furiousBlog - in my diatribe » flash

atlas shrugged and dog lasers

furiousBall — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 14:09:06 +0000

Picked up my copy of Atlas Shrugged Part 1 that was being held at my favorite library and neato, it’s one of the pre-recall versions…

Titan has started being allowed to lay with Bubs while he reads before bedtime, and both seem to be enjoying the new privileges.

BOY IZ READING… LAZORS ON!!! PEW PEW PEW!!!

Small Business/Tech Links…

Funny/Interesting Links…

karmaic smiles

furiousBall — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 15:06:01 +0000

So, if a Dad gushing over how proud he is of his son bugs you – you should probably find another blog post to read today…

See this? This is a kid enjoying the products of his hard work…

That is Bubs in his report card prize, some new Bauer Vapors – which are decent, but not lavish skates by any stretch. But to a kid that was wearing skates two sizes too small, they are the best thing ever.

His grades will be finalized next Wednesday and he has straight A’s except one class, Social Studies – which he is one point away from an A. He has a chance to get that A with a homework assignment or a quiz. Even if he doesn’t hit the perfect report card – his work has been extraordinary this marking period. Not only has his grades been awesome, but he is also playing soccer and ice hockey. He is learning how to organize himself and doing it without much complaining.

On top of that, I also received a letter from the BOE yesterday informing us that Bubs is going to get an award for his perfect score in Science on the NJASK last year (a test given to all NJ students in 4th and 8th grade). And I’m not done yet…

Last night at practice, one of the parents of his teammates came out of the boys’ locker room asking the parent next to me, “Do you know who number 7 is?”
“Yeah, that’s Van.”
And before I could claim #7 as my little dude…
“What a sweet kid, he came into the locker room and gave the coach the nicest apology for getting upset at the last game.”

I was beaming with pride. I was upset with Bubs for his complaining from the last game. Some familiar words came to mind… life grades on a curve. But hey, this is all part of why sports are so great for kids – those mistakes and improvements make these young men better hockey players and human beings.

Oh and on top of all of that greatness, karma smiled on me that day – while Abbe was cleaning our bookshelves, a $100 bill was found stashed in an old Christmas present from my parents… oddly enough almost the exact price for those skates.

Continuing on the good stuff motif… Team All for Layna received our largest ever donation and now, the team is at nearly 40% (up from 24% last week) and I am now at 50%! I can not wait to go out in this cold, rainy weather and run today. And with Black Friday approaching, I want you to consider skipping your coffee at Starbucks that morning and having a cup at home instead. Why $5? What good would that do for a cancer patient?

$5 can get you a latte at Starbucks or a beer at the local bar, but to see how $5 makes an impact for cancer patients, check out how every dollar really does count:

If 2 people gimme 5…$10 provides two hours of microscope use to determine if a new medicine will stop a life-threatening lung infection in a bone marrow transplant patient.
4 people…$20 pays for a bottle of nutrients that will nourish 10 million leukemia cells grown in the laboratory for a week, enabling scientists to test whether a new anti-cancer drug halts their growth.
8 people…$40 purchases enough razor-sharp blades to prepare bone-marrow biopsy samples from 200 patients, enabling doctors to make accurate cancer diagnoses.
20 people….$100 pays for the cost of an antibody used to determine the precise characteristics of lymphoma cells, allowing doctors to determine the best treatment for a patient.
50 people…$250 buys an instrument to measure tiny volumes of liquid, which allows scientists to accurately measure the solutions needed to prepare a patient sample for a diagnostic test.
100 people…$500 purchases 10 hours of time on a flow cytometer, a machine that reveals a multitude of characteristics of blood cancer cells that could be developed into effective diagnostic tests.

To dontate: http://pages.teamintraining.org/nj/wdw12/AllForLayna

Movie Review…

X-Men: First Class – this was probably the best super hero film I’ve seen. That’s not high praise by any stretch, but this film was decent.

Small Business/Tech Links…

Funny/Interesting Links…

MOUSTAIR
Governor Perry explains which 3 Federal departments he would cut - I wanna party with this guy, he seems fun
Surfer Rides 90 Foot Wave in Portugal, a world record
Jaw-dropping northern lights

Time To Get MUDDY!!!

furiousBall — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 12:07:36 +0000

Today is the mud run. My prediction, messy fun. Pictures to come sometime this afternoon.

After a long day of work, Bubs and I had our nightly baseball catch in the backyard and after the kids were picked up by their mom, I headed to the cheese shoppe for dinner and to pick up Abbe. I got to try one of their new sandwiches from their new Fall Menu – the Swirled Peace, and wow, it’s awesome. Oh and I would be remiss without mentioning a hearty congrats to the Carriage Trade Cheese Shoppe for their win in the 28th Annual New Jersey Monthly’s Reader’s Choice Awards!

Small Business/Tech Links…

Funny/Interesting Links…

why local is important, trials of a coder, another possible need for a car repair vigil, and a pretty lady in the wine glass

furiousBall — Tue, 10 May 2011 13:07:10 +0000

Yesterday was a somewhat challenging little fella. I woke up to an email from the branch manager of my local bank letting me know that my checking account was overdrawn. It turns out an ACH payment dinged my account that should not have (unless I slept walked and bought some tractor supplies from Woodbury, NJ and didn’t realize it). Thankfully, charges have been refunded and my account is fine – big thanks to the folks at The Bank responding so quickly, gotta love the customer service you get from locals!

I am mired in a couple of coding battles right now. I am pitted against the Poll Everywhere JS embed code that I want to use within an AJAX autorefresh DIV. The tricky part has been getting the JavaScript within the embed code to execute (destroying the child DIV, re-adding it with the innerHTML and then adding the child DIV back to the DOM has been fruitless). I will be putting in a call (hopefully today) to a Poll Everywhere engineer to get some assistance. My other challenge has been getting a decent cross-browser PDF embed script to work. I found EmbedPDF which worked awesome for all of my computers (on Macs and PC), but the load time is slow and actually crashed my client’s browser upon testing. Now that Scribd supports HTML5 (so iOS viewers can play too) as well as Flash, AND they support non-Scribd hosted PDFs, this should be the answer, but their API is giving me fits.

Today, I am dropping off the Pathfinder again at Chad’s for a mysterious check engine light that just came on – get your candles ready for the vigil, people.

Small Business/Tech News…

Funny/Interesting Links…

Must remember to keep smiling

furiousBall — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 13:19:26 +0000

Must remember to keep smiling while the world continues to explode around me.

Books the kids and I have been reading…

GUYKU: A Year of Haiku for Boys – this was great, both kids really liked this book. Their eyes glazed over when I explained the syllable scheme(s) of Haiku, but they really enjoyed this book. And my son actually showed this book to our neighbor’s child and explained the 5, 7, 5 pattern.
How to Clean a Hippopotamus: A Look at Unusual Animal Partnerships – this book was cool. Illustrations are neatly laid out in a comic strip block format and chocked full of weird information. Ever have anyone ask you to describe another symbiotic relationship besides that of the clown fish and anemone? Well this book will give you plenty of responses.
Jimi: Sounds Like a Rainbow: A Story of the Young Jimi Hendrix – LOVED this book. The artwork is super cool and although a rock star that killed himself with drugs and alcohol (but, this is about his childhood and learning guitar) may seem like an odd choice for the subject of a children’s book – the music he made is the real story.
Subway – great idea for a book. Now my kids want to go ride all the subways in NYC.
Yucky Worms – Viv really like this story of a grandmother sharing all the secrets about the wonderful things worms do for us. And finally this book dispels the myth that if you cut a worm in half, you get two worms.
Dark Emperor and Other Poems of the Night – I loved this book. One half of the page is a poem about the nocturnal animal or plant, the other side explains the science behind the poem you just read. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the kids thought this was as cool as I did.

Small Business/Tech Links…

Funny/Interesting Links…

Happy Annual-Bought-a-Bag-of-Water-Softener-Salt-Instead-of-Sidewalk-Salt Day everybody!

furiousBall — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 13:55:57 +0000

Dodged a big financial bullet yesterday, my cracked molar only required a filing and no root canal was needed. Whew. Being able to eat on one side of my mouth again is heaven.

And yes, I just realized I did it again…

Happy Annual-Bought-a-Bag-of-Water-Softener-Salt-Instead-of-Sidewalk-Salt Day everybody!

Good news is my water softener needed it.

The even better news is that I am doing very well to get the backend piece of a rather large web project finished this week. I also got a call from another client that wants me to be more involved with their SEO strategizing and we discussed expanding my role with their company. On top of that, in a few months I will be the proud owner of an iPad! I am working on an HTML5/transition Flash-heavy sites to non-Flash heavy sites and my client will be purchasing one for me. After consulting with my family iPad expert (my very talented cousin, Justin), I think I’m going to try to hold out for the iPad 2. The timing should be just right with my development ramping up around that same time and I’ll need the device for unit testing.

By the way, my house smells awesome today. Abbe got a crock pot from her boss and is trying out some sort of really awesome smelling recipe all day.

Small Business/Tech Links…

Google’s New Anti-Spam Algorithm – Google’s new algorithm isn’t perfect yet, but if you are generating lesser-quality blog content as a feeder site for your business site – you might want to talk to a legit copywriter, stat.
HTML5 Boilerplate
AutoPagerize – I love Chrome

finishing up

furiousBall — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 14:28:31 +0000

I am in the home stretch on a couple of projects. I’m knocking out laundry lists of last items to finish before go-live. Both sites are really slick and will be awesome additions to my portfolio. Next week, I am planning on giving Flash Game Fever a major overhaul to see if that site is really worth keeping.

I’ve got coding to get back to. This afternoon, I need to prepare my presentation for BNI and also Viv will be visiting the dentist (and that’s always fun).

Small Business/Tech Links…

Rev Up Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

A visit from Em and Bradley

furiousBall — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 13:26:32 +0000

Pictures from yesterday…

Links for my geeky homies…

Adobe brings Flash apps to the iPhone
VMWare Fusion 3 Makes Running Windows on a Mac Fun – I’ve been using Fusion for a couple years now and love it.
9 Ways to Take Your Site from One to One Million Users

Bubble Boom-aholic

furiousBall — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 14:16:25 +0000

Here’s Bubs and Abbe filming an on-location newscast from in the field reporter, Vivienne… (I think Abbe was interviewed)…

And here’s Bowie trying to get Abbe’s attention while Abbe was folding laundry…

And here is my latest battle… Abbe’s addiction to Bubble Boom.

While it’s great she’s earning me a couple of pennies here and there (actually probably more like fractions of a penny) by playing so much, she gets a little… umm… intense… yes, she’s pretending to shoot the bubbles here…might need an intervention…

Books the kids and I have been reading… Dolphins In Danger (Adventures Of Riley) – it’s another Adventures of Riley book – the kids love ‘em, Hush, Baby Ghostling – Vivienne LOVES this story, Adventures of Riley–Mission to Madagascar – again, Riley = teh awesomes, Skelly & Femur – kids like this one, great illustrations but not much reading involved, South Pole Penguins (Adventures Of Riley) – Riley + tales of penguin poop? as we say here in Jersey… fuhgetaboutit, There Was An Old Monster! – kids like this, there is also a song you can download.

And now, a word from Glenn Beck’s sponsors…
MS Marketing Decapitation in Poland
2009 World Sauna Championships
Help Waldroid Destroy Waldo Once and For All
50 Extraordinary and Attractive Billboards

Links for my geeky homies…

R..r…r…r, r..r…r….r…

furiousBall — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 13:24:19 +0000

After shredding my neck in the attic while pulling down some baby stuff to give to a friend of Abbe’s and Abbe’s sister and putting up decking to create more storage space for my ex (she’s currently getting charged $200/month). I finally did the r-word. R..r…r…r, r..r…r….r…, relax. That! Beautiful day, we had a blast over at my Mom’s and my beautiful goddaughter Danielle, Aunt Cis, and Elijah were all over.

I finally started playing around with Flex and man, it’s bad ass. Can’t wait to create some stuff with this! I was thinking about writing the furiousCMS help file with Flex, but that seems like a bad choice (flash for help?) right now. So I’m probably going to do a boring href anchor thing like most help files and upgrade it as I have time.

Links for my geeky homies…

14 Steps to Good Business Website Design
TweetFeel – real-time Twitter feelings towards brand, celeb, etc.