Orland Media site

My company website is launched, featuring the new course Applied ActionScript 3.0, which I believe is the best of its kind in the world.

Seeking Adobe Flash™ development or training?

Please visit the site of my company Orland Media Ltd, where you can find the new course Applied ActionScript 3.0™.

New Graphic site launches

Through my company Orland Media Ltd, I have completed development of the site for Irish design agency New Graphic.

The site was built to specification in ActionScript 3.0 and is entirely XML driven, allowing my client to easily update the site themselves without needing to come back to me. The core architecture of the site is very lightweight (therefore fast loading) at only 75Kb.

As far as the technical details go, my decision to create this project using ActionScript 3.0 yielded the following benefits:

• Ten-fold speed increase
• E4X XML parsing (easier data handling)
• Enhanced drawing API
• Simplified and formalised event handling model
• Correct type objects for the job at hand (i.e. Shapes for shapes, Sprites for one frame clips) == lower overhead
• Use of enhanced third party classes, such as TweenLite AS3

The site was engineered entirely using external ActionScript (.as) files and my editor of choice was FlashDevelop.

Some useful programming principles

• KISS
• Hollywood
• DRY

Happy Valentine’s Day Andrea!

It’s February 14th - Valentine’s Day, and I would like to headline my site with this tribute that I created in Flash (ActionScript 3.0) for my lovely girlfriend Andrea, who has her own site here, and whose stunning picture you can see here. Her many qualities include beauty, intelligence and integrity.

I often thought I would have to go back in time to meet such a lady, but I ended up having to go to sunny Florida. She has enhanced my life tremendously and I am continually flattered by her interest in me.

I have written many articles not only in support of rational thought but also in support of a return to chivalry and romance, so I will link to a few of these today too:

• North & South: a call to romance
• How to entertain ladies
• The lost art of chivalry
• The death of the English lady

Oops! The latest free Adobe Flash Player™ is required to view this content.

Andrea, if you don’t feel loved after seeing the above, I don’t know what’ll do it.
But I know you do, and I will be with you soon..!

Amateur

Today I was working at a design agency in Soho. Though I like the guys there a lot, down in the basement I saw the strangest thing: the entire wall was covered by very amateur and rather pointless drawings. They were okay, but I found myself sincerely hoping that whoever did them was not paid very much. For as a woman says on the person’s site:

“Your drawings are creepy and horribly freakish and show a warped mind that seriously needs to be examined by a psychologist. Whoever wrote the review for your work also needs their head examining and after that if they still think that your work is of a quality that other people should be subjected to I suggest that they see the work of my 3 year old niece who rivals your ‘expertise’ and sign her for a multi million pound deal that she obviously deserves!”

- Natalie Murphy

Nicely put! Actually it has become fashionable these days for companies to pay people who have barely a modicum of talent to do silly things for them - the more pretentious the better - when they could actually pay far more talented people to do better things. This has been discussed by Dawkins and others in evolutionary terms. The idea is that if you waste a lot of money on stupid things you thereby make a statement “Look at us! We are so successful we can afford to throw money away on silly rubbish”. As I recall Dawkins is critical of this argument, but I can only imagine this is why it is done in business, as it makes no moral or aesthetic sense whatsosver.

Safari 3 Beta

Apple have released a Safari 3 Beta for Mac and PC. It’s looks nice too (as much Apple stuff does) but as is usual for Macs it suffers from various limitations - they have even built in the Mac restriction that one can only resize the window from the bottom right corner, not from any corner or edge as is possible with other Windows browsers.

TiltViewer

This is the kind of thing we are starting to see with the new revolution in 3d Flash. Nice stuff…

How to handle interviews

If you are being interviewed:

When a company interviews you, they are not doing so as a charity and they are not especially interested in what they can give you. They are seeing you because they effectively have a problem, and you have convinced them you might be able to solve it.

If you can indeed solve it, you have no particular reason to be meek and mild or to think of yourself as a lesser person or more needy than the interviewer. While you should not be arrogant, a meek and mild attitude is not going to do you any favours. If you want others to respect you, you should first of all evidently treat yourself with appropriate self respect. Don’t even care about “how you are appearing” and “what they think of you” etc. Just do what you know is right.

You are no less than the interviewer. I don’t even like to call interviews “interviews”. In fact they are meetings, and their purpose as far as I’m concerned is simply to establish whether there is a match of requirements. There might not be. You might not be skilled enough, the company might not be offering to put you where you want to go or they might not be paying enough. That’s fair enough. That’s a result. The company might also make a mistake - they might misjudge you. Well, if this happens and you’re worth having, it’s their loss. Don’t worry about it.

When I go into interviews I am totally relaxed. This tends to be disarming for interviewers, but it’s not deliberate, its just as a result of me having met hundreds of people. I am totally straight about what I know and what I don’t know, so as not to waste anybody’s time, and I am simply interested in explaining what I do and seeing whether it meets what they need. I am never interested in begging for something from them.

See interviews for what they are, don’t even take them personally, remember everyone is entitled to be treated with respect, and just relax.

If you are the interviewer:

I have been an interviewer so I know what this is like. My advice to you is be genuine, don’t try to play any ego games with your interviewee (or any other games), and remember that a person worth having probably knows they are worth having. Treat it like a meeting, that’s all. You are simply interested in assessing if this person 1) has decent social skills (should be obvious) 2) can do the work well 3) is going to stick with the company 4) is requesting an appropriate pay grade. Don’t be overly formal. Indeed if a conclusion one way or the other is becoming obvious even in the interview, then you might as well discuss it. Anything else will look false.

When to fire your client

One of my favourite quotations from the “dot boom” era is this one:

“We had to fire Sony the other week. They weren’t listening to us, so we let them go. We actually had to get rid of Bad Boy [Entertainment] in the beginning, but they straightened up and came back. So did Sony. What the client sometimes doesn’t understand is, the less they talk to us, the better it is. We know what’s best.”

Gene Na, Kioken

Gene is right. If you employ someone for their expertise, of which you have seen evidence, let them get on with the job unhassled - otherwise employ someone else. Here’s further interesting discussion about this issue.