Archive for the ‘Weblog’ category

I see myself as an interactive designer more than a flash developer, but when Steve Jobs comes down on flash the way the internets have been rumoring he has it creates a little concern. That was until the other day when I was surfing the web on my iPhone and I viewed the “Magical” iPad promo video and noticed that the video had been edited since the last I saw it—in which Apple had taken out the flash portions of the New York times web page and replaced it with the blue broken plugin lego block. See below.

The image above was how the video displayed a few days after Apple got some flack that the iPad didn’t have flash support. But upon viewing the video again I noticed that the flash areas were back. See below.

I’m hopeful that the pressure of every other mobile phone and tablet getting flash support in the coming months will force Apple to finally give us the full internet. I’ve seen a few videos of flash player running on Android devices and it’s really exciting to see the possibilities of running flash and flash apps on a phone.

On another note I am back to blogging. My goal was to start again the first of the year, but wanted to do it with style and that meant waiting on my new wordpress theme. Which I need to finish polishing this week, but I’m anxious to start publishing my ramblings to the intertubes. So here you tubes. Cheers.

On my drive to work today I saw my old Jeep, and for a brief moment I longed for having her back in my care—I drove that car for years and couldn’t believe it had been over a whole year that I sold that junker. It was quite a nostalgic moment and then I stomped on the gas in the GTI and quickly all the memories of that jeep quickly blurred into the back of my mind (I was lucky to if I ever got that jeep to freeway speeds).

My blog is a lot of things and I’m adding a new purpose to the list tonight. Online store. Over the past couple of months I’ve been selling some custom flash pieces as stock over at the FlashDen, and so far it’s been a pretty fun side project. It’s weird to know that there are hundreds of people out in the world now that own a piece of code by Marc Garner. A few of the purchasers have contacted me and it’s interesting to see how the files are incorporated into their projects. I’ve seen a portfolio, a Danish furniture designer’s site, and one of my video players was used for a Baptist Church in the South.

Anyway, I get a lot of traffic from Adobe’s exchange, and I thought why not try and get those sells directly.

So my apologies if you come to my site to view photos of my kids (sorry dad) or if you come to the site for my other posts, forgive me for looking a bit like digital car lot. I’ll continue to post about family, design, life, and such, but there’s now going to be a few flash based stock projects for sale mixed in.

While over in Viet Nam we had lots of time to spend in our hotel room (with a new toddler we needed to conform to his routine), and our TV in the room had a ton of channels, but there were only three channel that were English. The travel channel, HBO, and discovery. But much to my happiness they also had chinese MTV. Which is much better than MTV here in the states (no reality TV just music videos). Anyway, it was always a good source for some quick entertainment (like when Vietnam censors the show on Discovery I had been waiting to watch).

Anyway, thank you MTV for introducing me to this guy. Ever since my days in Taiwan I’ve been a pretty big fan of Mandarin Pop, and it’s been a while since I’ve discovered some one new. This was my favorite video that would come one.

CHORUS:
要感謝這小小蟲給我機會
I want to thank this small insect for giving me this opportunity
這是我初次嘗到戀愛滋味
This is my first taste of love
感覺好奇怪　好像　傷害了誰
It feels weird, similar to harming someone
或許我太壞　把小蟲摔下來　去換你的愛
Or maybe it’s because I’m bad, throwing down the insect and exchanging it for your love

Yesterday we got a bit of a surprise. Just as Susan and I were walking out the door to go to a Vietnamese cooking class for the day the phone rang. It was our agency cordinator here in VietNam and she said that our giving and receiving ceremony (the part where Tuan is made ours on the VietNam side of things) had been changed from Tuesday to Monday (Which happens to be Gem’s Birthday back home).

Here’s some information about the trip you might want to know. We are here with 3 other adoptive Families who are adopting through our adoption agency (Pearl S. Buck International). From Tuan’s orphanage there are 2 kids. Tuan and Chau (to be named Morgan) being adopted. The other little girl being adopted is from another orphanage around Hanoi.

We pulled up to the POJ (I have no idea what that stands for but it’s the government entity that we have our giving and receiving ceremony (G&R) at). The kids were already there waiting outside on the grounds with their care givers.

Tuan’s orphanage is pretty unique. It’s part of a larger women’s correctional facility (I don’t think it houses major offenders mostly drug and prostitution related crimes), but we do know that because of this the ratio to care givers is much higher than your typical orphanage (2 to 1 it seemed compared to Gems 10+ to 1). Women who want to be involved with the the orphanage go through training and then become part of the staff and care givers at the orphanage.

The photo above is Tuan and his nanny. She told us that she’s been Tuan’s nanny ever since she became part of the program, which was about 2 months after Tuan had been left at the orphanage gate. All the photos that we’ve received before travel usually had Tuan being held by this women. As you can imagine the two of them are extremely close. He held on to her the whole time we had to wait around. I don’t think I can express enough my gratitude for this women, and how lucky we are to have had her to care and mother our son while we’ve had to wait to make him ours.

Above is POJ building. The G&R is pretty uneventful and having to sign papers and such I needed to put the camera down.

After the G&R we went outside and of course had to wait a few minutes for more paper work to be finalized. This photo is extremely awkward as the families wait with much anticipation and the Nannies dread the turn over. It’s was really difficult. You wanted nothing more than to go up and hug the nannies and express your gratitude, but cultural and language barriers held us back.

The transition of course hasn’t been the smoothest. Tuan has cried a bit but not near the amount Gem. I have yet to hold him as Susan won’t give him up for the life of her. Which is fine by me right now. Having had Gem attach to me and then be physically attached to me for 3 weeks I will be happy to be the supportive parent (though it has it’s headaches too). Anyway I just wanted to share some of the details. The next few days we’ll be mostly in the hotel room working on getting Tuan attached to us (there’s nothing worse then taking a kid around and having him reach out for every brown woman he sees).

And finally “Happy Birthday Gem”. I really wish we were at home with you to celebrate. I feel like a terrible parent having missed half of your 4 birthdays. I’ll make it up to you with a car on your sweet sixteen.