San Diego

I went down to San Diego, my old stomping ground, for Memorial Day this past weekend and again today for work. I miss the laid back style down there. Over the weekend, people were so laid back, to the point it started to get my frustrated. Standing in line to order coffee was a three or four minute ordeal! Imagine my frustration.

A lot has changed down here since I used to live here. Downtown has Petco Park, a ton of high end condos, Gaslamp looks totally invigorated with swanky restaurants and hip LA-style clubs. It doesn’t top there, though. I went back to UCSD to see the Price Center Expansion that I had worked on in school, and it’s finally complete. Walking from the old Price Center (now “Price Center West”) to the expansion (“Price Center East”), it’s a striking difference. The old center looks so old and tiny, but then it was all we had. The new center is light and airy, with a ton of open space for seating and dining. Since it was a Saturday that we went, there weren’t a ton of people, but I could imagine how it’ll help reinvigorate campus life.

198 Words

Apple’s AirTunes

I bought a used AirPort Express today and I can’t believe it took me this long to figure this out. AirTunes is a pretty phenomenal concept, but getting the whole set up to run with my WRT54G was painful.

It was unable to run in client mode. I tried a couple of times to get it going through the automatic setup to have it only do AirTunes, but the yellow light kept blinking. In the end, I set up with in WDS mode, which also turned out to be difficult to use. The trick was making sure both the WRT54G and the AirPort Express had the same wireless channel, and when putting the WEP/WPA key in the AirPort Express to prefix it with a “$”. Who knew?

In any case, it’s up and running and amazing. I highly suggest also throwing Airfoil in the mix so you can route YouTube videos and sites like Pandora through AirTunes.

159 Words

Adobe’s Open Screen Project

I don’t write a lot about what I’m doing at Adobe and it’s mostly since I’m working on projects that are not released yet and are still under development. However, today we announced the Open Screen Project, a cross industry effort to bring Flash and Flash technologies to more screens.

A the basic level, the next release of our Flash player runtime for devices (e.g. mobile phones, mobile internet devices, televisions, etc, etc) will be free. On top of that, we’re dropping license restrictions on the SWF format (the file that Flash runs on).

Personally, I think this is really cool. It allows people in the creative community to know that Adobe is commited to putting our player and client technologies on devices across all the places where people will want a rich and expressive experience. It’ll help get on the path to have a consistent experience for developers and creative professionals regardless if they’re developing for a desktop/web site, a mobile phone, a Chumby, or whatever other device Flash might run on.

175 Words