And to all, a good night. NOT!!

So, It's never a good sign when you ask your computer to reboot, and said computer reboots... and then takes it upon itself to reboot, and reboot, .. and reboot.

All in all, I'm sitting here at 5:00am on a Monday morning, technically the end of my workday, watching my week about to go down in flames. This is my primary work computer, my workhorse. I have backups on one other system and my laptop, but I'd like to think that this is the one that the other computers look to for guidance and advice.

I forsee a very long day ripping out computer parts and booting and rebooting and ripping out more computer parts to save this one. It's very much like surgery, only a little less messy. Oh oh, there it goes again about to reboot. Somebody get me the paddles

CLEAR!!

And the Shout Out goes to

It's been an explosion this last year or so it seems, of good stuff on the internet. Reminds me in no small way of the early years of the dot com boom. Everybody was discovering the internet, everybody started a dot com and I couldn't aquire enough e-mail addresses. I stopped the count at 15 which I believe was offerred to me by Britannica Online. Hey, it was free, I took it. I'll figure out what to do with it later.

So, fast forward to 2005 and there appears to be a resurgence of good things, many in no small part to the competetive prodding by Google, the hosts of this here blog. 2.6gb email boxes, web 2.0 applications, open source versions of practically every type of software you need, from office applications to streaming media players ( kudos to the guys at vlc) and lots and lots more. You just have to look.

And now, the good guys over at OSFlash are making strides in what seems like every type of opensource flash app available, helping in many ways to promote the platform. When you're in the middle of it, you never realize how many people don't use words like Flash, and Flex and FlashCom on a daily basis until you're speaking to a colleage who incidentally also does web development, though in Java and he doesn't know about Flex or that Actionscript 3.0 is coming soon.

So, I'm going to do my part in giving a shout out to the cool guys over at RED5, also part of osflash and say, keep doing good work guys.

Opensource ROCKS!!!

Welcome to Macromedia - Now Adobe Systems

So, I finally ordered Macromedia Studio 8. After all, despite all my ranting, I really do love the company, even if I don't care for the new daddy.Expectations were high. Finally, after all the anticipation, the exercise in patience, I broke down and ordered Studio 8 bright and early on a Monday morning. It was even more exciting to see that there would be free shipping. Now all I had to do was wait. and wait. and wait

[3 days later - Order status:"pending"]

Ring ring. Thank you for calling Macromedia - Now Adobe Systems.

Hi Adobe systems, why is my order still pending?

Three phone calls, a dropped call and about and hour later]. Uh, we ... don't know. It appears to be a result of the merger, things are sort of being moved around. We'll call you.

Uh, Okay. I guess. (I mean, what was I supposed to do?)
If you have any further questions

[Update]
So, they finally call me 8 days after my order. We've shipped your Order! We'll send you a free book to compensate when we eventually get to it.

Make of it what you will