If you attended any of my Hot Shots training sessions in either February or April, you should have received an email a few moments ago alerting you to a little surprise: I've decided to give all previous students a complete course pack with the seminar notes and examples from all six of the courses as a small thank-you for your support! If, by chance, you haven't received the email, please contact me directly and I'll send you another copy.

Here's to a great summer, everyone! I know, I may be jumping the gun on that one but I'm hoping things will warm up in May and see tomorrow as a new beginning (one without a hint of tonsillitis, hopefully, so I can get to work on the zillion other things I want to do with OSFlash, Arp, AS3 and Flex 2, and, of course, the courses!) :)

Why? Oh why?

Returned from FITC only to literally expire on arrival. I felt that I was coming down with something the night before I was about to fly out to Toronto but I guess I self-medicated the heck out of myself ("no way I'm getting sick before this!") and I was somewhat in and out of it during the conference itself. Well, I managed to drag myself to a doctor in the morning after flying in, got the diagnosis, and have been bedridden since, sucking down antibiotics four times a day (yummy!) It even hurts to type! :)

Darn, and I wanted to get back and throw myself into things -- especially OSFlash, Arp (and maybe even contributing to FC64, the cool new Commodore 64 Emulator project by Darron Schall and Claus Wahlers) and getting ready for FlashForward Austin.

(more...)

I'm going to be presenting my session the Open Source Flash Revolution today at Flash In The Can and sitting on a panel on Sunday titled The Business of Copyright: Sharing the Love. If you're attending also make sure don't miss John Grden and Chris Allen's talk on the Red5 server. They're going to be demoing the latest release with video streaming and shared objects and I hear that Luke Bayes will be presenting part of the talk from Thailand through Red 5 :)

Toronto is lovely this time of year and I'm really happy to be back here to promote OSFlash, open source in general and the Creative Commons.

One more course to teach tomorrow and I can rejoin the land of the living and Internet-connected. Note to self: The Thistle hotel at the Barbican has *baaaad* Internet access. Full story at 9. Must remember to blog about Continental Airlines too while I'm at it (still haven't Pete!) [Short story: Don't fly with them to the States unless you have a submissive personality.]

The courses are going really great, by the way! I've had another wonderful group of students. Today we dived into Flex 2 (after covering AS3 yesterday) and tomorrow we're going to be spending the day playing with open source tools and workflows in my Open Source Flash Development course.

We're going to be meeting up at the [garish web-site alert] Comedy Cafe tonight at 7.30 with some friends and potentially some of my students from the first two Hot Shots courses. Along with Tink, Richard, and a few others, we've booked for dinner (and apparently there's a "disco" afterwards -- woohoo!)

If you're interested, why not drop by and say hello? (You can book online and last I checked there were about 50 seats remaining for the show.)