Shane Life

So the first day of the FlashForward Conference here in Seattle is over. And it was a pretty good day. Half a really good session on video (thanks to Robert Reinhart from FlashSupport.com) and a really sweet evening event put on by Adobe.

Started the day off well with a nice breakfast at the Top of the Hilton Restaurant here in our hotel. Nice view of the city from there. Snapped a decent pic of the view:

After that, we went and registered and proceeded to our all-day workshops. Also got a nice selection of schwag in our conference registration bag, exclusive with a premium pass:

The reason that I say “half a really good session” was because I spent the morning at Aral Balkan’s “Actionscript for Right-Brainers” workshop, a session that was aimed at designers wanting a better understanding of the Flash coding language, Actionscript. Unfortunately, Aral’s approach was really to outline what object-oriented Actionscript, which is something that is useful for building Rich Internet Applications, but rarely for designers like me. It also wasn’t helpful that this is what my view looked like in the room:

I decided after lunch at the Cheesecake Factory that I would go over to Rob’s workshop on video, which proved to be much more useful, considering our company is getting ready to undertake a pretty large video project with our upcoming customer portal where potential prospects will be able to watch videos of our existing customers telling stories of how our product has made their businesses more efficient, etc.

Not only was Robert a much better presenter, but he was presenting something extremely relevant to me and the rest of our interactive team.

Once we were done with the sessions, it was off to the VIP party at Gameworks, a giant arcade. Adobe paid for the evening with free food and drink as well as free games. The latter was the most important to me because I was able to play the Sega Derby Owner’s Club game that our friends Paul and Maria got me hooked on when we went to Dave & Buster’s with the a couple weeks ago. Basically you train and race a horse and as you train it, it gets better and better. My first horse was so awesome that I retired it (after it won 14 out of 20 races) and created a new horse, the unstoppable force that is CHUCK NORRIS.

It was a fun evening. I’m looking forward to the conference too. I think that I will really get something out of it, whereas in the past, it has been a struggle for me to connect with the material. We shall see. More to come.