” thing above, and again, I post it for the same reason. Obviously, having good students is something near and dear to my heart, and I wish I could hand out a print-out of this article and make everyone read it before class each day, but in lieu of that, I’ll just post it here and hope everyone reads it…
Happy Thanksgiving and all that…
Oops. Two more weeks passed by and no blog posts. I really need to do better…
Today is of course the day after Thanksgiving, and I’m quite contentedly sitting at home doing practically nothing. It’s been an interesting holiday so far: both of the kids spent all day yesterday being sick, and we got to spend this morning with my son at the doctor. My daughter summed it up best last night when she said, in response to the question about what she liked best about Thanksgiving, “This hasn’t been my best day.” Fortunately, they both seem to be feeling better now.
One thing I’m not doing today is shopping. I know that that somehow makes me un-American, but I did buy the paper yesterday to look through the ads and frankly, I couldn’t find anything on sale that was a good enough bargin to make it worth getting up at 3 to go stand in line and fight crowds. In fact, the two big items I’m looking at – a small digital camera for Kelley for Christmas and a digital video camera for us for our anniversary* – are both cheaper on Amazon at regular prices than they are in any stores today.
One good bit of news – I dropped my contract into the mail today for book #4: ActionScript 3.0: Your visual blueprint™ for creating interactive projects using Flash CS4 Professional. I’ve actually been writing it for about a month already, but now that the contract is signed I’m official. Wiley also changed the payment terms that they’ve been using for the prior books in a way that made me really happy. So that’s good.
Well, that’s it for now. I’ll be posting some news next week about the Sierra MMUG, but until then, have a great start to the holiday season!
Some quick updates
Sorry I’ve been a bit remiss in writing entries. The last two weeks were a bit crazy. First, I was rushing to get the book done. As you know, I finished writing a few weeks ago, but then I had to do the author review, when I get all of the comments back from the copy and tech editors and have to make revisions. So that took some doing, but I’m happy to say that I finished that up last Friday. I’m going to enjoy some free time this week – it will be a bit strange to have a train ride to San Francisco this week and not have any writing to do – but I am working on a proposal for my next book already, so we’ll see if the publisher accepts that so that I can move forward.
Second, I’ve been insanely busy even without the writing. Two weeks ago, I had something going on almost every night. Monday and Thursday were both teaching nights, and Tuesday and Wednesday were back-to-back user group events for the CS4 release. Then last week, I ended up teaching a class (PHP) during the day, with a one-on-one ActionScript each evening for an hour after that. On Thursday, I set a personal record by teaching 3 different classes in one day – PHP from 9-4, ActionScript from 4-5, and the HTML from 6-8. Yikes.
But the good news is that things are much slower this week. Today is a special family day thanks to Columbus Day. We’re going to take the kids to Bishop’s Pumpkin Farm, and I’ll try to post some pictures later on. Tomorrow is my first day off where I don’t have to either be writing or feel bad about not writing in a long time, so I plan to enjoy that. Then I’m off to SF for the remainder of the week. I’ll be attending the Bay Area ColdFusion User Group meeting on Weds and the meeting of the local Flash user group – very creatively named San Flashisco – on Thurs. I also plan to try to squeeze in a movie or two, so it will be fun.
And I will get back to tech-related posts soon …