I must apologize for the lack of updates on FlashAnt recently -- no, I didn't drop off the face of the Earth.

I got back from MXDU last week and it's taken me this long to recover from the jetlag, the customary cold I seem to pick up whenever I fly anywhere, and get past the pile of work waiting for me on my return. It's getting harder and harder to take a week out, it seems!

First off, my planned reports from MXDU hit a glitch when the GPRS on my phone decided to stop working for some unexplainable reason that I still need to grill Vodafone about. As you can imagine, that stopped the MMS photos and videos dead in their tracks. I do have a neat interview with Mike Chambers that I shot with my phone right after his keynote on the future of Flash with Mike Downey which I will be putting up here shortly.

MXDU was really a blast and I got to hang out with a stellar bunch of people including Geoff, Daniela, Alex, Andrew, Sas, Clinton, Tatsu, David, Mike C & Mike D, not to mention my roomies, Grant, Guy, Peter, Chafic and Matt...

My theme for the event unfortunately was "Technical Difficulty": Kicking off the first few minutes of my workshop with James' Coldfusion slides streaming into our monitors from the adjacent class and having both the projector and internet connection fail on my during my session (thank goodness there happened to be an Elmo in the room which at least let me project my screen.) I've taken note, though: From now on I'm going to have offline backups of every sample application during presentations -- better safe than sorry!

Technical glitches aside, I really had a great time. The XBox room was, of course, amazing and I wasn't even always last in the deathmatches (thanks Peter!)

I'm still trying to get back into the stream of things here and will post Mike's video as well as any other photos I find as soon as I can.

Today, I'm off to London to talk to a friend about an open source Flash components project that you will no doubt be hearing quite a bit about in the coming days... (oh yes, I *do* love to tease!)

The MXDU Aftermath article by Aral Balkan, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 UK: England License.