Some of you may know that I grew up in Malaysia -- Kuala Lumpur, to be precise. The eight amazing years I spent there will always remain in my memories as some of the most precious in my life and I've always wanted to return ever since my family and I left, back in 1989, when I was thirteen. It seemed, however, that -- with puberty, high school, university, work, etc. -- something always got in the way of realizing this dream until this year when I finally decided that we would plan a trip back with Emilie and my parents. Mom and Dad were supposed to fly into Gatwick today (they still haven't seen our new home in Brighton) and we were all supposed to fly out on Tuesday for KL. Unfortunately, as fate would have it, I got a call while in the Netherlands that my parents wouldn't be able to make it after all as my dad had developed a possibly serious condition in his eye -- a blocked vein. My parents are thus going to be flying out to Ankara instead (they live in North Cyprus, where my dad is a professor at one of the universities there) where more tests, and quite possibly a laser operation, can be performed.

In other words, a real bummer.

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The Flashcoders mailing list is a very special place for many of us. For me, it was my first home in the Flash community and I owe a great deal to the invaluable conversations that have taken place on the list through the years.

The Flashcoders list was started a long time ago, in a galaxy not too far away by one Branden Hall and has been a cornerstone of Flash developer culture ever since. According to the earliest records in the WayBackMachine, on November 6, 2000, the Flashcoders Wiki (or at least its front page) was set up as a resource to summarize knowledge shared on the list. Unfortunately, sometime around August 2004, the Wiki went down after being wiki-spammed to death.

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I'm back home in Brighton after having an amazing time at FlashForward and getting to meet and talk to some fabulous people. A big thank-you again to Linda, Stuart, Kim, Christoph, Kevin, Carolina, Jim and the whole FlashForward crew for their efforts in creating such a rewarding experience.

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I was lucky enough to attend a presentation by Paula Le Dieu, who is the Director of Creative Commons International, at FlashForward last week on the Creative Commons project. Needless to say, I was very impressed by the scope and importance of their undertaking. Paula was an excellent conduit, representing the reach, energy and enthusiasm that is, without doubt, inherent in the project. If nothing else, this has led to my getting off my (albeit skinny) butt and finally releasing the content on FlashAnt under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 England & Wales License.

What this means is that you can use the content on here for commercial or non-commercial purposes as long as you give me credit and you license your derived works under the same license. Also, if any legal action has to be initiated (due to a license breach, for example), it will be done so here in the UK and under the jurisdiction of the British courts (that's what the last bit means!)

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I'm sitting at the Macromedia keynote by Kevin Lynch (trying to concentrate on polishing my presentation and trying to put the events in London out of my head -- not easy, especially since I haven't been able to reach everyone I know). Kevin's currently talking about the Flash Platform and he just talked about OSFlash and showed the OSFlash web site. It's very cool to see Macromedia embracing OSFlash and the open source Flash community.