Brian Fitzgerald

I don’t remember if I actually watched this show or not, but it looks familiar. Either way, its hilarious now.

This is just a sample Powerpoint presentation hosted on ThinkFree. The posibilities with this are really pretty fantastic. I'm thinking about how a person's blog really becomes the one-stop shop for everything related to that person. My blog already incorporates my links (del.icio.us) and photos (flickr) along with my normal postings, but the ability to include documents (text, spreadsheet, presentation, etc) would be very powerful. Powered by ThinkFree

I'm working with the ThinkFree Office Online beta and one feature in it is the ability to publish documents directly to your web log. This would be really useful for publishing workshop/session handouts and presentation slides. You can see an example of a document right here. Powered by ThinkFree

Here’s just a couple of videos that show the Wii through its unboxing and demonstrate the gameplay on it with an upcoming game: Farcry Vengeance.

It was handy this year that the playstation 3 and wii launches sandwiched my birthday on the 18th. I've really had my eye on the Wii since its announcement though.

Even without the $600 pricetag that the PS3 is sporting, I've just resigned myself to the fact that I don't spend enough time playing video games anymore to enjoy the games that really need that power. I can't wait to watch it in a store, and it's that $600 that will keep me from wanting to pull out my wallet when I see a football game on it for the first time.

I knew that the Wii was going to be more available than the PS3, so I didn't have the feeling that if I didn't stand in line I wasn't going to get one, but I figured that I'd go see what the line looked like early on Sunday morning. I got to Target around 5:30 am and there was a line that stretched about a hundred feet. I really wasn't sure between the tent, chairs and people just there to stand in line with friends where I was. As the line started to wake up from what sounded like a mostly sleep-less night, people started to count themselves off and I appeared to be somewhere between 15 and 20, with 24 being available.

Around 7am, a couple of folks from Target came out started handing out tickets -- I got the pictured 17. They told us to clean up the area and be back by 8 at which time they would escort us through the store where we would be taken in groups of two to select accessories and games, then purchase the Wii.

By 8:30 I was back in my car with a Wii in hand. Only 3 1/2 hours invested, and I had a launch-day Wii.

The thing is a blast to play. The game that comes with it -- Wii Sports -- is simple, but very fun. It includes Bowling, Tennis, Baseball, Golf and Boxing and serves as a nice demonstration of the Wii remote and Nunchuck. The best thing about these games is that they are the types of games that are appealing to just about anybody and you need almost no instruction to play. They are just intuitive and fun.

Half Full? I realize this comes from the "Cup Half Empty" saying, but by itself it sure doesn't sound like much of a toast. "Here's to a tolerable life..." Maybe they are trying to save some money by encouraging half-full cups of coffee...

I've written before about geotagging photographs. This has become super easy since Flickr has added a geotagging function in the last few months. Sometimes, this may not be enough though. Tomorrow, my family and I are headed to Maine and plan to do a little boating (cold boating). I was interested in the idea of taking my GPS and my camera and finding a way to link waypoint data from the gps with photos that I take. I found that a program that I have used before, JetPhoto, will do this and I was off to trying to make it work.

First, I needed to find a way to connect my GPS (an old Garmin GPS 3 Plus) to my macintosh. I found a data cable for the GPS, but USB was just finding its way onto the first iMac when my GPS was made, so it has a PDA-like serial cable. I figured that I could then maybe use a Palm USB Connect adapter to convert the serial to USB, but there weren't appropriate drivers available for it. So, I found a similar adapter by Dynex at Best Buy that said it was OS X ready. I plugged it in, installed the software and... nothing. I went to the Dynex web site to see if they had a newer version of the drivers, but they didn't. Viewing the readme for the drivers told me that Dynex actually had a company called prolific make the drivers. I downloaded those and things were starting to look up.

Since JetPhoto only seems to match up GPS data with a list of photos, and doesn't actually connect to the GPS itself, I needed to find a way to connect to the unit. I downloaded GPSBabel, which seems to be the current GPS transfer application of choice for the Macintosh, but my GPS proved to be a little too old (I think) for GPSBabel to deal with it. So, I did something that I almost never do, went looking for older software. I found GPS Connect, a discontinued GPS connection tool for OS X and Garmin receivers. Finally, I had something that could see my GPS. I was able to download content from it and put things on to it. With this running, I was also able to effectively use LoadMyTracks which put my GPS information directly onto Google Earth and Geocaching menu which makes it easy to put coordinates from Geocaching.com directly on to your GPS.

All of this done, I'll see if I can't do the photo/gps thing on wednesday when we head to Casco Bay.

See photos from max attendees here

Max 2006 is over so I guess that means that its time to take a look back over the last couple of days.

One thought that was going through my head this evening was how much this conference confirmed my feelings that web development is getting more exciting and doing anything but standing still. There was so much excitement at this conference around new ideas and directions such as Apollo, Flex and integration of PDF and Flash technologies.

Second, Adobe needs to lighten up a little bit. The 2006 version of Max had a much more corporate feel to it, and it didn’t feel right. There were a few more suits and ties this year that I remember from the past. There were fewer freebies to be had. There were more disclaimers before discussions. Adobe tried to play cool by providing all the pop and candy we wanted, but I don’t think anybody’s love was getting bought. It may sound stupid, but sending everybody out of the conference with an Adobe jacket or other strongly branded item would have helped solidify a little loyalty.

Third, the conference needs to either focus on coders (not my choice) or expand and bring the whole design community together (awesome!). The Max signs all said “The 2006 Adobe Conference” and yet, except for PDF jockeys, the traditional Adobe user would not have found much for them at this conference. Go BIG! Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator should all be covered and celebrated. Do sessions on Premier and After Effects. Become THE creative conference. It would be amazing and certainly the event of the year.

These are some pretty basic ideas and certainly not the most important things I’m taking from this conference – just things on my mind right now. Tomorrow we travel back to the great plains. I’m pretty excited to see my family and begin trying some of the things that I’ve learned here.

The Blue Man Group opened this year's MAX conference. Fun to watch, but sure seemed like a commercial for their nightly show here at the venetian. $99 a ticket?! Ha ha ha...

I’m out in Las Vegas this week with some co-workers attending the Adobe MAX conference. It’s a little different this year as it is the first year since Adobe’s acquisition of Macromedia (whose conference it was before). Here’s what I’ve taken from today:

1. Adobe is providing an unlimited amount of PDF kool-aid. I don't think that many have much against the format itself, but most everyone I know and talk with groan when we think about the Acrobat player.
2. Flex is where we are going. Flex has really matured over the last two years and its time to take it seriously. ColdFusion developers are in a perfect position to fly with it.
3. THE MAC VERSION OF THE FLEX BUILDER IS NOW AVAILABLE AS A BETA!! I have it installed and can't wait to start working with it.
   
4. Apollo will be everywhere. We don't all write applications to run in browsers because we just can't get enough of Firefox, Safari and Opera. Apollo will allow us to liberate our applications from browsers and turn them into desktop applications.
5. Flash may be what saves makes PDF bearable. Today's release of the document reader beta from Adobe demonstrates an application that is only a couple of megabytes, yet allows one to select and read PDF files. Its about time that Adobe realize that people don't want to install a 30M file just to read PDFs.

I'm looking forward to tomorrow. Bruce Chizen, CEO of Adobe, will be anchoring the general session. I'll be attending sessions covering HTML/Javascript/AJAX usage in Apollo, prototyping with Fireworks, creating learnable applications, integrating flash video into sites and manipulating images with Coldfusion.  Finally, Adobe is hosting a party at the Palms tomorrow evening. Another long and exciting day...

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• Remember the Day of Atonement
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• Touching God's Heart?
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• Is ColdFusion Harming Itself?
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• Social Networking: Time For A Silver Bullet
  A social networking newbie? Want to get up to speed? This article will give you the history, the present and show you where it maybe going.
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• Teaching What We Donâ??t Know
  Interesting article in Tuesdayâ??s USA Today about how â??Todayâ??s Young â??Digital Nativesâ?? Canâ??t Live, or Study, Without Technology.â? The focus was on Ball State U. in Indiana, the most wired campus in the country. It gives a lot of examples of h
• Kansas State Launches Worldâ??s Largest Podcast Program
  Our degenerate neighbors to the south seem to be getting on the ball with Podcasting, although a commenter on the linked page notes that the whole thing is locked behind blackboard which makes me wonder if it is a podcast at all. Audio files without a RSS
• Other Wikis
  I've fallen off of the wiki wagon but need to get back on. This is a pretty comprehensive list of wiki applications available.
  (tags: wiki)

MaxUP is a un-conference that will run in parallel to max in October. An un-conference is a conference where you must participate to attend. Think open-mic night at the coffee shop, then require that everyone take the stage if they would like to listen.

Here's the details.

Google plans to add 200 years of newspaper history to its search archives. Perhaps they will run into the same problems with this that they have encountered in trying to put books online but I hope that they succeed. The internet, I believe, has introduced a barrier to history that has not existed before. If I want to look something up on the internet and learn about it, I have to consider how long ago that event happened. If it happened anytime after the mid-90’s I will probably be able to find writing on the internet from that time about the event. If it was before that time, the internet may not give me the kind of perspective I’m after. What are newspapers but a ‘blog? Add 200 years of newspaper history and the internet just got 200 years older. Exciting!

The Call for Participation for NECC 2007 in Atlanta is Open. Deadline is October 4.

Wikispaces is giving away 100,000 FREE wikis to educators. Get yours!

Dan Saffer helps the world understand designers.

New to CSS? Here is a fantastic guide to starting out with CSS.

This isn’t as easy to do as it sounds. Horizontally center, easy; Vertically-center, tricky. Here’s a shot at a solution.

Here’s a site design that takes the painfully boring topic of insurance and makes it fun.

Read/Write Web’s Top 10 Firefox Web 2.0 Add-ons

Flash is Ten years old! Flash back at the Flash anniversary site.

Here’s another one of those things that I know I need to learn and start using, and haven’t.

The Big Picture on Microformats

Where do you stand on software/video piracy? I don’t know anybody that’s all for it, but we all seem to have a line that we think is all right to cross. This video compares piracy to things that are pretty absurd…

WebWag is another AJAX-driven start page. Looks great.