Bush Using Straw-Man Arguments in Speeches - Yahoo! News

Bush Using Straw-Man Arguments in Speeches - Yahoo! News

interesting story. Too bad nobody on the administraion's side cares that the practice is not only deceiving, but complete bs. And they soak in evey word as truth like a sponge.

Ever see the movie "Outfoxed?" (www.outfoxed.org) There's a whole section on how the wonderfully "unbiased" folks at Fox News - "we report, you decide" - HA! - use the same method - "some say" this, and "some say" that to disguise this crap as truth. Nobody ever knows who the "some" are - fact is they usually only exist in the eyes of the administration.

double oy!

we end up at espn zone and stay until 12.

i still got up at 4 to get ready for the shuttle.

man, am i tired. but i think overall it was a really great experience.

i'm looking forward to next year...

the end

well, it's over and it's pretty empty around here.

i fly out tomorrow morning. my flight is @ 8:30 from lax and i find out the shuttle i need to take is at 5. 5, like in 5am. oy!

i run into a guy we hung out w/at disney and we decide to do dinner since there are no more feebies to be had.

day 3 - pm

i completely changed my original schedule for the rest of the day and am pretty gald i did.

i was going to take two workshops on Flash Lite - the version of flash for mobile use like in cellphones, etc. and one called "rapid e-learning yada, yada" (ok, i added those)

i thought it would be cool to find out about how to do flash for the mobile market, but, after the 1st few days here i realized that until i start working for someone who makes content for cellphones in japan or europe, i was wasting my time. there isn't really any market in the u.s. for it b/c the cellphone companies won't release phones with flash here until we all get sick of the ones they sell now. that could be a while.

the e-learing thing, i figured, was going to be a lot like the one i went to sunday. once was enough.

so, i got into a 90 min hands-on workshop - "using the power of xml w/dreamweaver"

this one, not suprisingly, was about using dreamweaver w/xml, something i've wanted to get my head around for a while now. xml is powerful stuff if you want to have dynamic content - and so much easier when it's already there like in an RSS feed. the basics were covered and by jove, i think i've got it. the hands-on ones are so much better - since you actually do stuff.

day 3 - am

started the day with "Drawing in Flash 8" with Michael Ninness. He works for lynda.com and knows his stuff. (he ran one of the other's i took before, too). it was a good session with hints on how to deal with the drawing tools in flash and how it's been updated for studio 8.

next was "Extending Dreamweaver"

now, i'm not sure about you, but reading the title made me think it was about some of the cool extensions out there for Dreamweaver and how to use them. but, no. it was about making your own extensions, which is an extremely diffenet ball of wax my friend. not really somthing i plan on doing anytime soon, but interesting anyway.

lunch. the lunches have become decidedly less fancy as max goes on. oh, well, it's still free. (contrary to what my dad used to tell me, there are free lunches in america)

disney cali adventure

waited 20 minutes to get on board a bus to take us to disney's california adventure for food, drinks, and rides.

it's a block away.

it was pretty cool, though. rode the roller coaster like 4 times. we tried to sneak back in though the exit after 11 - closing time - and got snagged. oh, well. drinks and rides that spin are a dangerous mix ;-)

l8r

day 3 - pm

had 2nd keynote before lunch today. not that exciting. all this one was was showcasing a bunch of new studio 8 stuff, which is what i'm seeing in the workshops anyway.

UT Austin won a MAX award for their entry, thought that was pretty cool.

they ran out of lunches this time. one of the servers told our table that they underestimated the count and only made 1700 when they should have made 2000. last i knew there were over 3000 here. you do the math.

got a cool sweatshirt for filling out a survey. life should be so easy.

attended a special reception for government, education folks. there was sushi - woo-hoo! met some cool people.

day 3 - pt1

damn am i tired. maybe it's the time change, i don't know.

but the guy who did my 8am workshop this morning had this to say "8am's tough when you have a lobby like the marriott." that was his excuse and he guessed everyone else's, too.

not me.

Art of encoding video:
the new flash 8 is really great when it comes to video. problem is, the version 8 player has only been around for a month or so. so, all the cool things you can do with it; alpha channels, etc. won't be usable until more people have it. regardless, it looks pretty darn good.

character animation w/flash, photoshop&flash-optimizing pixels, what's new in flash 8;
got some good tips out of these. can't wait to use it.

advanced actionscript 2.0:
maybe a bit too advanced. mostly about flash remoting which is a bit over my head.

day 2 - pm

lunch was pretty darn good. met a guy who works @ a company that just got aquired by macromedia in edinburgh scotland. guess he'll be working for adobe soon.

oh, yeah. that reminds me. the ceo of adobe was the last speaker b4 lunch. a large part of the 3,000 people in the room left. not a lot of love there, you can tell.

afternoon sessions:

Advanaced CSS, Dreamweaver Killer Tips, and Creating Richer & More Maintainable Sites w/CSS. see note below about them being too darn quick. getting what i can out of them, but sure glad i printed up the presentations beforehand.

now i need to find some dinner.

get this! ran into a guy that works at my old ad agency in NYC! i thought for sure i wouln't know anyone at this thing. (we weren't too close then, and we met in the men's room, so it was quick) but small frickin' world, huh?

Ze Rocks!

1st General Session aka keynote -

Ze Frank was the 1st speaker.

i almost cried.

you know how i said mike downey was the man in the Flash world? this guy is the man - or at least one of them - in the 'people who do really cool stuff in Flash' world. if you've never heard of him, go here ze's page and click around. when i was starting out in this ever-changing biz, his site was the one we would always go to to see what could be done w/flash and hope to emulate. lots of production hours wasted there for sure.

anyway. it's pretty cool seeing what the future - and present - holds for the Web and all that jazz according to the folks @ macromedia. good stuff. exciting stuff. makes me glad i do it (or at least try)

day 2 - am

got to my 1st hands-on workshop a few minutes late. waiting for the coffee to get re-filled in the ballroom was a bit more important at the time.

fast track to captivate:
fast is right. most of the workshops are 60-90 min long. not a heck of a lot of time to catch how to do anything. but, luckily, captivate seems easy enough to learn on my own later. pretty cool stuff that i can certainly see being used in the dms.

mike downey speaks

the highlight of the day - besides the free beer - was mike downey talking about what's new in flash 8. he's the 'flash product manager' aka the man.

you know how flash does vector graphics on the fly? now it can do bitmaps, too. at runtime.

ever use the blending modes in the photshop layers panel? flash has them and they can be applied to anything - even video.

effects like blurs and drop shadows? - ditto.

there's a thing called Script Assist to help w/actionscript syntax.

and the new video codec can take a 30MB mov and make it a 600k flv - with very good results. smashing.

he got applause more than a few times.

day 1, too

i learned that although we often mock powerpoint, it's what pretty much everyone in the corporate world uses. this is why macromedia created captivate and breeze - so you can try to make powerpoint more interesting.

sad, but true. brush up on your powerpoint everyone.

"learn advanced powerpoint"' "avoid clip art - invest in stock images", use: "animations", "audio to enforce concepts", "templates","graphics in place of bullets"

then, if you'd like, stick it into captivate or breeze.

or not. it's really up to you.

day 1

got a spiffy macromedia backpack @ registration. spent 40 min waiting on line at the Starbuck's in the Hilton lobby only to find they were serving it outside the room where my 9am seminar/talk/whatever was held. d'oh. i really miss the $8 i just wasted.

got hardly a thing out of the entire 'e-learning day.' seems like it was more geared toward big companies with big budgets. learned lots of acronyms - L&D, SME, LMS. you can ask me later what they mean.

tried to take notes:(not that it was all uninteresting, i just take bad notes)

Key challenges of e-Learning

• to hard to use
• inflexible
• not engaging

there was probably more but i stopped writng.

MAX 2005

so. i'm here.

i'm staying at the 'third choice' hotel. the other two were sold out - which means they have many more max folks around. i spent my dinner watching a group from wales do karaoke. moslty elvis. who knew he was so popular in the uk?

and so it starts

ok, i have finally jumped into the blog arena - better late than never. my biggest fear was that i would never have anything useful to say.

yup, nothing useful...