I just spent way too much time watching the lovely animated header they have on the FlashForward site. Definitely not the first time I've seen a perpetually growing tree before but I don't remember seeing one executed in such an immaculate manner.

OSFlash is one year old today! It was one year ago, near midnight on the 27th of May, that I hit the "put" button in Dreamweaver to send the site up to cyberspace. Since then, OSFlash has continued to grow rapidly and this month we are going to have more than 80,000 unique visitors. Now if only I could get all those people into a single venue with a band behind me! /m\ as John Grden would say! :)

Oh yeah, and take a look at the site and see if you see anything new!.. Ah, you noticed him did you? That's Buzzy, the OSFlash mascot! As you may remember, Jirasak Saebang from Codegent had won the OSFlash mascot contest some moons ago. Since then, Codegent have been amazing at realizing the initial Buzzy sketches I sent them and both Jirasak and Art provided a number of variations. We finally decided to go with Art's version (Art's real name, by the way, is Sillapanon Hattachanchai). A big thank-you to Luke, Art and Jirasak for making all this possible. The design change isn't limited to the Flash header so expect more changes to come as the site evolves (including a really big one.)

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I'm going to be speaking at Multi-Mania, which is apparently Belgium's biggest multimedia event, on 29th June, 2006.

(A word of warning about the web site: It scared the crap out of me because the links make the exact type of clicking noise that my last hard disk did before it died. I shed some sweat before realizing it was the web site making the sounds and not my dying computer!)

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Well, it got your attention, at least! :)

I just saw that the kind folks at Lynda.com have put up my interview video from FlashForward 2006 in which I was asked: Does the open source [Flash] community typically embrace Flash, or is there skepticism? How does the Flash community take to open source -- what are the key concerns? During your session's Q&A, did you recieve any surprising questions? What excites you about the Adobe/Macromedia merger? And, finally, what's your experience been at FlashForward?

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What is the deal with the WiFi drought we appear to be experiencing in the UK?

The one thing notably missing from the otherwise excellent Adobe Live was free WiFi at Olympia 2. In its place, a company called eForce (watch out for gangs of stray apostrophes on that page) was charging around £300 for a WiFi connection. How is this in any way justified and how much are daylight-robbery tactics like this hurting (and holding back) the tech industry in the UK? What a short-sighted practice on the part of Olympia and other venues that perpetuate such practices.

I was personally forced to use my 3G card (which mostly got GPRS reception at Olympia) just to process sign-ups for the London MMUG.

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