Shane Life

Tonight was the first meal in Seattle that I have eaten seafood.

For dinner this evening, we went to a place called Salty’s on Alki and I have to say that it was one of the best seafood meals I have ever had. We arrived after 8 and there weren’t many people left. We started with a huge appetizer platter, complete with mussels, clams, prawns, crab, and raw oysters (or really big boogers, depends on your opinion of them).

I don’t get seafood often, but I’ll try most anything. I don’t hate clams and mussels, but they aren’t my favorite. The prawns were awesome and the crab was…well, it could have used some butter sauce.

For my entree, I had this incredible salmon dish that had been smoked first, then grilled. It was moist (sorry Alli) and so tasty. Served on a bed of wilted spinach and some roasted garlic mashed potatoes, the entree was terrific in every way.

We capped off the meal with a sampling of a few of the desserts. A bite or two of the white chocolate cheesecake (so smooth), some white chocolate mousse cake (light and phenomenal) and a chocolate sampler platter (which I didn’t try, but I think Alli would have liked).

All in all, it was a wonderful meal. And not only that, but we were across Puget Sound, so our table was at the window, right on the water, looking directly at downtown Seattle. We had a great view of…well…everything.

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.

I’m headed to Seattle all next week for a conference. I’ll be posting from there and trying to keep my flickr photostream updated.

Before I go, I have a volleyball tournament tomorrow and we’ll see how my ankle handles a day of jumping up and down. Cross your fingers! As for the rest of the weekend…tonight is the Gardner Dance Team’s Light Show…it’s their final performance before their big Spring Show.

I’m interested to see what Seattle is like. While I’m not a big fan of seeing it without Alli, I still am interested in the city. We are planning to go to the original Starbucks location as well as see Pike’s Market and all that other touristy stuff. But mostly we’ll be in sessions from 8 in the morning until 6 at night.