After roughly a year of procrastinating about learning ActionScript 3.0 due to other projects always being on fire and... well... procrastination, it is finally my prime directive at work to learn the sucker. All projects going forward will be using the new version of our in-house authoring tool, which is built to use a brand-spankin' new version of our proprietary engine which uses AS3!

I've been reading about AS3 for a few days now, but just today I got around to how working with XML is handled. Pardon me while I completely nerd out for a minute here and say that working with XML in ActionScript 3.0 is freaking awesome!!!

It's so easy and intuitive and simple that I actually cannot wait until the next project comes along where I have to pull in a large amount of XML data. I used to hate it -- the way ActionScript 2.0 handled XML was cumbersome, ugly, and more trial and error than anything to get up and running. It required buckets and buckets of code to parse all the information out of an XML file and into a workable format. But not anymore -- the need to parse is completely gone. You can just take any old XML object and easily pluck the information you need right out of it with no fuss.

The power went out for a couple of hours at work today. We played 3 rounds of Murder. It really is a fun game when you've got a large group of willing (because there's nothing better to do) adults playing in a committed manner.

Also today: went out to lunch with a few coworkers with the intention of getting Chinese at some new place we'd never gone to. We missed the turn for the restaurant and realized we were right by the Vienna Beef factory public cafeteria... so we decided to go there instead. Mmmm... Chicago style hot dogs and cheese fries. It was actually the first time in a LOOOOOOONG time that I've had a Chicago style dog that didn't come from Superdawg. It was good, but Superdawg is still way better, in my opinion.

Last Thursday afternoon I was reluctantly informed at work that I was being moved into the back room in order to make room for the two new employees that started on Monday -- a new writer and a new production coordinator.

The new set up in back is actually quite nice. I have a lot of space, it isn't swelteringly hot back there like it is up front, and of course, the people back here rock just as much as all the folks up front. However...

I so didn't want to move to the back room and I'm having serious withdrawls from the front room. First off, the front room is where all of production sits -- writers, designers, etc. It's loud and pretty crazy most of the time, and I actually work really well in that environment. I love that no matter what is on your mind, you can just blurt it out to the entire room, whether it's work related or in reference to something entirely inappropriate you just found on the internet.

The back room is where engineering sits... along with our HR person, office manager, and owner/founder. It's kind of the "grown-up" room (or as grown up as anyone at my company can reasonably get). It's also a very quiet room. I feel like I have to whisper even if I'm talking about legitimate work. And in a funny way, I actually feel kinda akward sitting with a bunch of "real" engineers. I have no computer science background and all I know is Flash, so the majority of what they talk about is completely over my head. I liked being the smarty-pants up front with all the creative-types. ;-)

Ah well, what's to be done. The company is growing and the beloved front room just isn't big enough to fit us all in. And as I said, it's not bad... I just really miss it up there... especially when I hear the whole front room laughing about some random joke or in an intense conversation about some movie or video game or something else of that nature (which is practically all the time) because I know I'm missing out.

le sigh

The new You Don't Know Jack webgame that I worked on is a finalist for the Webware 100 2007 awards in the Entertainment category. I won't command you to, but if you feel so inclined, you can go to their website and vote for us :)

Webware 100

As you can clearly see from the below screenshot of my Outlook Calendar from work, I have a very important meeting tomorrow morning.

Today at lunch my boss told me she had a nightmare about me last night and that it kept waking her up so she couldn't get any sleep.

She said that in her nightmare, I came into her office at work, rubbing my belly, and announced that I was 4 months pregnant, that I was leaving the company (for good), and that I was giving only 4 days notice.

She said that for the rest of the night, she kept waking herself up, screaming, "Oh my God, we need another programmer!" Then she'd say to herself that it was only a dream and go back to sleep, only to be woken up again minutes later by the same scream.

I don't know how much of the waking up screaming part was exaggerated, but I still found this both amusing and a little frightening. I actually apologized to her for keeping her up. :)

For the record... I am not pregnant.

Actionscript 3.0 is both terribly exciting and incredibly terrifying.

I find it amusing that I'm now officially an employee of UCLA. Being a USC graduate... well, you know. Really, I never cared much for the whole rivalry since I couldn't care less about sports. But it still amuses me some. On the other hand, the reason I'm doing it is because my former USC professor now works for UCLA and he asked me if I would do the work. So it's kinda like being faithful to USC. :)

Anyway, if you're curious, I'm going to be doing some freelance Director development work for training and evaluating military sharp-shooter instructors. At least, that's the first project. Then there will be some other training materials about learning cognition research.

I'm not looking forward to having to do more work when I get home from doing work... but I am looking forward to the extra income. And besides, It would take A LOT for me to say no to my former professor. He's the guy who taught me Director (and really, programming in general), he is a great friend, and he is pretty much responsible for my career path as I know it.