Sti Media: The Source

MXDU VOTP (Part 2)

See this post if you don't understand what VOTP means. I finally finished up the rest of the "voices" videos. There are 42 in all. Here's that link again.

MXDU VOTP (Voice Of The People)

Here's the project that I had mentioned in a past entry here that we have dubbed "Voice of the People at MXDU". It's a simple flash video gallery that has the opinions and thoughts of some of the people that were at MXDU2005. The idea was Geoff's in the beginning and we just ran with it here doing the wacky design of the page and dev of the video player (which is quite basic with only 2 buttons.. but it works great). A great idea in the first place and it's excellent to see that we could actually implement it this time around as it was coming close to being cancelled just to all of us being so busy. I expect to see improvements and more stuff for MXDU2006.

Please keep in mind though that I haven't added in all the videos just yet (there are quite a few..) so check back every once in a while to see the new ones. I'll try to get them all done this week though.

The funnier ones are the speakers actually, as all they talk about are the 2 Mikes whooping their arses in the X-BOX room. Could that be because that's all they did? :D Of course then there were the 2 Mikes bragging about it..

Here's the link to the application:
Voice of the People at MXDU2005

On a side note, I just want to comment on how cool my laptop held up on the way home from Australia. I actually managed to edit a whole bunch of pictures, write a few blog posts, mess around with a few other things, and then capture all the video that we took for the VOTP and the thing still had at least 2 hours of battery time left. Time flies when you're having fun though, so to me it was a reasonably short flight getting back. Thank god I recharged everything before getting on the plane though.

Thanks again to everybody that had the courage to stand in front of the camera and say their piece. It turned out great!

Kin ye put anotha steak on the barby? The day after MXDU

This was a riot. On the day after the conference a few of us got together at Andrews place (of Rocketboots) for a BBQ. We got the main tour of his house which he designed especially for the lot, met up with his wonderul family (cool kid that Sam, pics on him below) and even managed a quick walk down to the river which he can see from the porch. The house itself is in the bush unlike Geoff's which is in the middle of the city so we actually took a 30 minute (or so) train ride to get there from the city.

Being the first time to Australia at all anyways, seeing the "wilderness" in the suburbs was pretty cool. It reminds me a lot of the drive up along the west coast of Canada really, with the rocks and trees (trees are different though..)

Anyways, the food was awesome, the company was great and I think we all had a really good time. It sucked to have to leave actually, but we had to because it was time to catch a plane and go home.

So, here are the pics with short descriptions. Lots of fun all 'round :D

Even though we were having a BBQ, the first thing that EVERYBODY did was break out their laptops and take advantage of Andrew's wifi. Email anyone?

Except for Jesse 'cause he didn't have wireless on his laptop. ahh.. correction there, "her majesty's" laptop. So he was pretending to be surfing and stuff like the big boys :D

Here we all are down on the river. I short hike down a very steep hill got us here. Since this river connects up to the ocean, supposedly every once in a while sharks will travel up it...

Here's Pete having great fun with the guitar he stole off of Andrew's 4 year old (Sam). I think Aral has a better picture or even a movie of Pete's good fun.

That's about it all in all though. Huge kudos to Andrew and his wife for the great hospitality and delicious food. Thanks guys!

Down Under in Australia, MXDU Ruled!

I have got to say that MXDU has got to be the coolest conference I have ever been to, and also had the pleasure and honor to speak at. I've read lots of others saying that is was really really great in the past but it's most definitely something that had to be experienced to understand.

I actually arrived on the starting day of the conference at 7:30 in the morning. I really wish I could have gone a lot earlier (as in an earlier date not time) because being that I was going from Tokyo there is only a 2 hour dif which means I left at night, had no sleep on the plane and arrived in the morning.. Needless to say I was pretty exhausted for the day.

I managed to get to the first keynote only 15 minutes late, which was pretty good considering that you get x-rayed *leaving* the airport in Australia. That is definitely a first for me. Getting a taxi was hell too in that there was already a line up of about 150 people trying to get taxis to the city too.

So anyways, the keynote finished up and off to the sessions everybody goes. All of the speakers at MXDU were first class. They really know their stuff and it was really interesting watching them go at it. As in go at the X-Box Halo 2 room! I think whenever they weren't in their own sessions, they were all congregated in this one room with 4 X-Box machines all hooked up together playing Halo 2. It was pretty cool though.

I gotta say the best thing for me really was the fact that I could meet all the people that I've only heard or read about and finally put a face to them. There were also some reunions there (Chafic, Mike Downey, Geoff and Julie just to name a few) and that was pretty cool in itself.

On the first night after the sessions were finished up there was a treasure hunt with all the people that were going to attend the banquet. What happened was that we were all split up into groups of 8 or so and ran off to take pictures of things around the Darlington harbour. But it wasn't that the "targets" were written out in plain english, they had a riddle approach to them. So anyways, I was in the team "Tincan" with 6 others and it was a blast as we ran around and took pictures of really weird things. The funniest part of it all was that we would actually get more "points" if we could get total strangers in the pics with us. So we did! I'll try to post all the polaroids of what we took later (they're all in one picture that I took with my digital). Here's the collage we did (we didn't win though, the "Microsoft Team" won..)

And of course "Team Tincan" in it's glory :D (minus Geoff on the far right)

The banquet was excellent. The food was good, the entertainment was fantastic with a jazz band and a comedian that was actually posing as a waiter the whole time we were there! He was a riot!! For the first little while we couldn't figure out what was up with him. He kept saying really weird things all the time and doing weird stuff that was just... odd. When we all figured out he was a hired comedian it all came together. Here are a couple of pics of him giving massages to Mike and Grant (this was before we knew he was a comedian).

The second day was just as good if not better than the first. The keynote was really cool with a few new things shown for 8 ball. And Mike Downey showed off some mobile stuff which was pretty neat. We do mobile stuff too but it's only for Japan at the moment.. so a bit different.

After that keynote my session was up, Flash Video Capering. It went really well if I do say so myself, and I think it hit the right spot with the people who managed to make it to the session. I found though that MXDU is really tuned towards developers so my session on video wasn't as popular as maybe it would be at a full Flash conference. Anyways, I'll post my files, and preso in another post though as I'd like to get some extra thoughts in with it that'll just make this post insanely long. I was definitely honoured to be speaking at MXDU and I really hope they have me back there next year as there is NO WAY IN THE WORLD I would turn it down. MXDU rules!!

So, after the sessions that day there was a quick round robin session which stuck all the MM people up on the stage to answer questions (which again were pretty much all Coldfusion..) and then it was gift time for the speakers. Geoff and Julie were fantastic in their gift choosing I think. We all got wine bottle carriers (leather at that) with Tiffany's glasses to go with them. AND this goes with the cool bag and even cooler knife that came with the set that everybody gets for attending the conference itself! Beauty. It's also a unaminous vote that the knife is not "shwag". Which is a new word for me which means "stuff that you get at a conference". Mainly because most of the stuff that you get, you toss out. I gotta say though that the knife isn't going in the garbage for anyone. Very cool stuff.

And to top it all off, Julie and Geoff had a bunch of us over at their "palace" in the middle of Sydney for a party. Thanks guys for the great hosting!! Amazing place, and way to go on getting the waterfall working. Here's a pic of that:

Anyways this post is getting a little lengthly so I'll stick my seperate thoughts on Australia (plus pics), my preso and side notes, and also what we did the day after the conference. I gotta say in finality though that Geoff and Julie deserve huge kudos for the conference they put on. I don't think that even one person was dissappointed at the end of the day. It was an amazing experience. Thanks guys. Also, Australia is really really cool. I'm definitely going back for some R&R the first chance I get and travel around a lot more than I could this time.

If you have read this far.. thank you :D. That was a long entry.

Flash Video Capering at MXDU - "It's not the flash part that is hard"

In 2 more days I'm off to Sydney to go and present about Flash video. I'm seriously excited about this and can't wait to get there. Here's the snippet on what I'm going to talk about:

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As I'm sure you can tell, Flash video is quickly becoming (if it hasn't already) the most popular medium to get video out onto the web lately. The reason, as I'm sure you know, is that it's not just video when it's in Flash, it's now a new experience as you have interaction and power over what you can do with that video in your web site or application. Now, whether you are going to put your video into Flash or not there are some basics that are required to know so you can make the web experience a bit better for the user.

In this session I'm going to cover most of the basics of shooting, importing, editing, and rendering the video that you plan to put up. Combining that with tips and tricks for chroma keying, captioning, and adding other effects to get a better experience for your buck along with the final encoding so you don't make your users wait around until the cows come home for it to buffer.

You will also see the basic 3 ways to get video into Flash (coded straight in Flash, Dreamweaver Video Extension, and Flash Communication Server), though I do consider this the easiest part of the whole process, so we'll keep this part to the minimum. Then to top it all off, I'll go over a couple of examples pointing out things that could have been improved and where to take the project from there if you wanted to get it to the next level.

If you are interested in more than just importing video into Flash and are keen to see the details on pre-deployment, then this session is for you.

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My last presentation (3 of them) at MAX in Taipei was on FCS so I'm really glad that I've been given a chance to talk about something else. Flash video rules, but it's not just the Flash part of it really. So many people want to make really cool stuff with Flash and MM makes it looks so easy. I was actually asked by a friend that if they buy the video kit for DW, can they make videos like the ones on MM's site really easily. Well.. we all know the answer to that one, so that's what I'm going to concentrate on this time.

It's not the Flash part that is hard, it's the preparation before getting it into flash. Although I will try to steer the session around getting video ready for the web, I think most people have that part figured out as there are a lot of articles on the web about that, and all the MM people have covered that stuff over and over again.

Anyways, if you see me before I see you please come and say hi. I'll most likely be the guy toting around a laptop and video camera for the MXDU super secret project we have planned :)